The New Republic, a publication dating from the original Progressive Movement, recently ran an article with a cute and provocative title, “Aquacalypse Now: The End of Fish.” The author is Daniel Pauly of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia.

Essentially, the article correctly argued three points. First, because fish in the oceans are a common pool resource, they are subject to the tragedy of the commons. Valuable resources with no owner or manager to control takings will be exploited beyond their sustainable yield.

Second, catch technology has greatly improved. This ancient activity has been industrialized. First came onboard refrigeration, then acoustic fish finders, and now GPS systems. Traditional fishing and fisheries face ruin.

Third, the world’s fisheries now operate as a fishing industrial complex. This is an alliance of corporate fishing fleets, lobbyists, scientists, and politicians. The result is “between two and four times as many boats as the annual catch requires, and yet, the funds to ‘build capacity’ keep coming.”

The sorry result of this process is a sequential depletion of the “good” fish, such as cod, flounder, and sole. As the high quality, popular fish were reduced to a small fraction of previous populations, harvesting moved to uglier, smaller fish—many of which were renamed by marketers. Hence, they were rebranded to make them more appealing. The “slimehead” became the delicious orange roughy and the Patagonian toothfish was transformed into the Chilean sea bass.

This is clearly a pathological situation, one driven by politics. Most of the article deals with political forces driving unsustainable, inefficient practices. Each of the sectors acts rationally—but in a short-sighted and collectively inefficient enterprise.

Pauly likens it to a gigantic Ponzi scheme. Distorted science and accounting dominates. Most fishery scientists are government bureaucrats and behave accordingly. Their chief goal “is to protect fisheries and the fishermen they employ.”

This leads to perverse accounting. For example, fish such as the Hudson River sturgeon aren’t counted as overfished once they disappear. Rather, they become a historical note.

Fixing governments is Pauly’s (correct) answer. “[I]t is they who provide the billions of dollars in annual subsidies that allow the fisheries to persist despite the lousy economics of the industries. ...[C]apacity enhancing subsidies must be phased out.”

I don’t know the aquatic analogue of not seeing the forest for the trees—not seeing the fiscal for the fish? While Pauly clearly understands the classic common pool problem of fisheries, he neglects the central problem of policy reform.

From the perspective of those in the “fishery industrial complex,” the budget of the central government is a giant common pool. And people exploit it accordingly. That’s the take home message left out of an informative article in the “progressive” New Republic.

Fortunately, there are constructive answers that apply to far more than fish. Mine is a predatory bureaucracy that preys on the environmental, ethical, and economic problems Pauly describes.

I introduced and described this reform three decades ago. The published piece was received merely as an intellectual curiosity. We were rich then. When the situation becomes sufficiently dire, perhaps it will be taken seriously.