Don’t be silly. You’re avoiding the argument I made.
I’ve acknowledged we can extinct a species. Possible 10’s or even 100’s of species.
The thought that we could wipe the seas clean of fish is just nonsense.
Uh-huh. You don’t know anything about economics, and yet you run around making statements about supply and prices.
Well, I never said we could wipe the seas clean of fish, so have fun with your strawmen. What I did was point out an error in Morgensteen’s argument.
No, you proposed a strawman when Morgenstern made a statement about fish, which I already pointed out are a huge number of species and conflated it to one particular species.
And Morganstern is correct. At some point if we’ve exhausted all supplies we will not be able to economically obtain fish from the deepest and farthest reaches of the ocean to make it profitable.
Stop treating the description “fish” like it’s a single species.
Morgensteen’s use of the word “market” in his argument made it clear that he was talking about fish for which there is a market for. Not all fish everywhere in the ocean.
Uh, no, I’m not talking about fish generally, and neither was Morgensteen. We were talking about fish that are being consumed, which is why we are talking about the market for fish. You are the one who is trying to use a broader definition of fish and pin it back on me.
Additionally, as I have already pointed out, if demand is high enough, you can certainly push multiple species to extinction. Nothing you have presented here has shown that prices will rise so high and demand will drop so low that consumable fish will not become extinct. All you have stated is that fish we can’t get to won’t go extinct, which I never stated anything like that to begin with. Stop making up strawmen to argue against, and stop making incorrect statements about how S-D curves and markets work.
Well that’s where we disagree. I’m talking about fish in the broader sense and I believe Morgenstern was as well and I think you did as well.
I’ve told you multiple times that I thought he was talking about the consummable fish market. And I think that’s a reasonable supposition, considering that the word “seafood” is in the title, people were talking about farming in the thread, etc. If you don’t think that’s the way he was using it, so be it. But that’s the way I’m interpreting it.
Oh, thank’s for informing me what I thought.:rolleyes: So, you’re just making up my thoughts? Talk about strawmen. I stated multiple times how I’m using the term and what concepts I’m talking about.
Neither you, nor anyone else who has posted in this thread (and that includes me) has any idea what the supply-demand curve for consummable fish is. Some enterprising person could try to crunch the data and come up with some estimates to see if demand would really drop low enough to prevent extinction, but flatly stating that it actually will is just making stuff up.
This article is useful for this: Subscribe to read | Financial Times
Rather than talking in absurd generalities, let’s dive into the meat of the issue. What the OP is probably referring to is the highly influential Worm 2006 paper in Science (PDF) which was a mega bombshell and has been cited over 2000 times.
The relevant paragraph is as follows:
where it previously defines a collapse as dropping below 10% of the maximum recorded catch.
So the actual, concrete claim is not that we will have hoovered up every fish in the ocean or that farmed fish are in danger (although farmed fish that depend on fish meal feed will be) or that such a result is inevitable, but that, if the trend line holds and nothing is done to stop it, the line crosses the 100% threshold at 2048.
Fishery collapse is a very well studied topic and it emphatically does not follow the Economics 101 model laid out in this thread. It’s well accepted within the fishery community that free market economics do not work with fisheries which is why every well run fishery enacts quotas, catch limits, monitoring and penalties for non-compliance. Some fisheries are more well run than others and are slowly recovering their stocks while other, even supposedly well run fisheries are still collapsing.
In the meantime, fishery management is still immensely complex politically and there are still many poorly run fisheries that are in danger of collapsing. Every consumer should be aware of the political choice they make when buying seafood and follow the advice of guides like The Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch to make sure they are not contributing to the global seafood collapse.
That is not true at all. what is the case in the economic analysis is that the wild fisheries suffer from the very well known problem called the tragedy of the commons. This is not a failure of such economics, we can know well this from the worst collapses in the old soviet system managed stocks - it is a problem more general. It is described here: “which individuals, acting independently and rationally according to each one’s self-interest, behave contrary to the whole group’s long-term best interests by depleting some common resource.”
The fault is not free market, the fault is deeper.
Of course you can also collapse a fishery through non free market systems and I never suggested otherwise. But find me a single well run fishery that doesn’t rely on rigid command-and-control systems where maximum allowable catches are set by a central governing authority. That’s the antithesis of free markets but it’s how to run effective fisheries.
In our culture, supply/demand curves tend to suffer from severe lust-skew. A rising price may suppress broader demand, but as the price rises, the item in question acquires desirability. Then, by being desirable, purveyors are attracted to the item at the very least by the promise of more profit for less revenue. Hence, a “coffin corner” forms: higher prices can lead to total stripping (extinction) just as easily as market-line depression.
And aquaculture does not appear to be a viable solution. The tasty seafood, like salmon and shrimp, are predators, requiring feedstock, which at least at present, are wild-caught. Shellfish, yeah, we can farm that pretty easily, but can it be grown fast enough to keep up with demand?
Of course, nobody here has mentioned the collapse of the cod fisheries off Newfoundland. This is interesting because except for a small area, Canada claims jurisdiction (and tends to enforce it) off the Grand Banks. If you read a book like Farley Mowat’s “Sea Of Slaughter” (guess where he’s going on the ecology debate with a title like that?) the Grand Banks and the Gulf of St. Lawrence according to early explorers ran thick with codfish 6 feet long or more. By the 1980’s, turning a blind eye to overfishing had pretty much destroyed the fisheries. Where locals used to have seasonal employment processing the catch, many fish plants are shut down now. The Fisheries department consistently ignored dwindling supplies to allocate larger quotas for political reasons, nobody tried to stop European overfishing. Factory ships used fancier and better technology to find and vacuum up all the fish they could find. Dragnets wrecked the bottom ecology; smaller-hole nets captured younger fish before they were old enough to spawn. Nets full of the “wrong fish” not part of the quota - the dead fish are just dumped overboard.
Today the Fisheries claims the cod have recovered, but they are still nowhere near the level they used to be.
Things are even worse on the high seas. There is the claim that fishing for shark fins has decimated the shark population. Some US jurisdictions might ban it, but between local pressure and corruption, other nations are unlikely to ban shark fishing before sharks are hard to find.
And this is the answer to the OP’s question. Like whales that almost disappeared in the late 1800’s, people from all over the world will suck up the edible wildlife of the ocean until it becomes a rarity like deer, rather than a section in the grocery store freezer. There may always be farmed fish, but hunting and gathering fish will stop being a business because there won’t be enough to make a profit.
There’s no real evidence that seafood is a Veblen good but even if it were, the effect would be fairly minimal. What makes a fishery collapse so insidious is that there’s not much of a price increase prior to collapse. Typically, with an unmanaged fishery, you’re pulling the same amount of fish out of the ocean year after year until one year, there’s a precipitous decline and within 2 or 3 years, the fishery is totally collapsed.
If you look at North Atlantic Cod for instance, total haul was remarkably flat from 1980 - 1990 and then fell off a cliff in about 3 years. By the time anyone even noticed a price increase in cod, even a total ban on fishing would not have prevented the collapse.
no it is not the antithesis of free markets. it is the antithesis of a non-regulated free market, but nothing in free market economic theory - except maybe among some strange american ultra ultra liberal ideologies - is against rigid regulation where there is failure because of the issues like the commons issue. Because of the specific nature of the fisheries and how they fall across juridical boundaries and even outside normal regulation jurisdictions at all due to the common law of the seas, it is perfectly analytically acceptable and does not contradict free market at all because the hypotheses against regulation are not obtained in this case. This is clear.
this is not an antithesis of free markets systems, and among the worst and most continuing failures are the command and control systems based on the non market systems.
LSL Guy: A minor objection:
We are by no means whatsoever running out of deer.
In just one suburban county (Prince George’s) in Maryland in 2011-2013, 2101 deer wandered into the paths of mmotor vehicles:
http://www.pgparks.com/Assets/Parks+$!26+Recreation/Your+Parks/Deer_Management/DVC+Map+2011-2013.pdf
Each yellow star represents one deer fatality. Deer in MD and VA (and many other states) are so abundant that collisions with cars are a substantial and very, very serious problem.
OMG, so we’re developing so much that we’re forcing them onto the roads and moving them down left and right? No, not really. In the 2012-2013 hunting season, hunters in Maryland --a small state, as they go-- harvested 87,541 deer per the state fish & game people. And pretty much everywhere in MD, you can only use a bow & arrow, shotgun, or muzzleloading blackpowder gun --not a regular rifle as in most other states.
Our deer numbers are not declining. Not by any means at all!
BTW, Saturday’s Wall Stret Journal had an interesting article on fish farming. IIRC, they said something like 90% of all salmon on the market today are farmed, and that a Toyota subisdary is now farming tuna.
I think this has descended into definitional games since it appears that both of us agree with the statement “well run fishery enact quotas, catch limits, monitoring and penalties for non-compliance”.
The dwindling population of a single species is not going to eliminate the possibility of near extinction from market pressure. It’s the dwindling of multiple species making commercial fishing impractical that will lead to higher prices and lower demand at those prices. Whether or not those species recover or become extinct (or extremely rare) will have more to do with the availability of ecological niches. Climate change, pollution, and competition from other species are the great threat once particular species populations fall.
I never suggested we were running out of deer.
What I said was that IF we tried to stop eating beef tomorrow and began eating a similar number of deer instead, THEN we’d destroy the deer population very, very quickly.
The point simply being that wild stocks of any species will collapse under intense harvest pressure. Unlike native predators, we’re not under any competitive pressure that slows our predation.
When a fish is no longer abundant enough to economicaly harvest it will effectively become no longer available to the general public but that is a long way from extinct.
You can easily prove this false, purely on the basis of theory. Both economic and ecological.
But why go to the trouble of thinking about theory, you can just look at all the many species which have been hunted to extinction, or nearly so.