Legally induced technical regress in the Washington salmon fishery

Abstract

The history of the Washington salmon fishery is a legal and economic horror story. When the whites first encountered the flourishing aboriginal fishery, they failed to recognize the virtues of its technical and, in a certain sense, legal organization. Determined to transform into private wealth an immensely valuable natural resource, they rushed to appropriate the salmon fishery and threatened its survival. The state's voters, legislators, and appointed managers of the fishery, where the salmon ostensibly “belonged” to all the citizens of Washington collectively, would not permit outright destruction of the resource. But their response to the threat of overfishing was neither to limit entry into the fishery nor to create and enforce a private property right in it, something the Indians had approximated before the advent of the whites. Rather, the state's solution was to limit the harvest by penalizing or prohibiting the more productive harvesting techniques. In the Washington fishery today fewer than 10,000 commercial fishermen, aided by many millions of dollars' worth of fishing gear, harvest about 6 million salmon annually. Before World War I a similar number of men, working with much less than the modern amount of capital, normally harvested three to four times more salmon each year. Thus, commercial fishing productivity is now only a small fraction of what it was 70 years ago. This technical regress did not have to happen; in no sense was it inexorable.

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