This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 22nd, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Making fishing sustainable in open waters poses a real challenge for fishermen.

There's evidence that the solution is a clearer

delineation of property rights. Jonathan Adler is co-author of the SSRM paper, learning

how to fish, catch shares, and the future of fishery conservation.

We spoke earlier this month.

Well, the problem with Atlantic Cod, like a lot of fisheries,

is that they're overfished.

And in the United States, in many cases, federal

management of fisheries has been tantamount to no meaningful management or at least no effective management.

And more broadly, fisheries are really the best example we have been

been shown to not be very effective at overcoming the tragedy of the

Commons and rarely prevent overfishing and where they do control fishing tend to produce other

consequences which can be bad for the fisheries as well as bad for those who

participate in them.

Okay what have what have been these traditional attempts to limit?

So traditionally what's been done in various regulatory strategies has been to impose limits on the type of gear that can be used,

type of boats that can be used.

These are essentially rules that are trying to mandate in catching fish by making it harder to catch fish.

Some fisheries have adopted catch limits for the fishery as a whole so that when the entire fishery reaches that limit the entire

that it shuts down and the incentive this creates for those who participate in the

...