Thank you to everyone who came to the presentation.  If you have question or comments or wish to sponsor the talk with your group write me (Chuck Willer) at chuckw@coastrange.org

Here are all the presentation’s slides with notes. The notes contain more links to content mentioned in the talk.
The Slides & Notes Link

The presentation will evolve. When I’m satisfied with the subject, we’ll make a video and place it on the Coast Range Association’s YouTube page.

Here is an update on climate warming, an issue central to the future of our region.
Climate Warming: an August 15, 2026 update by James Hansen and others:
Super-Duper El Nino and the Bigger Problem

Here is a link to to the CRA’s landownership map for western Oregon: Ownership Map

Here is a link to CRA research of corporate timber and property taxes paid. 

Link to the CRA’s population study of western Oregon.

Link to Wealth, Income and Oregon’s Rural Communities.

In 1996 we learned that cutting less frequently actually produced larger timber volumes per year. Over the next six years we delved into why big timber cuts so frquently and sacrifices production and profits. The answer is that the big owners manage for return on invested capital – not maximum production. We demonstrated why this is the case in a report titled Forests That Work (2001).

All along, the mainstream economists at OSU and across the nation argued in support of return on capital. During the mid- 1990s period, I began my quest to understand economics and its history.

Parallel with work on forestry and economics, we engaged in research into the social and economic conditions of the Coast Range region. All the social and economic problems found across the country occur in our region. Rural depopulation and the loss of small land holdings were mentioned in the talk. What accounts for the situation we find ourselves in? 

Of course, I highly recommend reading Sven Beckert’s book Capitalism – A Global History

Link to a review of Beckert’s book in The Guardian:
“An extraordinary history of the economic system that controls our lives. The Harvard professor provides a ceaseless flow of startling details in this exhaustively researched, 1000-year account. “No religion, no ideology, no philosophy, has ever been as all-encompassing as the economic logic of capitalism,” Beckert claims, defining it as “the ceaseless accumulation of privately controlled capital”. Accounting for it therefore feels like explaining water to fish. Adam Smith, “the hero of capitalism’s triumphant self-remembrance”, attributed it to benign self-interest. Beckert, however, calls it a revolution, centuries in the making, which depended on things that Smith downplayed: “power, violence, the state”. Far from natural or inevitable, it has always been “unstable and contested”, proceeding by jolts.”

To Understand Economics – Understand Its History
The slides illustrating the core neoclassical model and the argument that Walras, Jevons and Menger each independently borrowed the electromagnetism field equations of Maxwell comes from economic historian Philip Mirkowski. Mirkowski’s 1989 book More Heat Than Light, and his subsequent books, forever changed the way mainstream economics was seen by its critics. Increasingly, since 1990, history of economics courses have been eliminated from mainstream economics departments. 

Economics Divided
An excellent overview of the current schools of economic thought.

2nd edition  John T. Harvey.
Elgar Publishing

An excellent source of good economics:
World Economics Association (WEA)
Link to WEA Website
I highly recommend reviewing the book list on the WEA website!
Link to WEA Books

The list of Chairs of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors: Link to Poster

As the new presentation evolves, I will update this page. Suggestions are welcome.