Daily Score Blog

Here's one more arena in which Cascadia is proving its leadership: the minimum wage. Washington and Oregon have the highest and second-highest minimum wages in the United States, respectively. Workers in Oregon, where the minimum wage was increased today, are guaranteed at least $7.25 an hour, a dime less than their neighbors to the north. The federal minimum wage, by contrast, is set at a paltry $5.15 per hour.

Establishing a wage floor is an important way that governments can help lower-income workers and their families avoid the pitfalls of poverty and enjoy a measure of self-sufficiency. Because poverty is associated with an array of social ills--from teenage pregnancy to poor educational outcomes to increased rates of crime and delinquency--we all have an interest in broadly shared economic security.

Some argue that high minium wages mean high unemployment too. But there's little convincing evidence to support this claim. David Cooke, a labor economist for the state of Oregon says that wages and employment are a "very complex" issue and there's no obvious relationship between them. (See this post for more on the topic.) In fact, Washington's unemployment rate has plummeted dramatically in recent months, despite its highest-in-the-nation minimum wage. The same thing happened in California, which also guarantees its workers a higher wage than the federal minimum.

Chicken Little was no communications guru. But what happens when the sky really is falling--or just as bad, when it's heating up?

The stubborn truth of global warming just keeps coming ("Animals, entire forests could migrate") and coming ("Melting ice may create shipping shortcut") and coming ("Victoria, 2104: Welcome to the tropics").

When you get weary of this truth, don't tune it out--do something. For example, you can join Washington's Clean Car Campaign, an effort to opt in to California's emission standards, by emailing joelle@climatesolutions.org with the subject Clean Cars. (The campaign website will be up next week.)

Because unlike Chicken Little's problem, we can fix this one.

When Lewis and Clark reached Cascadia 200 years ago, wolves ranged across most of the Rocky Mountains and Pacific Northwest. But within a little more than a century, ill-advised "predator control" schemes extirpated wolves from nearly their entire historic range. So the West went wolf-less until the mid-1990s when small populations were re-introduced into Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho.

What a difference a decade makes. Wolf populations boomed, and their range expanded dramatically in just 10 years. Today, an estimated 850 wolves inhabit Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, far exceeding biologist's original expectations. In fact, a couple of summers ago I was lucky enough to encounter a pair of wolves while backpacking in a remote area of Idaho. (I won't tell you where.)

Not only do wolves help to return the wilderness to its natural wildness, but ecosystems are regaining their health. In Yellowstone, for instance, native trout populations are bouncing back to historic levels because the fish flourish in tree-shaded rivers. And the trees are growing back because elk and beavers now fear to linger by streams where they make easy targets for wolves.

Today, the Department of the Interior announced that the states of Idaho and Montana will take over wolf management from the more stringent federal government. The upshot? It will be easier to legally kill wolves. Officials expect that wolf populations will contract, dulling the luster from a shining wilderness success story.

Women live longer than men.  But in the Northwest -- as in the U.S., Sweden, Great Britain, and probably elsewhere in Europe -- the gap between women and men is narrowing.  Take British Columbia:  in 1975, women could expect to live nearly eight years longer than men.  But by 2004, that gap had narrowed to just over 4 years.  Women are still healthier, on average, but not by as much.

But, surprisingly, that's not a pattern seen in Japan.  There, the gap between male and female life expectancies is still growing -- more slowly, perhaps, than in previous years, but growing nonetheless.  A baby girl born in 2003 in Japan could expect to live past 85 years; a boy, to the age 78.7.  (In comparison, average life expectancy in the United States is about 77.3 years.) 

In the graph below, each dot represents the gap between male and female life expectancies in a given year; Japan is in orange, BC in blue.  In BC, the male-female gap peaked in 1975; in Japan, it's still on the upswing.

When the life expectancy gap narrows, women's lifespans still tend to grow; it's just that men's lifespans grow faster.  In BC, that meant that life expectancy gains for the population overall actually accelerated after the gap between men and women narrowed.  Which could mean that Japan -- which already has the world's longest lifespans -- could further outdistance the Northwest in life expectancy when (and if) their male-female gap begins to narrow.