Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Along the sensitive areas of the coast, only owner-operated boats are allowed to fish, and these people must all have certified lobster fishing licenses. Their licensure also gives them voting rights around regulations for lobstering- in a sense, they own the commons and collectively make rules governing it. 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. (page 138)
I'd highly recommend the book, which introduces the dichotomy of "generative" organizations (which by design seek to produce social value in addition to profit) vs. "extractive" organizations (which maximize financial value above all else).
I'm surprised this article skips over this topic entirely.
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.
> 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/Kell...
That's a hell of a sentence. Clever use of two idioms which are probably unrelated in origin but share imagery.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, but it doesn't strike me as one that contributes much to understanding the phenomenon. Individual licensed lobstermen, not the State of Maine, bear the costs and reap the rewards of their catch. The role of the State of Maine is to set rules about how and how much they catch (to their collective benefit), but the state is not in any meaningful sense catching lobsters.
> I fail to see your reasoning here. A single corporate entity would would prefer to employ the smallest number of people possible.
I'm not sure what reasoning you think you're failing to see. I did not say anything about how many people unitary ownership would employ, nor did I express any opinion about the merits and demerits of unitary ownership as a solution to the tragedy of the commons; I only noted that it is one, to illustrate my point that Kelly's characterization of the problem and its solution in terms of "fairness for the many" versus "maximizing for the few" exhibits no understanding of either the problem or the solution and seems to express nothing beyond her sympathies.
You lower the price of lobster because of efficiency and better sustainability, you increase the margins for restraurants that sell it and thus that industry can grow and expand, providing both increased tax revenues as well as economic expansion: more successful restaurants improves the entire economy as support industries also expand. The fundamental question of economics is really about the desire to protect th vocal view (lobstermen) vs. the overall economy at large.
Regulation is necessary however such regulation should be tilted towards favoring substainability and efficiency over specific groups: i.e. lobstermen. A lobsterman is benefited less by overall efficiency than the overall economy. It's in his best interest to have a restricted supply and higher prices. If a lobsterman had his way, the lobster he catches in his single boat would be the only lobster available to the market. Lower prices and greater demand doesn't benefit him -- his boat holds a finite amount. A greater supply doesn't benefit him either -- after he fills his boat. His interest in sustainability only extends as far as his own boat -- beyond that, why would he care -- excess supply means lower prices so he would have to work harder to make the same profit. Corporate entities can simply buy more boats.
>>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.
I fail to see how granting exclusive use to a single party would benefit "would-be lobstermen", if anything, its economies of scale would allow it to employ less people.
Not to talk about how the hypothetical single party might find another, more profitable, equilibrium point with less, and more expensive, lobsters in the market, employing less people. Or sending all of them to china and damaging the coastal tourism of Maine.
Also, I can't think of a modern instance of a monopoly that was given the control of a limited renovable resource and behaved nicely in an unregulated environment. All the instances I can think of were heavily regulated.
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.
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/co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_protected_area#Coral_re...
[3] http://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-2/fisheries/illegal-fishi...
Look at the fisheries in New Zealand or Alaska for examples of very well managed fisheries.
In many developing countries it's not a tragedy of the commons problem, it's a structure/stability problem. How can you ever have managed fisheries without political stability, or with stability but rampant corruption?
How can you have political stability without economic stability and food? It's a chicken and an egg problem.
Sample shenanigans: http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/313631/mpi-official-a...
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Barry_Torkington/public...
http://www.farmedanddangerous.org/salmon-farming-problems/en...
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.
[15] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-07-11/at-sears-...
> Plagued by the realities threatening many retail stores, Sears also faces a unique problem: Lampert. Many of its troubles can be traced to an organizational model the chairman implemented five years ago, an idea he has said will save the company. Lampert runs Sears like a hedge fund portfolio, with dozens of autonomous businesses competing for his attention and money. An outspoken advocate of free-market economics and fan of the novelist Ayn Rand, he created the model because he expected the invisible hand of the market to drive better results. If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.
Sales would invest in RnD, and buy services from IT. HR would would need to focus on high quality services, not dictating unwanted routines.
Profit could be extracted as a tax, and all departments could be required to just break even (with an allowed buffer for investments spanning multiple years).
I've worked at such companies and it kind of sucks. Everybody optimizes for their local optima without any concern for what is good for the company. People end up a lot less willing to lend a hand to a 'rival' groups, and projects that would be good for the company as a whole end up scrapped because the individual departments involved cannot agree on how to spread the profits/risks internally. Also a lot of work ends up duplicated because it is 'cheaper' to get someone in your department to do it rather than to 'pay' a rival department to be allowed to use their solution.
Basically you end up losing many of the advantages of scale that a big company should provide without gaining most of the advantages of flexibility and nimbleness that a small company should provide
I'm not sure how you would work out how many tokens a department has to give. My hope is that there would be a way to incentivize going outside your team/department to get help.
OK, so it's not automatically a disaster, but companies have attempted to do this with "virtual org" and clouds of freelancers. It only works for certain types of piecework and small organisations. For larger things it's simply impossible to write the required contracts. This is part of why the London Underground privatisation failed: contract documents were heading into the millions of words and still inadequate to describe the working relationships.
Fisherman (with potentially outsider) creating a set up a property rights institutions maximise their own profits is exactly what free-market capitalism is all about. Voting in a private club that you can only get into if you fulfil several requirements is NOT DEMOCRACY, only voting.
That's what people like Hayek are talking about things like local knowledge. There is a hole field of economics that try work on these issues, property rights economics, constitutional economics, economics of clubs. There is a subfield called "free-market environmentalism" that tries to use property-right economics to achieve better outcomes for the environment.
The same problem applies to your idea that a captain is a king. The owner of the ship has the power to set up whatever he thinks is the most effective way to get people to fish with the limitation that they have to volunteer to join him.
So the reason free-market capitalist are free-market capitalist is because it allows free people associating with each other create the institutions that solve their problem in the most effective way.
Also I want to point out that none of these things are anti-state, a state can need to provide the legal system that allows for such institutions to be created and needs to enforce the contracts.
Some things that might be of interest:
- Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
- Choosing in Groups: Analytical Politics Revisited
- Free Market Environmentalism
Constitutional economics could have some insights into how to set up a group of nations working together on a common solution.
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.
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.
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.
While the wholesale price has fluctuated, has there been much change in retail/restaurant lobster prices? I certainly don't see restaurants near me lowering the price of a lobster roll. If anything, looks like Old Port Lobster Shack in Redwood City increased theirs judging by what Google shows in their menu listing for a "Maine Lobster Roll" ($18.75) vs. what their website shows ($22.95). But that's just a local price in a market that in general seems to see prices racing upwards due to the influx of cash in the area.
Likewise. It's a tough job, but someone has to do it.
No. Anecdotally, and also supported by data there was an article at some point about it. The worst part is a lot of restaurants use rock lobster instead of Maine lobster
(It's fair that lobster pricing does fluctuate more than other proteins but "market price" is at least as much about reducing pricing transparency.)
So, the short answer is that lower lobster pricing doesn't seem to have led to widespread lower pricing in most places.
What I was referring to was regular restaurants that routinely don't list a price for dishes that use lobster on their menu and instead just say "market price." Which, in my experience, is more or less a synonym for "expensive."
I'd note that, in addition to lobster pounds, it's far more common for coastal Maine restaurants to have the price for lobster in their menu like they do for every other dish.
No idea if they are any good, but they are $8.
Lobster rolls are really pretty simple. But they need to be fresh lobster and very little else--which obviously isn't a good match for McDonalds style prep. The good news is that means they're very easy to make at home and many places that sell lobster will even boil them for you.
I tried the McLobster a few years ago, it was pretty mediocre.
Since that year, I haven't seen the same offerings where this Bloomberg article would suggest that the amount of harvested lobsters has gone up.
That was a fun summer.
> This leaves the Maine (and Canadian) lobster industry with another interesting challenge: how to find enough buyers for all those lobsters so that prices don't collapse. As you can see from the chart below, they've mostly succeeded:
> [price chart]
> Affluent Chinese diners have been one reason. This January, five chartered 747s full of live lobsters flew from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to China to supply Chinese New Year feasts. Maine's lobsters tend to make the voyage less dramatically, in regularly scheduled flights from Boston, but $27 million worth of them were shipped to China in 2016.
> The national and even global spread of the lobster roll has also helped a lot. I came to Maine on a trip organized by Luke's Lobster, a fast-casual restaurant chain that now has 21 "shacks" in the U.S. and eight more scheduled to open this year, along with six licensed locations in Japan. ... Luke's Lobster now has its own plant in Saco, Maine, that processes between 4 and 5 percent of the state's lobster harvest. Processing, in this case, means cooking and picking the meat out of the claws and knuckles for Luke's lobster rolls while cleaning and freezing the raw tails and clawless "bullet" lobsters for sale to restaurants, groceries and such.
> Holden's father, Jeff, says that tails used to sell for much more than claw meat. Now lobster rolls, for which tail meat is generally too chewy, have flipped the price equation.
So far this year in Maine, the price is about 2x what it normally goes for. Locals say it's because there's such strong overseas demand (China, etc). The average price of a lobster roll I'd say is around $18.
Contrary to what the article says "it's not making anybody rich" I can tell you the lobstermen who typically sell lobster for $2/lb off the dock are very happy with $4/lb. A friend on a very good day will catch 2,000 pounds, so the extra margin this year is welcomed.
This is the justification of ag cooperatives (like the recently invalidated California Raisin Advisory board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Raisin_Advisory_Boa...) which are/were granted monopoly control over marketing and enforcement of production controls.
These boards have been really useful (in some fisheries like Ayre Peninsula / South Australia, and according to this article perhaps in Maine) and really terrible (e.g. Wisconsin milk boards).
Anecdotally: My father was a skipper on a cray boat, catching crayfish in the south east of South Australia. The boat owners in those towns were essentially the wealthy elite. But the work was tough and most of my fathers friends hit 50 with significant ailments. One has an elevator in his house as he can't ascend stairs, the other suffered a stroke at 48 and is constantly in agonising back pain, and I bumped into one more in a neck brace who was doped up on opiates to cope. They made their money and retired early, but there was definitely a cost and perhaps they never got to truly enjoy the fruits of their labour.
The locals are very proud of the lobster industry and efforts to regulate it pragmatically but also humble and understanding that it could disappear quickly if the overall ecology changes and especially if the water temperature sweet spot continues moving north.
There is concern for the economic prospects of those who leave school early or skip college to take fishing jobs young and may not be prepared for much else if the fishing goes away.
I thought they said many lobster boat captains made more like double the article's stated $45k; of course, that's only for the owner/operator. It's no desk job, for sure: those guys are out on the water before sunrise every day (except during thunderstorms) and it is cold out there. They do wrap up pretty early in the afternoon.
Why not just go back to school and retrain for another career? Offshore and deepsea fishing is backbreaking, labour intensive work. I'd hope most of them were smart enough to figure out they aren't going to do this for the rest of their lives. Hell, I was a bartender once and even I figured out that standing on my feet 8-12 hours per day won't be possible after so many years.
You make it sound like such a trivial thing. There is usually considerable debt and lost wages taken on for attending school, even for someone fresh out of high school. Throw a family into the mix, and it becomes very, very difficult.
That is very interesting and something I didn't know. I like herring more than lobster. It has greater nutritional value. It's kosher. And it is not a giant sea insect fed to prisoners. What is not to like.
I wonder whether similar actions to protect herrings are being taken as once were taken to protect lobsters.
- The Secret Life of Lobsters, I highly recommend this book about lobsters, science and lobstering industry. It was a best seller so don't let the title turn you off.
- Lobsters enter the trap, eat the bait - and leave. (This is a relatively recent discovery.) Lobsterman it turns out, have been feeding the lobsters all this time. This might explain the consistently large catch.
- There were laws at one point that limited the # of days a week you could serve lobster to your hired help.
() https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
He's only allowed to eat it indoors if I'm not home, and the cans have to be thrown in the outside trash immediately.
Only problem is they only taste good smoked, and when I had easy access to fishing for herring, I didn't have a smoker :-(
Yes, highly recommended reading.
An interesting point lobsters are supposedly immortal they just keep on going if not caught of course (and if not eaten!).
Also interesting in December 2016 there was a mysterious die off of many types of sea life off south-west Nova Scotia. I guess this didn't affect Maine but I'm not sure if it affected NS since their lobster season is in the fall http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/nova-scotia-dead-h...
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/the-fish-on-my-plate/