George Monbiot Seems Remarkably Ignorant

Especially for one telling us all what to do

So bluefin tuna are to be seen off Dartmouth these days. Actually, George is looking at them from around and about the house I was born into. Which is, I think, a certain fun. Sadly, it’s the only fun we do get here as George is also massively ignorant on the subject he wants to tell us all about. Which, when you’re trying to tell everyone else what to do isn’t a good way to start - ignorance just isn’t a good way to start designing policy or even a reaction to the world.

You might wonder why an industry would destroy the wildlife – I beg your pardon, “seafood” – on which it depends. But this is to misunderstand the nature of capital. What counts is not the reproductive rate of fish, but the reproductive rate of money. You exploit a resource as quickly as possible, extract what you can until it collapses, then invest your profits elsewhere. This is the strategy Friedrich Hayek, godfather of the doctrine that dominates our lives – neoliberalism – championed in his book The Constitution of Liberty.

Sorry about this but this really is idiocy. Because the reproductive rate of money is maximised by having more fish in the ocean. This has actually been tested, the science done, the result is in.

As background the Tragedy of the Commons from Garrett Hardin. If we’ve an open access - Marxian access - resource then that’s just fine. Up and until the demand on that resource is greater than the reproduction capacity of the resource. At that point we’ve got to have some limit upon who and how much has access to the resource. Because if we don’t then the incentives are: “You exploit a resource as quickly as possible, extract what you can until it collapses,”

That’s, you know, pretty obvious.

Hardin goes on to say that we can have government limits - socialist in his words - or private property - capitalist - as solutions. Which works better is dependent upon the specifics of the resource in question.

No, Elinor Ostrom did not disprove Hardin. She showed that self-organisation among human communities can also do the job. But, also, that such self-organisation - in itself a fairly Hayekian point - fails in human communities above a certain size. Two or three thousands folk sorta size - about the sorta size where social pressures and disapproval still have power.

OK, so which is better, government or capitalism in fish stocks? Immediately offshore fisheries probably Ostrom in fact. When there’re 20 folk fishing 50 yards offshore then general agreement among them probably does work. I’ve seen an entirely self-organising, lasted for centuries so far, system for clam fishing for example behind one of the barrier islands in the Algarve. OK, great.

No one looking at the Common Fisheries Policy is going to say government has done a great job. And George is quite right to raise the middle finger to those cretins.

But he’s claiming that it’s capitalism causing the overfishing. Nope. Because we rarely have a capitalist solution to the Commons Problem in fisheries.

Except where we do that is. There are a few fisheries where we’ve moved to ITQs. Individual Transferrable Quotas. The fishermen own the right to the fish stock - it’s property, mortgageable, inheritable, like a farmer with fields. And this works.

Why does it work? Because, as it turns out, the profitable level of a fish stock is above the sustainable level. More fish around, less diesel and time used to catch enough to feed the market. Profits are thus maximised at stock levels substantially above sustainable levels. That means more fish to gawp at while maximising profits.

Or, alternatively, George Monbiot has got the neoliberal capitalist attitude to fisheries entirely and wholly the wrong way around. The reproductive rate of money, within that neoliberal capitalism, is more fish in the sea than there are currently. Therefore, having neoliberal capitalism running the fisheries (some to many fisheries perhaps not all) would increase the number of fish to gawp at. Exactly and precisely the opposite of what George is claiming.

The problem is about George. For someone who keeps insisting that he’s just critiquing the neolberal capitalist attitide to the environment he knows fuck all about the neoliberal capitalist attitude toward the environment.

But then that’s such a strange thing in public intellectuals, isn’t it? Ignorance?