Taboo Trades
Taboo Trades
Market Solutions to Fish and Wildlife Preservation with Jonathan Adler
My guest today is Jonathan Adler, Cabell Research Professor and Tazewell Taylor Professor of Law at William & Mary Law School. Professor Adler is the author or editor of seven books, including Climate Liberalism: Perspectives on Liberty, Property and Pollution (Palgrave, 2023), Marijuana Federalism: Uncle Sam and Mary Jane (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), Business and the Roberts Court (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Rebuilding the Ark: New Perspectives on Endangered Species Act Reform (AEI Press, 2011). He has testified before Congress a dozen times, and his work has been cited in the U.S. Supreme Court. A 2024 study identified Professor Adler as the seventh most cited legal academic in administrative and environmental law from 2019 to 2023. This episode is co-hosted by UVA Law 3L, Bradley Noble
Show Notes
About Jonathan Adler
About Kim Krawiec
About Bradley Noble
Adler, Jonathan H., and Nathaniel Stewart. "Learning how to fish: catch shares and the future of fishery conservation." UCLA J. Envtl. L. & Pol'y 31 (2013): 150.
Adler, Jonathan H. "Conservation through collusion: Antitrust as an obstacle to marine resource conservation." Wash. & Lee L. Rev. 61 (2004): 3.
Adler, Jonathan H. "Legal obstacles to private ordering in marine fisheries." Roger Williams UL Rev. 8 (2002): 9.
Adler, Jonathan H. "Water rights, markets, and changing ecological conditions." Environmental Law (2012): 93-113.
Adler, Jonathan H. "Taking property rights seriously: The case of climate change." Social Philosophy and Policy 26.2 (2009): 296-316.
Schmidtz, David. "When Preservationism Doesn't Preserve." Environmental Values 6.3 (1997): 327-339.
[00:00] Jonathan Adler: Is with some environmental questions.
[00:02] People have very strong moral commitments that are or that conflict with the idea of thinking about the problems in purely economic terms or thinking about things as resources. Right. So one of the things Schmitz talks about is elephant conservation.
[00:19] And it might be one thing to say, oh, sardines, we can think of those as resources.
[00:23] But elephants,
[00:25] whales, right. We're talking about charismatic megafauna,
[00:29] fancy words for, you know,
[00:31] big animals that we care about.
[00:34] Kim Krawiec: Hey. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Taboo Trades Podcast, a show about stuff we aren't supposed to sell but do anyway. I'm your host, Kim Kravik.
[00:50] My guest today is Jonathan Adler, Cabell Research professor and Tazewell Taylor professor of Law at William Law School.
[00:59] Professor Adler is the author or editor of seven books and numerous articles. He has testified before Congress a dozen times, and his work has been cited in the U.S. supreme Court.
[01:10] A 2024 study identified Professor Adler as the seventh most cited legal, academic, and administrative environmental law from 2019 to 2023.
[01:21] He joins us today to discuss his 2013 article,
[01:25] Learning how to Catch Shares and the Future of Fishery Cons.
[01:34] Hey, Bradley, thanks for joining me today.
[01:36] Bradley Noble: Hi, thanks so much. I'm happy to be here.
[01:38] Kim Krawiec: Why don't we start by just having you introduce yourself to our listeners?
[01:43] Bradley Noble: Yeah, no worries. So my name is Bradley noble. I am A3L here at UVA Law.
[01:48] Kim Krawiec: We are talking today to Jonathan Adler, and this is an episode that you volunteered to be the host of.
[01:57] Can you tell us a little bit about why you chose this episode as the one you wanted to be a little more involved in?
[02:05] Bradley Noble: Yeah, absolutely.
[02:06] So, I mean, in all honesty, I think what really drew me to this topic was just the fact that I knew close to nothing about it, actually.
[02:15] And admittedly, even after reading the article, I still know very a limited amount about it. But I think that I am a lot more interested after having read Professor Adler's article.
[02:25] But I think more broadly, I think I've become more interested in environmental issues within the past couple of years, especially as they've become a lot more salient to us.
[02:33] And the idea of fishery management is really not something that I often see come into that conversation.
[02:39] So, yeah, I was just curious to learn a little bit more about what Professor Adler had to say.
[02:43] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, me too. And you know what? I will tell you that my limited knowledge, but improved thanks to reading Jonathan's article came in handy at dinner the other night when somebody was talking about fisheries.
[02:57] I think it was somebody who had a family business, right. Who involved Fishing and I could speak without complete ignorance for at least a few minutes. So I felt pretty good about that.
[03:09] Bradley Noble: No, that's awesome. I wish that I could have had that opportunity already, but. No, I'm happy you did.
[03:16] Kim Krawiec: Bradley,
[03:17] we have a lot of questions for Jonathan.
[03:19] What is it that you are hoping to learn a little bit more about or get from him during our discussion today?
[03:26] Bradley Noble: Yeah, I mean,
[03:27] so I mean a couple of things. One just being that I obviously after reading the paper thought it was very interesting and like the solution I guess that he proposed seemed very well thought out, incentivizing kind of long term collective thinking around fishery management by fishers.
[03:44] But I guess I'm kind of wondering where kind of the limits of his proposed solution are. So like at what point do those incentives not seem so appealing to fishers?
[03:55] So I guess, I mean that's one thing,
[03:57] but also it's been a few years since he wrote this paper and I admittedly haven't been so tapped into policymaking and scholarly work around fishery management. So I'd be curious to kind of get his take on.
[04:11] Have there been any developments in that area and if so, in what ways that they've gone?
[04:16] Kim Krawiec: Yeah, this is one of the main things I'm interested in as well. And I think that we discussed this in class a little bit that most of the time when we have people on here, they have new papers or working papers.
[04:28] Right. And so we don't have this time gap and it's actually kind of nice to have a paper that sort of captures what I think was the sort of state of the world in.
[04:41] Was it 2013?
[04:43] Yeah,
[04:44] 2013.
[04:46] And kind of find out whether anything has changed since that time. And Bradley, I know that you are like me in that one of your questions was gosh,
[04:58] this is so persuasive.
[04:59] Jonathan Adler: Right.
[04:59] Kim Krawiec: You make the case for this so persuasively that the amount of uptake on it is,
[05:06] which is limited, is surprising. And so I'm interested in hearing whether that has changed and I know you are too.
[05:14] Anything else that you are hoping to talk to him about today?
[05:19] Bradley Noble: No, I mean I think really I'm excited to hear his responses to all of my classmates questions because there are some really good ones.
[05:25] Kim Krawiec: Well, let's join the others. Welcome. Jonathan, thanks for joining us today.
[05:35] Jonathan Adler: My pleasure.
[05:36] Speaker D: Great.
[05:37] Kim Krawiec: Well, why don't we start by having you introduce yourself to our audience?
[05:41] Jonathan Adler: Sure.
[05:42] So I'm Jonathan Adler. I'm the Tazewell Taylor professor of Law at William and Mary where I just joined for the past 25 years, I had been a professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law,
[05:54] where, among other things, I was the founding director of the Coleman P. Burke center for Environmental Law.
[05:59] Prior to that, I had clerked on the D.C. circuit and I had spent a decade doing environmental and regulatory policy in Washington, D.C.
[06:08] and a large part of my research looks at alternatives to traditional forms of regulation in addressing various environmental problems, and in particular, alternatives that are grounded in classical liberal principles or that rely upon property rights, markets, and things like that.
[06:26] Kim Krawiec: Thank you. So we are here today to talk to you about your 2013 paper,
[06:32] learning how to Fish Cat Shares and the Future of Fishery Conservation,
[06:37] which is published in Remind me, Jonathan. I'm going to put a full citation in the show notes so people can.
[06:43] Jonathan Adler: Find the paper, the UCLA Journal of Environmental Law and Policy.
[06:47] Kim Krawiec: Okay, great.
[06:48] And I think I am not alone in not knowing much about fisheries before I read your paper. I mean, I still don't know very much as compared to you, but I did tell the group before you joined that it already came in handy at dinner the other night.
[07:04] I was able to speak for, you know, a couple of minutes at least without sounding wholly ignorant. But can you tell us a little bit about just the background for this piece and sort of what motivated it and how you came to it?
[07:16] Jonathan Adler: Sure. So as mentioned, you know, I had. I had done work in environmental policy. I'd done a bunch of work looking at different ways of thinking about environmental protection and conservation.
[07:27] This is actually, I guess depending on how you count,
[07:30] was the third or fourth paper or project I did related to fisheries.
[07:36] So early on,
[07:37] kind of when I first joined the academy, I was interested in questions of private ordering in the context of environmental conservation.
[07:46] I did a couple pieces exploring that. One looking at how various legal rules get in the way of private ordering and in particular how this occurred in the context of fisheries.
[07:57] And then another paper,
[07:59] which was part of my tenure file, I guess that that the elevator version or elevator speech version of it is, is that antitrust law is bad for fish. And what that article focused on was history of how in a bunch of fisheries, participants in those fisheries in the mid 20th century had tried to organize themselves to account for the nature of the marine commons and to kind of eliminate the.
[08:27] The commons dynamic by. Through contractual arrangements. And some economists, like Gary Liebkap had done some important work on this,
[08:35] and they found that their arrangements were illegal because the way you solve the tragedy of the commons privately is to enter into horizontal agreements and restraint of trade that constrain output and consumption.
[08:51] Right. So the,
[08:53] the members of the community all agree, we will all agree to limit how much we can.
[08:58] And so I wrote a very long article in the Washington and Lee Law Review talking about both this history of how antitrust law had prevented these arrangements from being maintained and how this had occurred in some fisheries that subsequently collapsed.
[09:15] And then talking about how modern law, in various ways, in some respects, is either trying to carve out possibilities for some of these sorts of arrangements through efficient cooperatives and how antitrust law could be conceived as a way to allow for these sorts of arrangements.
[09:33] And then also how ITQs, in some respects, are the government doing what fishers might have done on their own, at least in some contexts.
[09:42] So those were some things that had got me interested in this area. This particular paper that I co authored with a former student was really just an effort to build on that, but also just to talk about the accumulating empirical evidence with regard to ITQs.
[09:59] So as I talk about in the paper,
[10:02] the theoretical economic work goes back to the 1950s.
[10:06] It actually predates Garrett Hardin's famous essay out the Tragedy of the Commons.
[10:11] But there wasn't.
[10:11] Kim Krawiec: I never knew that until I read your paper, Jonathan. So I so in addition to learning about fisheries, I learned more about the tragedy of the comm than I knew before.
[10:20] Jonathan Adler: Yeah. So fisheries economists had understood this dynamic, had documented it, had theorized about how to deal with it.
[10:27] And, and then it turns out there's some other work by people like Eleanor, like Eleanor Ostrom, looking at, at traditional communities and how they had addressed commons problems in various ways that might look similar.
[10:38] But it really wasn't until the early 21st century where we had the breadths of empirical evidence that we have now for a variety of reasons. I mean, There were some ITQ programs that were adopted in the 1990s in various countries,
[10:53] but for a variety of reasons,
[10:56] they were effectively barred in US Waters or new ones were barred in US waters for a period of time.
[11:02] And it wasn't until the early 21st century when they started to proliferate again, and that we started to accumulate a lot of empirical evidence. And so the point of this paper in large part was to say, look, here's we had this theory, but we actually now have a lot of data,
[11:21] not just on the United in the United States,
[11:23] telling us what actually happens in practice.
[11:26] And that really matters because there's all kinds of things in environmental protection where we might, in theory, think a certain thing might work, but it really matters. You know, what happens when it,
[11:37] it confronts the real world. So the point of this paper was to kind of summarize that that work. There is kind of a.
[11:45] Last thing I'll say,
[11:46] a common frustration I have about the environmental law literature is how such an interdisciplinary field produces so much scholarship that's actually not meaningfully interdisciplinary, that is to say,
[11:59] does not actually engage with the work being done in other disciplines.
[12:05] And that's particularly true with environmental economic literature. And so, you know, a lot of stuff that this paper talks about,
[12:13] you know, was completely absent from the environmental literature because for whatever reason, environmental law scholars had not been looking to this fairly robust literature to see what we could understand and learn about what's been occurring in this area.
[12:27] So that's a, that's kind of what spurred the paper.
[12:30] Kim Krawiec: Well, thank you for that introduction to your work and what motivates you.
[12:35] I am now going to turn this over to Bradley.
[12:38] He is the host of the episode for today and he's basically going to run the show from here.
[12:45] Bradley Noble: Thank you so much, Jonathan, for being here with us today. I really appreciate it.
[12:49] Kicking us off. My question really is kind of bringing us more forward looking more, I guess, to the present.
[12:55] So reading your paper, I really understood that imposing these individual transferable quotas and total allowable patches really sounds like a well thought out and efficient way of managing fisheries.
[13:06] And it seems like it would really benefit a lot of stakeholders involved as well. So I guess my questions are kind of one, like, why has it not been more broadly adopted here in the United States?
[13:18] And what do you think would, I guess, need to be done for it to be more broadly employed here?
[13:23] But then also we talked about how it's been a few years since you wrote this paper. So I guess more out of curiosity,
[13:30] has uptake increased since you wrote the paper or have there been any other types of developments in the field?
[13:37] Jonathan Adler: Sure. So that's a good question. Good question. And it's an important question. And you're kind of the very broad general answer is change is often hard.
[13:47] And people, especially when you're talking about individuals, you know, you're not talking about things in a, you know, the action is say, say corporations, but you're talking about people and their livelihoods, their, their ways of their way of life.
[14:00] It's hard to convince people to change, and it's hard to convince people to accept change that's uncertain. Right. You know,
[14:08] and so if you think about fishing as an industry in particular,
[14:11] you know, this is something that is often individual's livelihood, maybe something that's been in their family, something that's very tied to a local community into a particular place.
[14:20] And to say I've got a better way of doing things is scary.
[14:25] And this is, you know, this isn't something just about people in the fishing area. You know, this is, this is common. I mean, there's all sorts of work that's been done by cultural anthropologists and others about how people are often resistant to change that is uncertain and particularly that threatens things that are well established and that they rely upon.
[14:46] And so I think that's a big part of it. And you know, one of the things that happened in the United States was there was a period of time in the late 20th and early 21st century where there was a moratorium on adopting any new ITQ programs or catch share programs.
[15:02] I'll use those, those phrases interchangeably. I mean, there we could, we could argue about how one's a subset of the other. But I think for purposes of our discussion, they,
[15:11] it's useful to just to not get bogged down in that. There was a moratorium on new programs.
[15:17] So there were a handful of fisheries that had it cues, but there was a bar on adopting new ones. And then when the moratorium was lifted,
[15:26] the rules through which regional fishery councils, which are the, the kind of mechanism that we use to regulate individual fisheries were such that you needed multiple super majority votes of participants in the fishery to for the change,
[15:40] which is also a big hurdle.
[15:43] And I think that, so that was part of it. I think also, I think to be frank,
[15:49] a lack of trust. Right. So when folks from outside of efficient community come in, whether they're from Washington D.C. or they're from some big environmental NGO or they're some academic and they say, hey, I know how to help you do what you're doing better.
[16:04] It's understandable why,
[16:06] you know, people in a particular community might not trust that. So I think that's been one of the biggest obstacles.
[16:14] You know, when you, when you listen to interviews of participants in fisheries that have gone through this process, you often hear, in fact listen to one the other day with a guy who's now a co author of a new book on, on kind of this experience about how his view,
[16:32] why he opposed it, and now is something of an evangelist for this sorts of approach and is actually going out with members of environmental NGOs to other fisheries, trying to promote them about just this, this fear that you're going to do something, it's going to lessen the amount I have to catch.
[16:48] It's going to change the way I've learned to do what I do and I don't want that. So I think that's been, been a big, big barrier.
[16:59] You know, arguably there's all. There also may be economic interests. Right. Those who stand to benefit from, from this sort of change mean there may be individuals who stand to lose and may resist as well.
[17:11] In terms of uptake, it's increased somewhat.
[17:14] Last I looked, there are 17 fisheries in the United States that have some sort of in federal waters, that have some sort of ITQ or catcher sort of program.
[17:24] But globally it's something like 200 or so across 40 countries.
[17:29] And so there has been proliferation internationally,
[17:35] not as quick as we might want or as I might want, but it has started to increase. And you know, as I said, there are now that there are fewer legal obstacles in the United States than there used to be.
[17:46] There are efforts to try and push more aggressively for more of these sorts of approaches.
[17:54] Bradley Noble: Great. Thank you so much. And thank you for providing that additional context too on how fisheries are actually operated. I think that was really helpful for,
[18:00] for all of us.
[18:01] So now I'm going to kind of on the same vein of regulation and policymaking, I want to turn to a question from Katherine.
[18:08] Speaker E: Hi, Professor Adler, thank you for being here with us today.
[18:12] Yeah. My question has to do with when change does happen.
[18:16] So between your article and the Schmidt's article,
[18:19] I was struck by how often conservation and preservation efforts seem to fail and lead to the opposite effect. Attended,
[18:26] you yourself pointed out how the traditional regulatory approach to fishery conservation is considered a spectacular failure and how the failure is considered entirely man made.
[18:37] Given that such regulations are usually pushed forward by those who are genuinely concerned about conserving resources and the environment,
[18:44] what do you think is missing from their approach?
[18:47] What are one to two critical considerations for conservationist policymakers and lawmakers when crafting regulations?
[18:54] Jonathan Adler: I think that's an important question. Let me start by just saying, I think especially when we're talking about environmental policy in particular,
[19:00] it's hard and there's a lot of things that we learn by doing and experimenting and that's certainly something we see throughout environmental law.
[19:11] So everything I'm going to say next, I wanted to preface it by pointing that out to say it's very easy as an academic to look back at what's worked and what's not and said, oh, well, that those things failed.
[19:22] And you know, how could anyone have thought, no,
[19:24] there's a lot of legitimately difficult stuff in environmental protection.
[19:29] So I think that's important as an initial matter. I think, you know, in terms of why there was these sorts of approaches were not initially adopted and why things were adopted that failed, I think there's, there's a bunch of reasons.
[19:42] One,
[19:43] the idea that we could apply traditional notions of property rights that work in the context of,
[19:50] you know, fairly clear terrestrial resources,
[19:53] nonliving resources, or at least non animals in a kind of intuitive way to something like fisheries. I mean, it's understandable why people thought that was a re. Right. It's one thing for a farmer to have property lines delineated for, you know, where a farmer gets to farm and, and,
[20:14] and what's hers and what's her neighbors and so on.
[20:16] And we know that even that could be sometimes difficult.
[20:20] But if you're not talking about land, you're talking about water and you're not talking about crops, you're talking about fish,
[20:27] and the fish certainly don't know where the boundaries are. I mean,
[20:30] it's understandable why conceptually there was the assumption that these sorts of ways of thinking about resource problems might be not workable and technologically difficult.
[20:42] It turns out we were too quick to assume that. There is some interesting work by cultural anthropologists about how a lot of traditional communities developed conservation strategies for fisheries that look a lot like property rights, but without that nomenclature and did so without the benefits of modern technology and what have you.
[21:01] But, but point is, it's understandable, I think, right. You know,
[21:05] property works when you can draw meets and bounds. It doesn't work when you're talking about things that move in the water.
[21:12] Right, understandable.
[21:13] I do think also in the particular area of environmental policy, it is worth kind of understanding the intellectual history of environmental protection in this country and how the modern environmental movement that kind of really gained force in the late 60s, early 70s as distinct from the preceding or the pre existing conservation movement was suspicious of markets,
[21:37] was suspicious, suspicious of consumption,
[21:40] viewed environmental problems through something of a Malthusian lens, that the problem was rapacious markets wanting to consume evermore and that this necessarily would lead to ruin.
[21:52] If you go back and read Garrett Hardin's essay, there's actually an element of that in his essay. Right. So I talked about the commons part. There's a whole extended discussion in that essay about population and about how we're just going to have too many people and it doesn't matter what else we do and what we just have to find a way to constrain consumption.
[22:09] So I think that just made policymakers and those interested in environmental issues turn away from thinking about issues in economic terms.
[22:19] And then lastly, and this comes up more in the Schmitz essay that you all read as well. The essay by David Schmitz, who's a philosopher,
[22:30] is with some environmental questions.
[22:33] People have very strong moral commitments that are,
[22:39] or that conflict with the idea of thinking about the problems in purely economic terms or thinking about things as resources. Right. So one of the things Schmitz talks about is elephant conservation.
[22:50] And it might be one thing to say, oh, sardines, we can think of those as resources,
[22:55] but elephants,
[22:56] whales,
[22:57] right. We're talking about charismatic megafauna, you know, fancy words for, you know, big,
[23:02] big animals that, that we care about,
[23:05] animals that, that we think are intelligent that have, in the case of elephants, have very complicated familial and kind of group structures and behaviors.
[23:17] And the idea that we would treat them as a resource to be consumed strikes a lot of people, as I would say, for very, very understandable reasons that I have some sympathy for as just problematic.
[23:31] Right.
[23:32] And so I just think there are areas where our visions of what it is we want in environmental policy conflict perhaps with what works or what might be most successful.
[23:43] And that's certainly something the Schmidt's essay talks about. I mean, if I'm talking about halibut and red snapper and so on, I'm not sure it, it triggers those concerns. But one reasons I wanted folks to read the Schmitz articles, because it's important to recognize that some of the things I talk about,
[23:59] if you expand them to other contexts,
[24:03] do you know,
[24:05] are going to trigger reactions about whether or not it's moral to think about things in this way. And I think that's important to put on the table. And that certainly is a reason why we've not, for example,
[24:16] you know, wanted to think about these sorts of approaches as applied to certain animal species.
[24:22] Great.
[24:23] Bradley Noble: Thank you so much for such a thoughtful response.
[24:26] Now, I'm going to shift a little bit now to a couple of questions that kind of focus on your paper's implications for both local and indigenous communities a bit. So the first of those is going to come from Kendall.
[24:39] Speaker F: Hi, Jonathan. Thank you so much for joining us today.
[24:42] So my question is specifically about page 188 through 189 of your article.
[24:47] And I know you addressed some of the social concerns regarding how ITQs will impact local communities and their ability to competitively acquire shares.
[24:54] I'm curious if there have been proposals for ITQ regulations that prioritize values of equity and inclusion beyond the buyout programs and compensation that you discussed on page 189.
[25:04] Specifically, are there any programs that aim to keep such communities in rather than buying them out? Like I'm imagining something akin to reserving a portion of the ITQ shares for local communities and giving them a first right of refusal.
[25:17] Jonathan Adler: So there's been a lot of,
[25:20] a lot of consideration of how to think about these concerns in the development of ITQ programs. And you know,
[25:28] more broadly, anytime we're talking about a dramatic change in the way a resource that communities rely upon is managed, we need to think a lot about transition rules, right? So even if one's convinced that this alternative structure is going to be the, a better way of dealing in the future,
[25:43] you still have people that are very reliant upon the way things are and dependent upon that. And so there's been a lot of consideration about how you might think about that.
[25:52] And there's no kind of one size answer.
[25:55] You know, one thing that that is adopted in some of the more recent ITQs in the United States has been developed are one in particular are limits on concentration. So limits on how much of the fishery someone can own.
[26:08] And the concern there is largely that local participants are going to be bought out by larger entities, perhaps larger corporations,
[26:16] who both will perhaps develop some sort of market power within that particular fishery, but also are not tied to the local community.
[26:24] And we see this sort of concern about, you know, ranching communities and farming communities in all sorts of resource dependent communities,
[26:31] cannabis communities,
[26:32] localized, localized.
[26:34] Kim Krawiec: No, really. Actually, your answer really reminded me of the podcast I've done on cannabis regulation.
[26:40] Jonathan Adler: So. So concentration limits are part of it. And I should note there are parts of the world. In fact, I haven't listened to it yet, but I came across a podcast episode about it cues as.
[26:50] As an investment.
[26:51] And it is focused on Australia and New Zealand where,
[26:54] where concerns about concentration have not been as dominant as they have been in the United States.
[26:59] And in fact, where there are some, some fisheries that are managed in ways that from an antitrust perspective would be completely illegal under US law. So that's. So concentration are something that's been particularly common.
[27:10] A second way those sorts of concerns have been addressed is just thinking very carefully about initial allocation,
[27:17] right? So an economist will come in and say, well, the efficient way to allocate is just auction everything off.
[27:23] Well, if you have people that are involved in the community that are involved in the resource that have been relying upon it and using it for generations,
[27:31] an Auction's not very satisfying,
[27:33] however much some economists may think it is the most efficient way.
[27:38] Right. So generally ITQs have not been allocated through auction. They've rather been allocated through some sort of mechanism that tries to recognize the importance of incumbency, the importance of, of, of who's already there.
[27:53] And there have been various ways of doing that.
[27:55] And now typically, you know, the T in ITQ is transferable.
[28:02] And so if you have that initial allocation and even if you have a concentration limit, people still might sell.
[28:09] And in most US ITQs, you,
[28:12] once they've been adopted, you have seen a decent amount of exit,
[28:17] compensated exit, but, but exit nonetheless where, where some portion of, of people that have been fishers in that community agree to leave or, or sell their shares.
[28:29] And I'm not aware off the top of my head of where right of first refusal has been adopted, although I do wonder if it would have that much of effect just insofar as there might be a difference in willingness to pay and resources available for purchases.
[28:47] All that said, something I don't talk about in this paper, but do talk about in some of those other papers that I mentioned is there are fisheries in the United States where either quota or just absolute rights are allocated to indigenous communities.
[29:05] And so there are fishing rights that have been allocated to tribes,
[29:11] for example, there are fishing rights that have been kind of set aside to particular communities as a way of recognizing the pre existing right.
[29:21] You know, essentially say that,
[29:23] you know, whether or not these rights were historically recognized as or treated as property by the United States from a. And you know,
[29:32] if you read McIntosh vs. Johnson in property Laura in another class, you want to kind of understand that whole the idea that there may be things that we may look at and observe and recognize as property but that don't have a chain of title that makes them recognized as property under US Law.
[29:48] There have been efforts to, to recognize that and it is interesting actually to see how some of those rights have been used and developed. So for example, I am aware of some fisheries where the rights are held communally by tribes, but where the tribe then in turn engages in various kind of market oriented structured reforms or management.
[30:14] So you know, I'm aware of some fisheries where the background rights are held by tribes, but then they lease or sell out rights to recreational fishing companies and the like for portions of what is ultimately the, the tribes.
[30:28] What are the tribes rights in the fishery?
[30:31] And that's interesting because it's, it's often kind of outside of the, the dominant regulatory structure that certainly applies in most commercial fisheries.
[30:42] So I hope that that answers your questions.
[30:46] Bradley Noble: Thank you so much. You. Actually,
[30:48] this is kind of a nice lead into a follow up question from Sari. I know she's touching on some similar issues as well. So do you want to go ahead, Sari?
[30:56] Speaker G: Hi, Jonathan. In relation to Kendall's question and probing a bit deep into some of what you just mentioned,
[31:03] in regions where indigenous communities have long standing customary Systems,
[31:08] how should ITQs be reconciled with those pre existing legal and cultural claims to fishing grounds?
[31:16] And should customary systems be treated as de facto property rights within catchier programs?
[31:23] Jonathan Adler: Sure.
[31:24] So I mean, my own view, and I'll start with the last part of that question first, is that, you know, my own view of property rights and kind of property law is that property law is at its best when it is reflecting or reifying the way we actually order our lives.
[31:41] And so from that standpoint,
[31:43] recognizing arrangements that can be understood as, as property rights,
[31:50] even if they haven't traditionally been recognized under law or have that appropriate chain of title, I think is both normatively and practically desirable to do.
[32:03] And that can be true in a lot of contexts, right? It can be true with indigenous communities. It can also be true in environmental contexts with other groups that are engaged with a resource in over time in a way that, that creates reliance interests.
[32:20] Right. And that can be that this comes up a lot of times in the context of recreation. Right. So you may have people that, that have for a long time used,
[32:30] made use of, of lands or other resources in a particular way.
[32:34] And my own view is that it's better to recognize that. And if you're kind of moving in the direction of, for lack of a better word, privatization,
[32:43] you want your transition rules to account for the fact that there are people that have relied upon that.
[32:50] Two things I'll just add to that. One is while Most of the ITQs in commercial fisheries have this kind of individualized notion of property,
[33:02] we shouldn't assume that's the only way to think about property rights. And we too often do,
[33:07] especially in the environmental context. So there's no reason why rights can't be allocated on some kind of communal basis or some kind of collective basis.
[33:17] The fishery cooperatives that we have in some contexts are examples of that. But certainly that's another way of accommodating or accounting for indigenous claims and certain resources to say, look that,
[33:31] you know,
[33:33] think back to your property class, right? A condominium or cooperative right is not just something that is not just a high rise in New York Right. These structures are ways of owning property collectively.
[33:47] Corporations actually are that way too. And. But there are all sorts of ways of owning property collectively that we don't want to be taking off the table. And so that's, I think, something that's important.
[33:59] The other thing I should say, and there's some interesting historical research about in the wake of World War II, how the United States sought to modernize,
[34:11] I use that word,
[34:13] think of it in scare quotes, how Japan managed the inner sea and fisheries there in a way that completely ignored not just traditional ways of doing things, but the local knowledge that had accumulated over centuries about the resource, about the way the resource interacted with the way people live and so on.
[34:35] And that's something that I have this very hierarchy in view of markets and property about the ways that these sorts of arrangements transmit knowledge.
[34:46] And technology is great.
[34:48] And more modern ways of doing things are often great,
[34:51] but there's often a lot of learning and knowledge that is embedded in traditional ways of doing things.
[34:58] And you want transition rules that don't wipe that out or don't ignore that,
[35:05] both because I think it's unjust, but also because it's often catastrophic.
[35:12] Right. That, that, that communities that learn to deal with difficult issues like how do you use a fishery sustainably,
[35:23] communities that learn how to do that over decades, if not centuries,
[35:26] have learned some important things. And you don't want to kind of come in with some modern newfangled management approach that wipes that away or that doesn't in some way account for that.
[35:38] And so I think, I think that's important, and I certainly think that that's something that economists are not always sensitive to.
[35:46] Bradley Noble: I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Denise for her question.
[35:49] Speaker D: Hi, John.
[35:51] I wanted to touch on something you said earlier and also mentioned a lot in your paper, which is that ITQs try to recognize incumb and that those shares are held for long periods of time, if not in perpetuity.
[36:03] I understand that they are transferable, but I was wondering,
[36:07] you know, if a market exists and all the ITQs have already been apportioned and none of the current fisheries are willing to transfer their shares, but someone new would like to join the market.
[36:19] Does that mean there's no legal way to do so? And if so, doesn't this system kind of incentivize illegal fishing,
[36:26] illegal fishing more than another system would? That sort of reapportions shares every year?
[36:30] Because I'm imagining a world in which a new fishery isn't legally allowed to join the market,
[36:35] but just chooses to do so in an unsafe way in order to hide from regulators, leading to lost gear, overfishing, multi species discarding and all of those other issues.
[36:46] Jonathan Adler: Sure. So I mean, as an initial matter, I'd say, look, property rights in general,
[36:50] among other things, are a right to exclude.
[36:53] And in any market or in any space,
[36:56] if the relevant property rights are allocated, the way in is, is to, to buy your way in or to find some alternative. Now one alternative might be something like aquaculture,
[37:05] which you might not actually have to do in the ocean and in some cases can be done on land and might soon be done deep sea. But we're folks are working on that.
[37:16] But yeah, so it does, it does exclude in that respect.
[37:19] And,
[37:20] and this relates to some other questions that I know that, that some of you have.
[37:24] The empirical research suggests that the more secure and the more perpetual the right is,
[37:30] certainly from an economic standpoint,
[37:33] the, the more successful the ITQ is,
[37:35] the more not only does it rationalize and ensure that the fisheries use more sustainably and efficiently, but also the more it causes those who participate in the fishery to focus on the sustainability of the resource.
[37:48] Right. Because,
[37:49] and this is something we know generally about property ownership. Generally. Right. That, that Right. How many of you have ever washed a rented car, right? I mean, you may wash and take care of the car you own.
[37:59] You don't wash and take care of the car you rent unless it's so dirty that you're worried the rental company will say something.
[38:06] Because when you own something, that future value matters to you.
[38:11] So I think that's in terms of the concerns about illegal activity empirically, what we've seen is the reverse, that is to say, a big concern with setting total allowable catches without something like an ITQ system.
[38:25] Right. So there have been fisheries where there's a total allowable catch. And when the fishery opens,
[38:30] when the catch is hit is reached, it closes.
[38:33] And is that the rate at which total allowable catches are maintained and not breached has increased with adoption of ITQs. And it appears to me the more robust the property rights are, the greater, that is,
[38:50] we also see in some countries that the cooperation with enforcement increases dramatically because the participants in the fishery recognize that cheating harms by others harms them in a way that that was not as clear under other forms of regulation.
[39:10] And so as an empirical matter, at least that appears to be what we've seen.
[39:15] Bradley Noble: Yeah, thank you so much for your response. So we now have a question from Rachel Duffy on an area that Actually really piqued my interest as well, which is kind of what you kind of just talked about, the implementation of these captchairs in other countries.
[39:29] So Rachel, if you want to go.
[39:30] Speaker G: Ahead,
[39:31] in your paper you mentioned that property rights and legal framework differ between New Zealand versus Canada and the US But I was wondering if there are other differences that can account for the greater success of CAT shares in certain countries.
[39:47] I was also curious if you believe that CAT shares can function effectively in developing nations with weaker governance structures and if so, what preconditions are required?
[39:58] And finally, I also wanted to ask if you think that catch share systems are more likely to be consistently enforced and more successful in smaller nations like New Zealand.
[40:08] Jonathan Adler: So I don't think it's the,
[40:10] you know, in terms of the differences, I do think that the empirical evidence suggests that the more ITQs are treated like actual property,
[40:18] the more successful the programs have been.
[40:21] We even see in outside of the United States some examples where fishery participants actually second guess the scientific determinations on total allowable catch and buy back shares in a way to actually reduce fishing even lower than the scientists would have said,
[40:36] which you couldn't do in the United States. That would be considered an antitrust violation here.
[40:41] So that's something significant difference we see in terms of other countries. And I think I mentioned there are cash share systems of various sorts in something like 40 countries. Now the way they're implemented and the sorts of transition rules you need are going to vary from place to place.
[40:57] In part to deal with concerns about traditional communities and ways of doing things in various places that are the underlying norms,
[41:06] but also to account for resources and including governance structures.
[41:11] And it is interesting how those sorts of concerns have been addressed. I mean there are countries where the only place you can really monitor is the dock because you don't have the resources and the technology to monitor in the water.
[41:26] Well, and so there are various strategies and policies that deal. I mean, so there are places where literally the requirement is when you bring the boat into dock, you have to lay all of your fish out on the dock so everyone can see them and so that everyone can see what you've caught and what you've grown in.
[41:43] Right. And much less not very technologically advanced way of monitoring and enforcing, but something that can be accommodated obviously in places where you have potentially competing jurisdictions where you have straddling stocks and so on,
[42:00] being able to handle some of these problems without technology becomes more difficult. I mean, ironically,
[42:07] I don't know ironic, but an unanticipated consequence of the Reagan administration's assertion of a broader exclusive economic zone United States, and then the fact that other countries replicated that is that it did make some of these problems easier because it extended the waters that coastal nations have under their exclusive control and that that's not recognized.
[42:30] So the,
[42:32] the number of stocks and the number of fisheries that have these kind of straddling problems is. Has been not eliminated by any means,
[42:39] but. But reduced.
[42:40] Right.
[42:41] Bradley Noble: That's super fascinating. I'm going to pass it along now to Reid for his question.
[42:46] Speaker H: Hi Jonathan, thanks for coming from your paper. It seems like the success of the catch share system relies on removing incentives to overfish by giving fishers a stake in next year's catch.
[42:58] If a country with a catch share system is immediately next to a country without such limitations, it seems like that would weaken those incentives,
[43:07] especially if fish migrate between the countries or if the limiting country can't adequately police the fisheries borders. As you were discussing,
[43:14] given this state of affairs, will international agreement be necessary for the success of an ITQ in some countries?
[43:21] Jonathan Adler: Maybe. I mean so there are there, I guess that extending the easy reduced the number the volume of fishing that occurs in truly open water.
[43:31] I mean whaling, a lot of whaling still occurs there. Whaling is a whole nother subject and interesting and fascinating subject. There are some fisheries where there are important areas that are completely outside of any country's jurisdiction.
[43:45] Right. There are a couple of famous donut holes where.
[43:48] And there have been,
[43:52] you know, there certainly are problems with that that having certain fisheries that are certain stocks that straddle areas that are either under no control or under control of the differing country that has different approaches.
[44:04] I mean, where you have a straddling stock, you do need some sort of agreement or recognition of the relative rights of the countries.
[44:15] The easiest way to do that is to essentially allocate a share of the quota or the share of the fishery at a macro level to each country in proportion to some sort of share or what have you.
[44:30] And then if one has ITQs and one doesn't, that problem is lessened.
[44:37] But certainly jurisdictional. I mean throughout environmental policy where you have jurisdictional boundaries that don't align with the kind of natural ecological boundaries, there are challenges.
[44:48] Bradley Noble: Thank you so much. Now things moving along, I'm going to pass it over to Cindy for her questions.
[44:55] Speaker G: Hi Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us today. Similar to that in your article, you briefly mentioned territorial use rights in fisheries as a promising alternative for localized populations.
[45:08] What are the biggest legal and jurisdictional barriers keeping these area based fishing rights from being implemented more widely in US Coastal waters. And how might those be overcome?
[45:21] Jonathan Adler: Sure. So, right. So turfs are based on essentially trying to treat water like land. And then the rights to the fish are the, you know, the rights within your water. The way rights to at least some resources on, on land would be, would be owned by,
[45:37] at least in, under US Law, would be owned by the landowner.
[45:42] Since fish move, that can be challenging. So as a, as a practical matter, turfs probably work best or generally work best for species that don't migrate, that don't travel great distances.
[45:53] Certainly some types of shellfish and the like turfs or things that look like turfs work. One could argue that some of the lobstering rules in Maine are kind of like de facto turfs in some respects,
[46:06] jurisdictionally or legally. In the United States they can be hard because we have both rules about, you know, what's federal water, what's state water.
[46:14] But then within state waters, if you're talking right along coast, you get things like the public trust doctrine which are hostile to the idea of allocating private rights in that space.
[46:24] And so I think that in the United States is the biggest barrier. You know, more broadly the question is, is the nature of the fishery or the type of fish one where kind of regionally or spatially demarcated rights actually fit?
[46:42] Bradley Noble: Thank you so much.
[46:43] So now we're going to shift a little bit to a question. You kind of talked about this briefly, but you know, these catch shares are being implemented in open waters and we know that oceans are kind of a dynamic landscape.
[46:56] So turning now to Rachel, who has a question kind of about designing in those types of environments.
[47:01] Speaker G: Hi, thanks for being here with us today.
[47:04] When designing property based management systems that try to provide long term benefits,
[47:09] how should people account for and incorporate unpredictable factors like climate change and migration patterns?
[47:14] Jonathan Adler: So here, as in a lot of contexts,
[47:17] thinking about management approaches are,
[47:19] what we really need to say is compared to what? Right. So,
[47:22] and so my argument would be is that dynamic market institutions do a better job of accounting for unpredictability and change and uncertainty, and do a better job of accumulating knowledge from dispersed sources than do centralized management systems.
[47:36] And so if we're concerned about fisheries being affected over time by things like climate change or other factors,
[47:44] having ITQs in place is a way of understanding that, because people that accurately predict those changes can benefit from doing so.
[47:54] I do have some other work, I have one or two papers looking at water rights in this context that talk specifically about how water rights are a way of actually accounting for the effect of climate change on water more effectively than other alternatives.
[48:07] And at least with water rights, the IPCC has actually embraced that, that,
[48:12] that as compared to other forms of trying to manage water resource use,
[48:16] pricing and rights as being the best way to do that. But again, the underlying question is compared to what right do we want?
[48:24] Do we think that a centralized management entity is going to do a better job of accumulating that knowledge and making that prediction? Or do we think a more dispersed dynamic systems can be able to do it?
[48:35] And for both theoretical and empirical reasons, I think that the latter does a better job or a less bad job of trying to account for that. That sort of uncertainty,
[48:45] Jonathan, is part.
[48:46] Kim Krawiec: Of that because by sort of changing the incentives,
[48:50] you both alter behavior. But also does it help draw on sort of more localized knowledge of people actually. So what is in brief, could you tell us what the mechanism is a little bit?
[49:01] Jonathan Adler: It's both, I mean,
[49:03] you know, the, what this. And I mentioned Hayek before a Nobel laureate economist and his, his most important insight was about how the, how about how markets and in particular the price system is actually a very powerful knowledge distribution and accumulation system,
[49:21] right? That when prices change,
[49:23] it's off of for resources, it's often because of environmental factors, it's often because of things like climate.
[49:29] If I'm a resource user, I don't have to know that that's why the price changed. All I have to know is that the price changed and that might cause me to economize on that input or to look for substitutes and alternatives.
[49:41] So that's part of what's going on, right? If a particular fishery is under greater stress,
[49:49] that may result in greater scarcity, that may result in a lower tack, that might result in other things that are going to affect prices and cause people to change their behavior.
[49:58] I do think it also aligns incentives with local knowledge, right. Those people who are, who are closest to the resource and have the most knowledge about how things are changing also have incentive to act upon that knowledge.
[50:15] And I think that's very important and that kind of institutionally to have structures that do that.
[50:21] And I mean, you look at fisheries,
[50:25] all kinds of interesting examples of participants in fisheries being aware of changes but having no incentive or ability to do anything in response to those changes. Right. Under traditional regulatory systems,
[50:38] this fisheries heading in a bad direction,
[50:41] but I have no incentive to reduce what I do because there's no right, there are no rights. And my neighbor's not going to Reduce their effort.
[50:52] And if I don't have any kind of right that lasts into the future,
[50:55] worrying about the fishery in 10 years, you know,
[50:59] I'll tell my kids not to go into the same business. I mean, literally. That's actually a quote from a recent interview of Fisher that I heard about how he used to think about these questions.
[51:11] So, you know, it's kind of having institutions that align those incentives so that the knowledge, there's an incentive to accumulate the knowledge and the ability to act upon it. And I think markets tend to do that better than the available alternatives.
[51:23] That doesn't mean they're perfect.
[51:25] Right. It just means that as a. Compared to what they're better able to do that.
[51:30] Kim Krawiec: Great, thanks.
[51:31] Bradley Noble: Yeah, thank you so much, Hazan. That's really, really helpful.
[51:34] So now we only have a couple of questions left and I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to Mason for his.
[51:40] Hi there.
[51:42] So in your paper,
[51:44] you cite this quote that basically says ITQs reduce the number of participants. Is this really a desirable or permissible outcome in a free market?
[51:53] How does,
[51:54] how much does the ITQ system work? Not because it's actually harnessing the free market mechanics of property rights, but because it's a fundamental restriction on free trade.
[52:04] Jonathan Adler: So the restriction on.
[52:06] The fundamental restriction on resource use that ITQs tend to rely upon is the total allowable catch. And as I already discussed, we see the total allowable catch gets enforced and complied with, and more often under IQ systems than under alternatives, because there's actually an incentive to support its enforcement in terms of reducing the number of participants.
[52:26] I mean, that's an empirical observation about what's happened. That it turns out that there are economies of scale, at least in some sorts of fishing, and that having too many boats chasing too few fish is not safe, efficient, or ecologically desirable.
[52:41] And so ITQs have allowed for that rationalization.
[52:45] You know, in terms of the number of participants. I mean, that's something that you, I would argue you have to discover through market processes, just as in any industry. Right.
[52:52] How many computer makers should there be? How many shoemakers should there be? How many diamond merchants should there be?
[52:58] I have no idea.
[52:59] But if you have a dynamic market,
[53:01] that will be discovered over time and it may change over time.
[53:07] As I noted earlier,
[53:08] some ITQs do have limits on concentration because there are social or other reasons why we are concerned about reducing the number of owners too much.
[53:20] And we often adopt those sorts of side constraints on markets.
[53:24] But the reduction in the number of participants is occurring because most US fisheries, insofar as they did not limit or meaningfully limit the number of participants,
[53:35] allowed for more participants than it turned out was efficient. So I mean, that's the way, the way that I would think about it. But that dynamic is actually what we see in markets all the time, right?
[53:46] Sometimes when you have a market in something, the number of participants in that market increases,
[53:51] sometimes it decreases.
[53:52] But we discover that through the market processes.
[53:55] Bradley Noble: Great, thank you so much.
[53:57] And now we're going to have a final question from Gabe.
[54:01] Hello. So my question is that in your paper you frame property based management systems.
[54:06] Jonathan Adler: Like ITQs as forms of property rather.
[54:10] Bradley Noble: Than sometimes them appearing to me as government issued trade instruments or licenses. Could you elaborate on why they should be considered property and treated accordingly?
[54:21] Jonathan Adler: So I mean, I should say under US law, the federal government's position is that ITQs are not property, but are permits,
[54:28] even though they are tradable, even though they are sometimes perpetual.
[54:31] It's not clear that courts agree, at least for purposes of the Due Process Clause. Courts have said no. They are property that are subject to due process guarantees.
[54:40] We don't know whether or not they'd be subject to the Takings clause as property or whether courts would treat them as such.
[54:47] So as a. There's a question of kind of like, as a matter of positive law, how are we characterizing them? Right. The US has been reluctant to treat to call them property, whereas New Zealand is perfectly happy to call them fully truth them as property.
[55:00] I think in terms of the way we think about them and what it is that is valuable about them.
[55:07] We have seen empirically that the more their features look like property and are treated like property,
[55:14] the more powerful they are and the more they, both economically and environmentally, they produce the results that we say we want, right? Which is fisheries to be used efficiently and sustainably,
[55:25] but also in ways that allow us to reduce some of the other ecological consequences of this resource use and deal with other conflicts.
[55:33] I would argue that that empirical result is something that shouldn't surprise us. I mean, I had written some stuff before this empirical work was done saying that we should expect this,
[55:42] not that that was new to me. I mean, I wasn't the originator of that idea. But we now have empirical evidence that shows that the More that the ITQs are defined as or recognized as things that we think of as property,
[55:59] the more effective they've been.
[56:01] And we do see evidence that where fishery participants have reasons to fear expropriation and the like, without compensation that the value of the ITQs is affected and the robustness of their ability to serve these purposes is, is compromised.
[56:19] But it's important to know we're kind of,
[56:21] we want to be thinking about it as a positive matter of positive law. Right. Legally, what are we calling them?
[56:27] And that may affect, you know, certainly administrative law questions. And then kind of qualitatively and descriptively,
[56:34] what are they? And this is kind of a similar to when we were talking about rights systems in indigenous communities. Whether or not the property nomenclature was used,
[56:44] a lot of pre existing management structures look like the potlatch system that some tribes use for salmon. Right.
[56:52] You can describe that in purely property based terms, not as a matter of positive law, just in terms of how those institutions operated.
[57:01] And so this is important. We can be talking about two different things, right? The quality of the underlying institution and then how positive law talks about it.
[57:12] Kim Krawiec: And Jonathan, I take it from your discussion today as well as from your paper that you would prefer where possible that the, that the ITQs look more, more property like. Because that's more effective, right?
[57:27] Jonathan Adler: Yeah. And I've written in a bunch of contexts about why where we use property as a conservation tool,
[57:35] the security of that property is important for that purpose to be obtained. And so, you know, we have good empirical evidence in that regard. With regard to fisheries,
[57:44] the,
[57:45] the empirical evidence isn't as robust in some other contexts, but I've written about that in the context of water rights.
[57:50] Right. So if you have environmental NGOs that say are purchasing in stream rights as a way of conserving salmon, treating those as, as property rights helps the NGOs actually accomplish what they want to accomplish,
[58:03] including the ability to then engage in triage if climate change or something else changes where it is they want to conserve in stream rights. And then I did a paper some years ago on why kilo is bad for the environment, about how very lax rules on eminent domain compromise the ability to use property rights as a conservation tool because it creates uncertainty.
[58:25] And so how much am I going to invest in preserving a landscape or preserving an environmentally important place if I'm a land trust or so on, if I know that my ability to protect against government expropriation is constrained or limited, or that I could be expropriated without even getting compensation,
[58:43] perhaps in some extreme circumstances.
[58:45] So more broadly, I think if we're using property based instruments for these purposes,
[58:50] the more protected they are,
[58:52] the more,
[58:53] the more effective they'll be for that purpose.
[58:55] Kim Krawiec: Great. Well, thank you. Jonathan. Do you have any sort of final things that you want to get out?
[59:03] Jonathan Adler: One thing, I guess I might say a couple things. One, I think that,
[59:08] you know, one of, as I mentioned, one of the points of the paper was that kind of impute, you know, the empirical experience with doing things environmentally matters.
[59:16] And there are all sorts of things that sound like good ideas that aren't once we actually try them in the real world. And that's important.
[59:25] The other thing, I'd just say that. And I may have said this already, but,
[59:29] you know, in a lot of contexts, we're not looking for the perfect solution. We're looking for the least bad one because,
[59:36] you know, our ability to adopt, you know, complicated structures that humans are going to implement is.
[59:42] It's challenging and it's not always satisfying, but that we often have to be thinking about kind of compared to what.
[59:50] Because every system has problematic aspects to it or things that we might not think of as ideal,
[59:58] but it might still be better than what the available alternative is.
[01:00:03] Kim Krawiec: That makes sense. And I think definitely some of the challenges that we discussed today having to do with fish, you know, moving and climates changing and other things, are more general problems, not specific to the it Q Shares.
[01:00:19] And I think, as you pointed out, perhaps they do a better job than the other other types of regulation at addressing those problems. So.
[01:00:26] Jonathan Adler: Right. And then, and you know, this gets into some of the things that Schmitzer article talks about, and there is some work on whaling that, that looks at this as well, which is we have to think very carefully.
[01:00:36] If we're not just talking, you know, most fish, we're generally not talking about resources that. That produce the same visceral response. Right. We're, we're,
[01:00:46] we're generally comfortable talking about fish as resources.
[01:00:49] We're not in the United States particularly comfortable with talking about whales as resources in different parts of the world. Right. There are very different views about that. And so there are contexts where it's very challenging to even think about approaches as the least bad because we have underlying normative commitments that make certain sorts of approaches very problematic or difficult to think about.
[01:01:12] And,
[01:01:13] you know, I find that to make those subjects fascinating and interesting.
[01:01:17] Kim Krawiec: Ha. Yes, that's the subject of this podcast, Jonathan.
[01:01:21] Jonathan Adler: But it is, you know, I mean, I know, like, in the context of whaling,
[01:01:24] there have been periods of time and there are certain whale species where the question is,
[01:01:30] do you want a mechanism that.
[01:01:34] Or management system that treats them as resources but prevents extinction,
[01:01:39] or do you want something that does neither?
[01:01:42] And,
[01:01:43] you know,
[01:01:44] with whales, it looks like that might not actually be the choice we face for most whale species, thankfully, but. But there are species for which that probably is the choice.
[01:01:53] Kim Krawiec: Great. Thank you. Bradley, any last minute thoughts from you?
[01:01:57] Bradley Noble: No. Thank you so much again, Jonathan, for being here. I learned a lot and I'm sure my classmates did as well, so. No, I just really appreciate you're taking the time to be with us today.
[01:02:07] Jonathan Adler: And as they thank you for taking the time, all of you, for taking the time to read the paper, to engage with my work, to ask some very good questions, some important questions,
[01:02:16] I appreciate getting that opportunity to exchange and have the engagement with my work.
[01:02:23] Kim Krawiec: Great. Thanks. Well, we will let you go. Jonathan, thank you so much for doing this.
[01:02:29] Jonathan Adler: My pleasure. It.
