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I'm in the middle of reading Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly, which talks extensively about Maine lobster fishery rights.

• dublinben 9y ago
  Well it is Bloomberg, after all. That doesn't fit their narrative, or support the established biases of their audience.
• valuearb 9y ago
  This is great, I hope we apply it to the rest of the ocean life that we farm.
  • dflock 9y ago
    The problem is that mostly we don't farm ocean life - we just hunt it, on an industrial scale.
    • Finnucane 9y ago
      More than half of the seafood consumed globally is farmed: http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/aquaculture/faqs/faq_aq_101.html http://www.nmfs.noaa.gov/aquaculture/faqs/faq_aq_101.html
      • dflock 9y ago
        Hmm, thanks - that's much higher than I thought. Still, leaves 50% hunted though, which is very high. If 50% of the animal protein that we eat was hunted instead of farmed, we'd eat the last elephant, tiger, chimp, giraffe, etc... by Friday.
  • tomarr 9y ago
    I agree this seems like a meritable solution. But I think this also bears quite close resemblance to how the taxi and medallion system sprung up in many cities, ultimately corrupted by the economic value of being in this exclusive club.
• mikeyouse 9y ago
  The article mentions it prominently.. including references to an earlier book about the same subject; > As University of Maine anthropologist James M. Acheson put it in his 2003 book "Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry: > While scientists do not agree on the reason for these high catches, there is a growing consensus that they are due, in some measure, to the long history of effective regulations that the lobster industry has played a key role in developing. The author of your suggested book heavily references Acheson in making her case: http://www.marjoriekelly.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Kelly-Spring-2013.pdf http://www.marjoriekelly.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Kell...
  • scrollbar 9y ago
    Eek- my scanning wasn't quite efficient enough! Thanks for correcting me.
• jredwards 9y ago
  > the right to make a living comes before the right to make a killing That's a hell of a sentence. Clever use of two idioms which are probably unrelated in origin but share imagery.
  • bdr 9y ago
    Lil Wayne did it first: https://genius.com/Lil-wayne-the-sky-is-the-limit-lyrics https://genius.com/Lil-wayne-the-sky-is-the-limit-lyrics
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
• jaredhansen 9y ago
  >That the right to make a living comes before the right to make a killing. That fairness for the many is more important than maximizing for the few. OK, but that's not really a full accounting of the tradeoff being made. Preventing "outside" or "non-local" fishing does have the advantage of privileging local stakeholders over remote capitalists - but it also privileges local stakeholders over remote _customers_. If economies of scale allow a commercial fishing operation to cut final prices by 10%, then on the margin you're going to see about 10% more lobsters being sold, which means that 10% more people get to eat lobster than would be able to do so under this regime. And maybe that's fine! I'm not saying we shouldn't make this tradeoff. But consumer surplus is generally ignored in this kind of calculation, as if the value of the lobsters were a zero-sum game in which we split things up between Small Local Good Guys and Rapaciously Greedy Outside Capitalists, and that doesn't tell the whole story.
  • Retric 9y ago
    Efficiency of scale does not increase the carrying capacity of the local areas. Further prices are mostly dictated by availability not operations costs. So, maximizing the average catch size long term is vastly more important than minimizing operating costs.
  • Spooky23 9y ago
    Local vs. Remote matters because the remote guys give zero fucks about the state of the fishery, or any other resource. For example, as a consumer, we in aggregate give zero shits about the oppressed seamstress in Bangladesh who is essentially a slave making our t-shirts for pennies. But if somebody kicks a dog, it will generate a massive outcry. We relate to the dog, who could be our own dog, but don't relate to the seamstress.
    • nickik 9y ago
      The control remains local because that where the resource is. It's about local vs remote ownership.
• pash 9y ago
  > Kelly argues that this ownership of the lobstering commons, in a cooperative-like structure, leads to greater sustainability. >> Large corporate boats can operate only in designated areas. Instead of permitting limitless liberty to absentee owners for the seeking of wealth -- by hired hands indifferent to local custom -- Maine set spinning a new governing pattern…. That the right to make a living comes before the right to make a killing. That fairness for the many is more important than maximizing for the few. That sustaining the prosperity of larger living systems, both human and wild, is the root condition for the flourishing of all. At least insofar as Kelly's argument pertains to the management of fisheries and other commons, it is—economically speaking—more wrong than right. A tragedy of the commons can be avoided in several ways, and none of them has much to do with putting "fairness for the many" ahead of "maximizing for the few". Indeed, a tragedy of the commons arises only when "the many" have unrestricted access to a scarce resource, and proceed to exploit it in an unsustainable way, due to the strategic nature of the situation. Kelly would have you think otherwise, but "large corporate boats" are not the root cause of overfishing; the root cause is the desire on the part of each fisherman in an unregulated commoms to haul in the biggest catch he can before someone beats him to it. So aside from imposing regulation, another way to prevent a tragedy of the commons is to get rid of the commons: grant exclusive use of the former commons to a single party, who then has an incentive for good stewardship. And quite contrary to Kelly's characterization of it, Maine's solution to managing its lobster rights can be seen as an instance of favoring the few over the many: lobstering was restricted to a relative few legally priveledged parties, few enough to make coordinating sustainable lobstering practices feasible. As is often the case when the law arbitrarily privileges some parties over others, there is an overlooked harm here, suffered by would-be lobstermen that the rules say cannot be. So it seems to me that Kelly's words express her worldview and her somewhat misplaced good intentions—it is the curse of the economically uninformed that their good intentions will often lead them to a destination they didn't seek—but nothing more.
  • zz01234 9y ago
    > another way to prevent a tragedy of the commons is to get rid of the commons: grant exclusive use of the former commons to a single party, who then has an incentive for good stewardship. There is a single party, and it is The State of Maine. > And quite contrary to Kelly's characterization of it, Maine's solution to managing its lobster rights can be seen as an instance of favoring the few over the many I fail to see your reasoning here. A single corporate entity would would prefer to employ the smallest number of people possible.
• orik 9y ago
  A perspective from the north pacific on fisheries, counsels, voting rights, etc - The whole thing is a many sided tug of war. Ultimatly Fisheries are very complicated. Green Peace & Environmentalists would like us to reduce our use of capture fisheries or abandon the practice altogether. (Even though capture fisheries produce protein without damaging biodiversity, unlike farms. also less greenhouse impact.) Financial stakeholders usually are perceived as wanting to let everyone fish a ton, but not actually always the case. Markets have perversely rewarded extreme overfish and extreme under fishing before because less supply = higher prices. Why catch 10x the fish when you can just raise prices 10x? Independent fishers and little guys would like less regulation because quota systems, fisheries counsels, etc consistently screw the small guy in favor of larger corporations gaining more control of the industry. These systems grant certain families exclusive rights to 'gold mines that keep refilling', but makes it prohibitive for someone not in the industry to every buy a boat and try at it. People trying to manage food output like this regulation and quota systems because it's impossible to regulate and manage fisheries when everyone is allowed to do it, it's a lot easier to manage with just a few companies. The biggest problem we have now with fisheries in the developed world (if your #1 priority is to feed the world without disrupting ecosystems) is that we are underfishing in the pacific, and in europe. Although current systems with mostly financial steak holders and environmentalists in charge are not ideal, I can't think of any realistic structure change that doesn't just lead to additional under fishing, as any new groups would have an increase of people interested in conservation for the sake of conservation, and there doesn't seem to be any way to get people interested in feeding the world in the door.
  • JumpCrisscross 9y ago
    > Green Peace & Environmentalists would like us to reduce our use of capture fisheries or abandon the practice altogether Bans seem to work better for charismatic animals. We spend about $10,000 per year per tiger on conservation efforts [1]. Meanwhile, marine protected areas [2], of which some are no-fish no-catch, are notoriously under-enforced [3]. Which kind of makes sense given nobody is directly incentivized to pay for it. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/cost-to-save-the-worlds-tigers-10000-each-per-year-or-just-pennies-a-day/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/extinction-countdown/co... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_protected_area#Coral_reefs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_protected_area#Coral_re... [3] http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-2/fisheries/illegal-fishing/ http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-2/fisheries/illegal-fishi...
• erikpukinskis 9y ago
  I think it's interesting to think about the way such a system is a hybrid of different political systems. At the fishery level it's not communistic... But it's also not capitalistic. The fishery isn't owned by a single profit driven entity, it's a democracy or a beurocrasy, or however they have it set up. At the boat level it's a single profit driven entity, which is purely capitalistic On the boat itself you have a monarchy: the captain is the king and you do what she says. We spend too much time bickering over capitalism vs communism vs socialism vs anarchism, but to me the question is which structure for which resource. The political landscape never was monolithic and never will be. Right now we are way over-using capitalism at the global level. But it doesn't need to go away. It just doesn't seem to work for watershed management, health care, etc.
  • 51stpage 9y ago
    I really appreciate your insight that different political structures work better for different scales and different situations. I suppose that's intuitively obvious but I hadn't ever considered it.
    • Double_Cast 9y ago
      You might wanna check out the story of Edward Lampert (the CEO of Sears). Ayn Rand inspired him to pit departments against one another. Sears devolved into a battle royale and profits dropped like a rock.
      • aeorgnoieang 9y ago
        That's a really weird inspiration to take from Ayn Rand. Any source with more details about this?
        • sogen 9y ago
          I think it was on metafilter
        • Double_Cast 9y ago
• justavoice 9y ago
  I think this gets at something that's been bugging me for a while: corporations used to be restricted in the amount of time that they were allowed to operate. They were of limited duration. At some point, the rules were relaxed. That gave rise to the mega-corps we have that now have no limits but what they can get away with. If we could put the genie back in the bottle we would have a much more competitive group of companies, and rent-seeking would be minimized. Of course,the devil is in the details: no one benefiting from the status quo will go along with the scheme. And they're the ones in control (no matter who is in the White House).
• shoover 9y ago
  Great point about the owner/captain regulation. It seems incredible that the little guys won in this one. Also, chrisbennet's comment reminded me of another piece of the sustainable fishing regulations, which is that the traps are regulated to be inefficient and let the lobsters walk out. As an engineer that is just about more than my mind can handle.
  • sitkack 9y ago
    That is awesome, only catch the slow ones.
  • colechristensen 9y ago
    >As an engineer that is just about more than my mind can handle. Why? It's just engineering to optimize for a bigger system. Set your system boundary too small and you risk damaging the whole. Making a perfect trap is something like premature optimization.
    • shoover 9y ago
      Because the core labor is boating around to process each trap every day. That's time, fuel, and bait every day. Point taken about optimizing the larger system, but the other pieces of the regulation resonate more for me. Throwing back a small lobster or a producing female offers a tangible connection to the global effort, whereas pulling up more traps for the same catch feels like doing more work just to keep busy. I'm sure there are good reasons for how it fits in the system, but that one would bug me nonetheless.
• batushka 9y ago
  Skin in the game. You can't expect fair play if one does not put and risk his share.
• nickik 9y ago
  I would recommend to people, not some guy who once wrote about this, but rather read the Nobel Winning economist Elinor Ostrom who has worked on these topics for a very long time. Check out 'Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action' and all her other work. Economist have studied these issues quite a bit, see 'property right economics', 'constitutional economics', 'Club Goods' and so on.