The Fishery

The pasture was a parable; the fishery is its proof, the commons made exact. Before Hardin told of cattle, the economist H. Scott Gordon had set down, for the fishery, the formal model of what open access does to a shared resource — and had shown, with a rigor the parable only gestured at, that the wealth of the sea, left common, is fished away to nothing. The fishery is where the tragedy was first made a theorem, and where its cures were first tried in earnest.

Gordon's insight was to ask what happens to the rent of the fishery — the surplus the sea could yield, the value of the catch above the cost of catching it. A sole owner of the fishery would husband that rent: he would send out only so many boats as maximized the surplus, holding back from the last boats whose catch would cost more in crowding and depletion than it brought. But no one owns the open sea, and so the boats come not until the rent is maximized but until it is gone. For a boat will keep fishing as long as its own catch covers its own costs — and as more boats crowd in, each taking from a dwindling stock, the catch per boat falls, until the fishery yields each boat just enough to cover its costs and no more. At that point entry stops; but at that point the rent — the surplus that was the whole economic value of the fishery — has been competed away to zero, dissipated among too many boats each barely breaking even. The sea that could have yielded a fortune yields, under open access, only the bare wages of those who fish it.¹

Rent dissipation is the economic ruin; often a biological ruin compounds it. The level of fishing that drives the rent to zero may also drive the stock itself below the point at which it can replenish — for a fish caught before it spawns leaves no successors, and a stock fished faster than it breeds dwindles toward collapse. The cod of the North Atlantic, fished in common by many nations' fleets, were drawn down through the twentieth century until, in the 1990s, the great stocks crashed — collapsing not gradually but suddenly, and not recovering even when the fishing at last was stopped. The open-access fishery thus courts a double catastrophe: the economic, in which the resource's wealth is competed to nothing, and the biological, in which the resource itself is destroyed. The herdsman's overgrazed pasture grows back with the next rain; the overfished stock may not return at all, and the tragedy of the commons becomes, on the water, a tragedy without reprieve.²

Against this the two orthodox cures were brought, and the fishery is where both were tested. The first is the state's hand: regulation from above, the public authority limiting what the open sea will not. It sets a total allowable catch, below the level that would crash the stock; it closes seasons, restricts gear, bars the spawning grounds, polices the fleet. By command, it imposes the restraint that no fisherman, fishing in common, would impose on himself — for the lone fisherman who held back would only leave his fish to others. The regulatory cure can work, and has saved fisheries from collapse; but it inherits the Leviathan's burdens, which a later plate will press. The regulator must know what he cannot easily know — the state of the stock, the right level of the catch — and the fishermen, whose livelihoods he constrains, will lobby to loosen his limits, evade his rules, and bend his science, so that the quota set is often too high and the policing too weak.³

The second cure is the market's: not to command the fishery but to privatize it — to carve from the common sea a set of private rights to fish. The favored modern form is the catch share, or individual transferable quota: the total allowable catch is divided into shares, each a right to a portion of it, and these shares are owned, and may be bought and sold. Now each holder, owning a defined slice of the catch, has a stake in the fishery's lasting health, for the worth of his share rises and falls with the stock; and the transferability lets the shares flow to the most efficient boats, undoing the rent dissipation by which too many vessels chased too few fish. It is the property-rights cure of the externality volume, applied to the sea: define a right where none existed, and the burden each boat imposed on the others is internalized into the value of an owned share. Where it has been well designed, the catch share has pulled fisheries back from collapse and restored the rent the open sea had squandered.⁴

So the fishery offers, in concrete form, the two cures between which the whole argument over the commons was long confined: the state's quota and the private quota, command from above and ownership from within. And the fishery shows, too, the limits that drove the search for a third way. The state's quota demands a knowledge and an honesty the regulator often lacks, and bends under the pressure of those it binds. The private quota demands that the resource be divisible into ownable shares — feasible for a fish stock counted and licensed, but hard or impossible for the fugitive, the boundless, the unmeasurable: how does one parcel the open ocean, the migrating tuna that crosses every nation's waters, the very chemistry of the sea? And the private quota raises its own hard question of justice — who is granted the shares, when a common sea is enclosed, and by what right are the many who fished it freely now shut out for the benefit of the few who hold the quota? Command and enclosure each work, sometimes, and each fails, often — and their shared insufficiency is the opening through which the flagship's third way arrives.⁵

The fishery is the commons made rigorous and made real: Gordon's theorem of the rent fished away to nothing, written in the crashed cod of the North Atlantic, and the two cures — the state's quota and the owned share — tried on the water with mingled success and failure. It shows the tragedy to be no mere parable but an exact and demonstrable result, and it shows the orthodox remedies to be real but limited, each demanding what it often cannot have, each failing where the other might succeed. Between command and enclosure the argument seemed exhausted — until a scholar who distrusted both went to look at how communities had actually kept their commons, over centuries, and found a third way that the quarrel of state and market had hidden. The next plate is the flagship, and the turn the whole volume has prepared: Elinor Ostrom, and the discovery that the tragedy is not a law after all.