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 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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
I listened to the first earnings call when Lampert took the helm at Sears, and he said to think of Sears as a real estate company. In other words, I don't think he thought a lot about Sears potential as a retailer.
> 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.
Which is odd since he only became CEO in 2013, "In January 2013, it was announced that Lampert would take over as chief executive officer at Sears after Louis D'Ambrosio stepped down due to family health matters, which took effect in May 2013."
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).
It would be interesting to have the departments of a company interact based on capitalism.
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
What about the opposite? What if every team department had a pool of tokens representing their services that they had to give away in a certain time period. I suppose tokens are the same thing as money but I like the shift from "Gimme, Gimme" to "Hey, I've got plenty, let me give you some." Each department would also be accountable for how many tokens they collected from other teams.
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.
Maybe I'm naive, but if you remove any disincentive to do so I find that most people, on an individual level, are more than happy to lend a hand to other departments and many people rather enjoy the variety and novelty of the projects that this can entail. I don't think it needs to to be actively incentivized as much you just need to remove as many barriers as possible for doing so.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
like I was saying, many people would like us to abandon this large source of protein even though sustainable fisheries are possible.
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.
Hello from New Zealand! I beg to differ about "well managed fisheries". NZ has regulatory capture, massive bycatch problems, and some species are near to collapse the way that orange roughy collapsed. The government talks it up as a sterling example of property rights, but the results are atrocious. It's a faith-based claim of success.
I'm not sure if you meant ocean farming or land farming, but most environmentalists oppose land fish farming because of the practices used to get fish meal are pretty destructive and impacts of concentrated penned animals (antibiotic use, waste, etc.) that affect all dense animal protein production.
Sure, if you ignore the rapidly growing auqaponics/bioponics tech that has been around si ce the 80s. Its basically a semi sustaining closed loop of agriculture and fish farming, using the waste of each, as the input to the other. Less food, antibiotics, and fertilizers in one shot.
> 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.
> 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.
> There is a single party, and it is The State of Maine.
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.
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.
>>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.
>>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.
If we make the same argument in favor of taxi cartels, people see the flaw right away. The system may encourage conservation but that's only one of many side effects and we're glossing over the costs.
That's because they're different. "Over taxiing" won't deplete the population of taxi riders. Just because you know something about the economics of the taxi business doesn't mean you can indiscriminately apply the same logic to a different industry. Which in a thread full of condescending compassion for the economically illiterate, is by far the more common fallacy.
You can of course enclose the commons and grant it to one party to manage but then you're not faced with the problem of how to manage a commons anymore!
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I for one will do my part to help pick up the slack in demand.
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.
Current pricing is often reflected to at least a certain degree in authentic lobster shacks on the Maine coast. However, in general, lobster is still priced in many places as this premium good. (I'm looking at you Legal Seafood with your $26 lobster rolls.) And, even worse, it's still common to hide the pricing behind "market price."
(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.
Market price in this case is retail. Its the price that will move the inventory of lobsters for the most money, before they die of starvation or kill/eat each other in the tank.
Of course lobster pounds and the like have a market price that's usually posted on a chalk board or whiteboard.
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.
The article does discuss why there isn't a significant decline in price. Its two proposed explanations are increased demand from Chinese buyers, and increased demand from the relatively new lobster-roll phenomenon:
> 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.
Anecdotally, I am in the North East and I do recall a year (probably 2012ish) where every local restaurant had exploded with lobster specials. Not necessarily whole lobsters for sale, but their meat used as a choice of protein along side chicken, beef, etc. The price at that time dropped to like $9 per pound in the super markets.
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.
A few years ago you could get lobsters from Market Basket for $3.99 a pound. And they would steam them for you at no charge. My wife and I would go to the beach in the morning and pick up a couple decent size lobsters on the way home for around $10.
In 2012, early warming of the Gulf of Maine precipitated an early and voluminous lobster molt. (The summer lobster are soft shell, meaning they have just molted). This glutted the market, creating dock prices near $2/ lb. During this summer, someone in Maine could buy a lobster for ~4-5 dollars.
They're apparently pretty bad. From what I've seen they're mostly a pre-frozen mush mixed in with lots of lettuce.
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.
>has there been much change in retail/restaurant lobster prices?
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
Nope. We get maine lobsters in the NY area and the price has increased in the last few years. Haven't had lobsters because I refuse to pay extortion prices.
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.
They seem to be starting to come down. They were $7/lb. at my local Hannaford's in Massachusetts today. (Down from about $12 fairly recently.) I assume that these are new shells coming in but I didn't buy any.
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 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).
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.
I went to Stonington last fall with my family. It's a beautiful and interesting place. We were fortunate to rent from a lifelong local and tour with a retired oil industry scientist and learned about a lot of this while there.
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.
A lot of the Northeast coastline acts like this from New York to Maine. You have to remember too that this area has a long and firm understanding of what overfishing does (Nantucket, whaling industry) and chose to try and find the most stable route. Most of that area's income is export of fishing and tourism from people from elsewhere coming to visit the beach. I grew up in this area and you are definitely brought up being very mindful of it.
> take fishing jobs young and may not be prepared for much else if the fishing goes away
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.
>Why not just go back to school and retrain for another career?
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.
There are some jobs that are high paying, short-term only. If you're being realistic you realize that and try to extract as much money from it as humanly possible before the jig is up. Some examples include oil derrick roughnecking, professional sports, modeling (obviously), deep sea fishing.
Yup - in addition, many take the winter off. It's hard work during the peak times of year, but I'd compare it to the schedule of a school teacher (~3 month break).
I remember reading about how abundant lobsters were on a historical plaque in Cape Breton. From travel Canada - "There was a time when these crustaceans were so plentiful and underappreciated that only the poorest children took lobster sandwiches in their lunches while the rich kids ate bologna."
http://www.torontosun.com/2016/07/27/learning-about-lobster-...
Folklore told here in Maine said that lobsters were so abundant they would walk up on the beaches. It was considered to be "trash" food and they fed it to prisoners.
> On average, it takes about a pound of herring to catch a pound of lobster.
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.
Yes, as bait fish they're quite easy to catch. Drop a line with a few shiny gold hooks and you'll likely pull it back up with a herring on each hook. For some reason they really like shiny objects.
Only problem is they only taste good smoked, and when I had easy access to fishing for herring, I didn't have a smoker :-(
From the article it says it's the same in Canada? Lobsters catches are down here in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence this season prices are about $8/pound for markets (big lobsters). Maybe they meant south-west Nova Scotia since it is close to Maine. http://www.seafoodnews.com/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=/SearchStory...
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...
If you found this interesting, I highly recommend Frontline's The Fish on My Plate [1]. It chronicles this quirky author's journey into the world of seafood. He does a "Supersize me" like experiment with seafood. I learned a lot and it even inspired me to modify my diet. Mussels not only are delicious, they help clean up the excess runoff from farms.
It concerns me that the creatures that devour dead stuff in the ocean are thriving. Is it not a possible explanation that there are a lot more dead animals in the ocean for the lobsters to eat? It wasnt suggested a possible reason in the article.
As someone who grew up in coastal Downeast Maine and has been lobster fishing on multiple occasions, it is my understanding that the lobsters partially feed off the dead herring used as bait. Fresh herring (freshly dead) is used as bait in the traps. Every time the trap is pulled up to check for lobsters (every 1-7 days), the old herring is pulled out of the bait pocket and fresh herring (freshly dead) is put back into the bait pocket. The old herring is tossed overboard where it sinks to the bottom and becomes food for lobsters. In a sense, the fishermen are cultivating the lobsters by feeding them. Here is a photo that I took, while lobster fishing, of herring that was used, pulled out of a bait pocket, and subsequently tossed overboard. Warning: graphic picture of dead fish. https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1120/5100863905_1d9520e7eb_b.j...
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 can eat up them all in five years" received over 10,000 likes.
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.
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.