A8 The BulleTin • Tuesday, May 25, 2021
EDITORIALS & OPINIONS
AN INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER
Heidi Wright
Gerry O’Brien
Richard Coe
Publisher
Editor
Editorial Page Editor
Should Oregon
cease federal
jobless benefit?
I
t’s taking something extra to attract workers. The Bulletin’s
Suzanne Roig reported 10 Barrel Brewing was offering a
$750 incentive. Sunriver Resort was offering $25 an hour for
housekeepers.
We don’t fault workers for being
choosy about jobs or cautious about
COVID-19. But some states are go-
ing to stop sending out the supple-
mental federal unemployment ben-
efits of an extra $300 a week in June.
Oregon does not plan to discontinue
them until they expire in September.
Should Oregon cut them off
sooner?
“I know there’s been a lot of dis-
cussion … that people are being
paid to stay home, rather than go to
work,” President Joe Biden said ear-
lier this month. “We don’t see much
evidence of that.”
We don’t know how government
would find much evidence. We
doubt people would confess to it. It
could get them in trouble.
In Oregon, the rules are that un-
employed workers cannot refuse job
offers or a recall to their previous
job, if they were laid off, because of
the amount of their unemployment
benefit. It would be fraud to refuse
to work solely for that reason. The
state Employment Department even
has a place where businesses can re-
port someone who refused an offer
of work.
People aren’t eager to take some
jobs for any number of reasons. It’s
not necessarily that the government
is paying them to sit on the couch
and exercise their Netflix account.
Sure, they might not like doing the
jobs available. They also may not
have access to child care. There still
can be uncertainty if schools are go-
ing to remain open. COVID-19 fuels
uncertainty, even with the effective-
ness of the vaccines. And to return
to work only to be told you have to
be the vaccine police for a business
and confront customers, well, that
wouldn’t be something to get excited
about.
It wouldn’t be fair to say that it’s
the fault of the federal and state gov-
ernment that workers can be hard
to attract. But, yes, the extra $300 a
week can be a factor. The thing is:
How do you decide when is the right
time to end it?
Yesterday was the right time for
many businesses. September will be
too early for some workers.
“We do not want those who need
those benefits to lose access to them
before the programs end,” said
David Gerstenfeld, acting director
of the Oregon Employment De-
partment. “While we are watching
current economic conditions, we do
not have any plans to end the federal
benefit plans early.”
So if you want the state to end the
benefit early, tell Gov. Kate Brown.
Or if you want to keep it, tell her
that. You can send her your view at
tinyurl.com/tellgovbrown.
Let the governor pick
the state forester
I
n this Legislature, when a bill
has bipartisan supporters it tells
you something. Oregon Senate
Bill 868 would strip the power to ap-
point the state forester from the Or-
egon Forestry Board and hand the
authority to the governor.
State Sen. Tim Knopp, R-Bend,
joined Democrats as a sponsor of
the bill.
The Oregon Forestry Depart-
ment, run by the board, has been a
financial mess. It’s been a manage-
rial mess. And it’s a mess that needs
cleaning up. An Oregonian article in
The Bulletin summed it up.
A department that oversees for-
est policy is going to be kindling
for controversy. It also has not kept
up in collecting wildfire costs from
federal agencies. It had a backlog of
$100 million in collections in 2019.
Legislators got so worried about the
department’s financial state they de-
manded a monthly memo from the
state forester to outline what it was
doing to climb out of the mess. If
that wasn’t enough, there’s the mat-
ter of a $1 billion lawsuit made by
counties who claim the state didn’t
do enough to sell timber. The state
forester resigned a few weeks ago.
The leaders of most state agen-
cies report to the governor. The state
forester reports to the state forestry
board, instead. There’s nothing in-
herently wrong with that relation-
ship. It could work. It hasn’t worked
well in Oregon.
Some people won’t like handing
more power to Oregon’s governor,
which this bill would do, in a way.
But it does also hand the governor
more responsibility for ensuring the
department fixes problems. When
Gov. Brown got more involved in
overseeing the state’s Department of
Human Services, it helped. Maybe,
SB 868 would lead to improvements
at the Forestry Department.
Editorials reflect the views of The Bulletin’s editorial board, Publisher Heidi Wright, Editor
Gerry O’Brien and Editorial Page Editor Richard Coe. They are written by Richard Coe.
Reassess Central Oregon water needs
GUEST COLUMN
BY YANCY LIND
A
s Bulletin readers know, we
are in a drought. As of May 20,
most of Central Oregon is ex-
periencing “extreme” or “exceptional
drought,” our snowpack is at 81% of
average, and groundwater is far below
normal. Consequently, rivers and res-
ervoirs are also low.
While diminished water availability
will create hardship for some, though
not all, local irrigation districts, let’s
not forget that the drought will create
lethal conditions for fish in many lo-
cal waterways. Here’s a look at one ex-
ample, the Crooked River.
Prineville Reservoir is at 56% of ca-
pacity, far below average for this time
of year with little snowpack remain-
ing in the Ochocos for spring runoff.
During irrigation season, water will
be released from the reservoir to meet
irrigation demands from Ochoco Ir-
rigation District and a much smaller
amount for North Unit Irrigation Dis-
trict. Essentially all of it will be with-
drawn by the time it passes through
the city of Prineville, the location of
the last major OID diversion. NUID
has a diversion below that, just above
Smith Rock State Park. When they
call their water from the reservoir,
there will be temporary spikes in
flows below Prineville, but that water
will be diverted as well.
The Bureau of Reclamation main-
tains a website (www.usbr.gov/pn/
hydromet/destea.html) where you
can see flows in the upper Deschutes
River Basin. On Friday, flows out
of Prineville Reservoir (seen in the
PRVO gauge) were 180 cubic feet
As of Thursday, three adult spring chinook have gone
up the Opal Springs fish ladder near the mouth of the
Crooked River. They will not make it far, however, due to
low flows making the river impassable upstream
Lind
per second after being at 230 cfs the
prior week. Flows below Prineville
(CAPO gauge) were at a lethal level of
9 cfs after being just above 60 cfs. The
changes in flow are from NUID calls
on their water.
Most Central Oregonians are fa-
miliar with the federally designated
Wild and Scenic River section of the
Crooked immediately below Bowman
Dam, which will have adequate flows,
but the entire river is important for
fish. Nine cfs is not healthy aquatic
habitat. It will not adequately support
redband trout, juvenile steelhead, or
currently returning adult spring chi-
nook salmon. As of Thursday, three
adult spring chinook have gone up
the Opal Springs fish ladder near the
mouth of the Crooked River. They
will not make it far, however, due to
low flows making the river impassable
upstream.
Sudden, dramatic swings in flows
from NUID calls are also detrimental,
potentially stranding fish and stirring
up sediment.
It is also important to know that
the Crooked River below Prineville
is highly polluted from agricultural
runoff. This has been well docu-
mented by the Crooked River Water-
shed Council and a study by Portland
General Electric, which was look-
ing into sources of pollution in Lake
Billy Chinook. Low flows concentrate
those pollutants in the river.
The Deschutes Basin Habitat Con-
servation Plan does have provisions
for drought years and preserving flows
below Prineville, but only during non-
irrigation season (winter). In those
months, a minimum of 50 cfs is re-
quired from Bowman Dam all the way
to Lake Billy Chinook. Paradoxically,
this is not a year-round requirement.
Even with the drought, water in
Central Oregon remains adequate
to meet the needs of people, farms
and fish but is allocated based on
decisions made over 100 years ago.
Eighty-six percent of our water supply
is used by patrons of irrigation dis-
tricts, frequently by landowners who
do not use it for economically pro-
ductive agriculture. It’s past time to
reexamine how water is allocated in
Central Oregon.
e e
Yancy Lind lives in Tumalo and blogs at
www.coinformedangler.org.
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Shifts in academic discourse are why economics is failing us
BY TYLER COWEN
Bloomberg
E
conomics is one of the better-
funded and more scientific so-
cial sciences, but in some critical
ways it is failing us. The main prob-
lem, as I see it, is standards: They are
either too high or too low. In both
cases, the result is less daring and cre-
ativity.
Consider academic research. In the
1980s, the ideal journal submission
was widely thought to be 17 pages,
maybe 30 pages for a top journal.
The result was a lot of new ideas, al-
beit with a lower quality of execution.
Nowadays it is more common for sub-
missions to top economics journals to
be 90 pages, with appendices, robust-
ness checks, multiple methods, nu-
merous co-authors and every possible
criticism addressed along the way.
There is little doubt that the current
method yields more reliable results.
But at what cost? The economists who
have changed the world, such as Adam
Smith, John Maynard Keynes or Frie-
drich Hayek, typically had brilliant
ideas with highly imperfect execu-
tion. It is now harder for this kind of
originality to gain traction. Technique
stands supreme and must be mastered
at an early age, with some undergrad-
uates pursuing “pre-docs” to get into a
top graduate school.
At the same time, the profession is
pursuing a kind of “barbells” strategy.
On Twitter (and, earlier, blogs), barri-
ers to entry are very low, and a Ph.D.
is not required. That can be a good
thing, but quality checks are extremely
weak.
Here’s the dirty little secret that few
of my fellow economics professors will
admit: As those “perfect” research pa-
pers have grown longer, they have also
become less relevant. Fewer people
— including academics — read them
carefully or are influenced by them
when it comes to policy.
Actual views on politics are more
influenced by debates on social media,
especially on such hot topics such as
the minimum wage or monetary and
fiscal policy. The growing role of Twit-
ter doesn’t have to be a bad thing. So-
cial media is egalitarian, spurs spirited
debate and enables research coopera-
tion across great distances.
Still, an earlier culture of “debate
through books” has been replaced
by a new culture of “debate through
tweets.” This is not necessarily prog-
ress. By demanding so much rigor in
academic research, they’ve created
an environment in which most of the
economics people actually see is less
rigorous.
There is also a political effect. Twit-
ter is a relatively left-wing social me-
dium, and so the tenor of popular eco-
nomic discourse has moved to the left.
I have mixed feelings about the
evolution of ideology in the econom-
ics profession. In earlier times there
were schools of thought — Keynesian,
Austrian, Institutionalist, the Chicago
School and so on — associated with
coherent world views. That was unsci-
entific, and it led to people embracing
both policy and empirical views that
weren’t always backed by the evidence.
Explicit schools of thought have
since faded — but ideology has not.
The new, often unstated dominant
ideology is a mix of wokeism and
center- left Democratic technocratic
policy reasoning.
I am not sure that most economists,
who come from many nations and
cultures, endorse that approach. They
just don’t work very hard against it,
and so it is the unstated default norm.
Furthermore, more economic research
these days is done in large teams,
rather than solo, so the incentive is “go
along to get along.”
Not long ago, Harvey Mansfield
suggested that Harvard, where he has
been on the faculty for almost six de-
cades, has not hired a single openly
conservative professor in the last 10
years — in any field, not just econom-
ics. It’s hard to argue that the political
biases so evident on Twitter somehow
do not infect the academic side of the
profession.
As economics has become more
ideological, it has also become less
forthcoming about its ideologies. And
that has led to less intellectual diversity
and fewer radical new ideas. That, in a
nutshell, is the main problem with the
economics profession. At least our re-
search papers are ever more accurate
in their estimates of the coefficients.
e e
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg columnist. He is
a professor of economics at George Mason
University and writes for the blog Marginal
Revolution.