Your point was...?

The "tragedy of the commons", sort of deal. Freakonomics talks about it.

It would be better (according to the book, to the best of my memory), to legalize ivory and elephant ranching, as it provides people with actual, personal, benefit into insuring elephant survival. If they're MY elephants, I take care of them. If they're NOBODY's elephants, I talk a lot at parties about how "somebody should save the elephants", but then I forget about it.

I think the parents argument was similar.

Starting with Kahneman and Tversky, a lot (most?) of interesting work in economics over the last 30 years has been in revising the standard rational actor model to incorporate all of the irrationalities which are reliably exhibited by we homo sapiens.

I have never liked elitist thinking, which is why I vote the way I do.

With regard to elephants in particular, I give you buffalo, as an example of an endangered herd animal which is no longer endangered, and in fact, is available for your next BBQ at the local grocery store. That's not intelligentsia, elitist theory, that's history.

As for whales, or fish, things become more tricky, if you can't put a fence around them and say "these are mine".

I don't particularly like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but calling it elitist and voting for people who promise to ignore it really wouldn't accomplish much.

I agree that empirical trumps theory. We're on the same page there. You seem to be confused what empirical means.

    And there is plenty of evidence that humans are myopic, 
    irrational beings.

It works fine as long as you have single ownership by a relatively rational person. hyperbovine pointed out the problem with the latter assumption; but the former is similarly problematic.

On the other hand, once ownership passes to a collective entity with diffuse responsibility (e.g., a corporation), it's easy to end up in a situation where no single individual actually has an incentive to ensure the long-term benefit of the collective, and by extension the elephant's survival.

A simple scenario along those lines is low-level employees paid unrelated to their impact on the company, high-level employees rewarded in response to short-term results, and a large number of small shareholders, none of whom have a large enough stake to justify time spent monitoring the company's actions directly.

Privatization as a cure-all for tragedy of the commons is an idea with the rough shape of a solution, but oversimplified into something barely sensible enough to be called "wrong".

Actual economics tends to be a bit more complicated than what popular presentations suggest, or what people with quasi-religious notions about how the economy should work wish.

But these things, when they happen, are recognized as problems and eventually corrected -- at least enough so that most large corporations don't malfunction in asset-obliterating ways. (Even if you think corporations amorally destroy others assets via negative externalities, they do a reasonable job of protecting their own assets -- so much so that even labor unions and left-wing wealthy people keep most of their wealth in corporate shares.)

That is, corporations malfunction plenty, but not often catastrophically, and they remain pretty good at holding and efficiently exploiting assets without destroying them.

Compare that to the case of an unowned, depletable commons that's exploited my many individuals and corporations. If you think one corporation could tend to poor management, then the 'commons' case has no hope: every participant, including amongst them flawed corporations with short-sighted managers, can only profit by racing others to use the pool before it's inevitably gone.

A government or regulatory agency could theoretically act the part of a single rational long-term-perspective owner -- but those multiparty hierarchical institutions have the same flaws you've pointed out in corporations. In my observations, they're even worse -- larger, with responsibility even more diffuse, and the 'shareholders' even more distracted and unable to hold staff accountable for egregious failures to protect stewarded assets.

I'm far from certain monopoly ownership would work but it needs to be compared against what's actually happening, and against what's actually possible with unowned/government-driven approaches. It's not enough to just note, corporations sometimes malfunction and ownership might also result in overfishing.

But yes, the eventual reality check of competition, stock prices, &c. is why market-based economies work out better in the end. But that's only a statistical guarantee, and doesn't necessarily help with specific cases, particularly when destruction is somewhat irrevocable, as with depleting wildlife populations. When a massively dysfunctional corporation couldn't really do any permanent damage, giving the market free rein is probably the best choice for average expected outcome.

And actually, in some ways regulatory agencies have more incentive to "protect" whatever it is they exist for--they wouldn't have jobs otherwise, and there's less likely to be the destructive short-term incentives pushing in the other direction. The flip side is that they also have incentive to complicate, prolong and expand the scope of whatever problem they're supposed to be "regulating"--eventually "protecting" it to the point where no one wants anything to do with it because of the mountains of paperwork involved.

As an aside, this is why unchecked monopolies are so dangerous--no competition means no reality checks and nothing to keep the company from going off the dysfunctional deep end.

The obvious solution is for fish farms to start raising Omega-3 production, but the fact that the fish in the ocean are unowned means it's still cheaper to overfish, and the only time that won't be true is immediately before the ecological disaster (assuming it is one) of menhaden extinction.

As long as there continues to be some means of profit from the resource (in forestry, replanted pine tree farms for wood pulp where formerly redwood was harvested; in fisheries, aquaculture or harvest of other species) there is little or no incentive for the private firm to preserve the original resource.

Here, with menhaden, as long as the private firm can continue to harvest something profitable they will have no incentive not to overfish the menhaden till the stock collapses.

The reason is simple; the resource that is publicly beneficial is live menhaden, filtering the water by consuming algae. The resource that is privately beneficial is dead menhaden, pressed for oil and ground for animal feed. This is why public protection is sometimes necessary; because the public good cannot always be made to coincide with private profitability.

2. Fish farming is unlikely to be the answer for the simple reason that farm raised fish are not fed a diet consisting mostly of algae (the primary source of the sought after omega-3 fatty acids). Farm raised fish are, as a result, lower in these beneficial fats than their wild counterparts.

In such a case, the fact that someone else didn't buy the land with the forests on it suggests that this was the most efficient use of the old-growth forest and the land it was on. That is, just because you or I find the solution unpleasant doesn't mean that it's not the efficient outcome. If it is an inefficient outcome, then there should be a market solution which makes the implementer lots of money.

Now this is rather circular reasoning. The tragedy of the commons relies on multiple persons. The whole theory of the tragedy of the commons says, that since you are not sure how much the other person will use the resource, you will use it as much as possible (even if it results in destruction of the resource). The whole reasoning falls apart if there is only one person using it. You must be working from a completely different definition of "tragedy of the commons."

It read like the resource was still public. I wonder though, if we can consider it a "Tragedy of the Commons" when a single player is doing most of the (alleged) damage to this resource.