Abstract
In the mid-twentieth century, several economists –led by the Canadians Gordon Scott and Scott Anthony–introduced bio-economic analysis which founded the modern understanding of issues in managing common property resources. They focused on managing marine fisheries to improve their national economic profitability, but many economists, including Gordon Scott, advocated for intensifying industrialized technologies that soon exacerbated the need for catch limits, limited entry, ITQs and other conservation measures. Fisheries biologists have largely bought into these approaches and have been unable to critique the bio-economic understanding in part because economists successfully alienated them from an understanding of their own past by appropriating fisheries biologists’ expertise over the economic dimensions of their scientific project. This chapter builds on my earlier findings that both Victorian-era economic ideas and nineteenth century German scientific forestry management ideals have powerfully influenced marine resource management to this day. The focus on ‘rational’ exploitation of fish and other marine species for maximum sustainable yield has been the result. The use of population models allowed the marine environment to become an abstraction, facilitated a limited understanding of fisheries science by economists, and mediated the focus on economic efficiency. Twentieth century fisheries management became further enmeshed in economic and social idealist constructions with the incursion of Keynesian economists such as Gordon Scott, and Canadian Deputy Minister of Fisheries Stewart Bates. By placing their contributions within the context of changing economic theory and mid-twentieth century Cold War issues affecting governments, scientists, and productivity in the North Atlantic region, and by analyzing the basic assumptions of Gordon Scott and his followers in the light of greater historical context, the fundamental irrationality and personal bias that form the basis of bio-economic models is exposed, as is the irrationality of mid-century fisheries management policy.
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- 1.
Although this tome was not published until 1957, from 1949 onward the content was widely promulgated through England and Europe in the form of mimeographs, presentations and courses taught at the Fisheries Laboratory at Lowestoft . Michael Graham was responsible for conceiving and fostering this work through his hire and support of Beverton and Holt . See Sidney Holt, ‘Forward to the 2004 printing’ (Beverton and Holt, 1957, 1993: ii).
- 2.
To understand the concept of rent, one must think like a landlord, not like a tenant (my own default way of thinking)! One must also adopt a rather strange world view in which the unowned and ‘unimproved’ ocean owes goods to fishers and other resource exploiters, because they have invested in capital goods and the time required to extract those resources.
- 3.
The seminal source on Gospel of Efficiency conservation is Samuel P. Hays , Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement (1959).
- 4.
The paper’s title, ‘In the Wake of Politics’ owes everything to Gordon Winder’s stimulating symposium ‘In the Wake of ITQs ’.
- 5.
Hence H. Scott Gordon’s foundation of the new economic discipline of bio- economics around the analysis of these challenges.
- 6.
This exchange occurred at a conference hosted by the North Atlantic Fisheries History Association, at Hull, England, 9–12 November 2011.
- 7.
In 1966 Gordon became a professor of economics and the history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, where apparently as of 2015 he remained a professor emeritus. Biographical information available online is vague and does not specify his qualifications (eg. see Indiana University, University Honors and Awards, Honoree H. Scott Gordon entry online).
- 8.
Gordon’s critic Anthony Scott clarifies that the discussion is not about monopoly, but rather the ‘complete appropriation of all of a natural resource in a particular location’ (Scott, 1955:117).
- 9.
For example, Robert Wieland’s 2007 policy paper, ‘Managing Oyster Harvests in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay’, prepared for NOAA ’s ‘Non-Native Oyster Research Program’ explains that ‘The economic model that best fits a renewable resource with this kind of harvest regime is the common property model, first proposed by Gordon’ (p. 2).
- 10.
For a finely textured analysis of the effectiveness of technological restrictions in conserving the Chesapeake Bay oyster fisheries in certain areas, see Christine Keiner’s The Oyster Question (2010).
- 11.
The Canadian restriction on east coast trawlers followed the 1928 publication of the findings of the Royal Commission Investigating the Fisheries of the Maritime Provinces and Magdalen Islands (the MacLean Commission). This commission received numerous complaints about the effects of trawling on local fisheries (Hubbard 2006a: 132–33).
- 12.
Ray Beverton pointed this out to economist W.J. Reed, when reviewing Reed’s discussion paper (Reed 1991: 227).
- 13.
Daniel Merriman, director of Yale’s Bingham Oceanographic Laboratory, ‘told Huntsman ‘this laboratory has never been burdened with so many requests for reprints as it has since the publication of that issue of the Bulletin. The demand has been tremendous both here and abroad, and requests continue to arrive in almost every mail’ (Merriman to Huntsman 1949).
- 14.
Gordon was influenced by Huntsman’s 1944 paper which argued that the North American fisheries had yet to experience a documented case of ‘under-replacedment’ (See Tough, 1999: 114).
- 15.
MacKenzie was director of the Market and Economic Service established by Deputy Minister of Fisheries Stewart Bates , and had an agricultural economics background.
- 16.
Instead of ‘growth ’ Scott used the eye-straining phrase ‘time rate of increase’. Presumably these two states of equilibrium resemble Marshallian partial equilibria.
- 17.
His use of a forestry analogy is interesting because he likely got it from Scheafer, whom I argue elsewhere developed his “surplus production model’ for fisheries exploitation after being influenced by Huntsman ’s introduction of this analogy at the Toronto Symposium on Fish Populations in 1947. See Hubbard, ‘The Gospel of Efficiency and the Origins of Maximum Sustainable Yield ’, in A Century of Maritime Science, University of Toronto Press, forthcoming.
- 18.
The argument against short-term licenses is that these punish fishers who invest capital into acquiring the technologies required to hunt and harvest oceanic species. It makes no sense to buy and maintain expensive equipment if one will lose one’s license after a specified restrictive period; this would also restrict entry into the fisheries by potential licensees only to those who were already wealthy and could afford to buy the equipment outright, let alone afford the cost of the license.
- 19.
The industrializing fisheries had formed an important component of Alfred Marshall’s economic analysis in his most important work, the Principles of Economics.
- 20.
I wish to thank my colleague Dr. Ron Stagg for this insight.
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Hubbard, J. (2018). Fisheries Biology and the Dismal Science: Economists and the Rational Exploitation of Fisheries for Social Progress. In: Winder, G. (eds) Fisheries, Quota Management and Quota Transfer. MARE Publication Series, vol 15. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59169-8_2
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