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Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

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Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#101

Post by aeorgnoieang »

Double_Cast wrote: post #64
51stpage wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That's a really weird inspiration to take from Ayn Rand. Any source with more details about this?

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#102

Post by nickik »

scrollbar wrote: post #3

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. 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…

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.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#103

Post by briandear »

zz01234 wrote: post #49
pash wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

> 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 s…

Is the goal to employ the largest number of people possible -- or provide a good to the public at the lowest cost and highest quality.

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.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#104

Post by chrisbennet »

geon wrote: post #91
pjc50 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some classic economic work on "the theory of the firm" by Coase that really gets into this question. Within companies, it's not an internal market but some kind of autocracy. Why? Coase makes an argument about transactional and informational costs.

It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism. 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).

A family member worked for IBM. Her department would buy non-IBM PC's because it was cheaper than buying from their own company. Helping out "the competition" within your own company doesn't help you meet your department numbers even if it would help the company as a whole.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#105

Post by CWuestefeld »

nickik wrote: post #99
erikpukinskis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are missing some aspects of the problem. Whole point behind free-market capitalism, is the creation of property rights and then allowing trade between them. 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 NO…

And so problems like climate change can be seen as a problem where we insist that things be handled collectively, where we then run into a tragedy of the commons. If our property rights model allowed for ownership of the atmosphere in some fashion, then there would be some aggrieved party who could get restitution from polluters, thus eliminating the externality that messes up our current system.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#106

Post by logfromblammo »

drhodes wrote: post #48
sctb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't post unsubstantive inflammatory comments on Hacker News. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This isn't inflammatory. This was in the news recently, the Chinese folks THEMSELVES were commenting on how they would do a number on the invasive species, because they happened to have a taste for a particular oyster which the Dane's apparently do not. > The most popular comment came from someone (a Chinese) suggesting oyster visas should be issued "with 10 years' unlimited round trips and one-month-long stay and I…

I believe the Cantonese/Vietnamese saying goes "anything with four legs, except table and chair; anything that flies, except airplane."

The Great Leap Forward conditioned the survivors to eat absolutely anything that moves. They'll even eat sea stars and jellyfish, without even gagging. While the rest of the world wonders how to dispose of the frozen gorillas[0], the Chinese are already wiping the fryer oil off their hands and throwing away the skewer.

As tourists, they have an international reputation in the hospitality and tourism industry for eating literally anything you might care to put on their plate.

[0] The Simpsons, "Bart the Mother" (10:3). According to Skinner, the pigeons are eaten by the Bolivian Tree Lizards, the lizards are eaten by Chinese Needle Snakes, the snakes are eaten by snake-eating gorillas, and the gorillas freeze to death during the winter.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#107

Post by ehnto »

gumby wrote: post #41

One of the non-obvious factors of the economics of farming (fishing a specific region included): since most of the inputs are the same (weather, and with the emergence of commodity crops over the last century, seed too), if you have a good year, so do your peers, which drives down the value of the crop; when the year is bad (driving up the value) your yield has likely sunk. This is the justification of ag cooperative…

The regulations in the Eyre peninsula, and SA in general, benefit the single boat owner over the corporate fisheries and I think that's really cool. The strange side effect of the free market eventually benefiting large corporate entities makes the concept of a meritocracy somewhat warped. It's hard to pull yourself up from your bootstraps if your competitor has ten boats full of cheap boots. With just the right amount of regulation, you can make something that works well for many as opposed to very well for few.

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.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#108

Post by sogen »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #101
Double_Cast wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a really weird inspiration to take from Ayn Rand. Any source with more details about this?

I think it was on metafilter

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#109

Post by nickik »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #105
nickik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing some aspects of the problem. Whole point behind free-market capitalism, is the creation of property rights and then allowing trade between them. 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 NO…

And so problems like climate change can be seen as a problem where we insist that things be handled collectively, where we then run into a tragedy of the commons. If our property rights model allowed for ownership of the atmosphere in some fashion, then there would be some aggrieved party who could get restitution from polluters, thus eliminating the externality that messes up our current system.

Sadly property right economics will not be helpful for climate change by itself, that's more about local resource management.

Constitutional economics could have some insights into how to set up a group of nations working together on a common solution.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#110

Post by [deleted] »

Double_Cast wrote: post #64
51stpage wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]
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