GUEST SPEAKER: I'm going to present to you some important criteria by which to evaluate the legislative proposals in the legislative hearings. And I'm going to present them in my suggested order of importance of the criteria.
So number one, I would suggest the most important criterion is science. So ask yourself, does the question used to evaluate the proposals, ask yourself does the proposal accord with valid research on maintaining fish populations?
Number two, I would suggest the second most important criterion is policy design and economics. Ask yourself does the proposal include a well-designed policy? And number three, I would suggest that the third most important criterion is politics. Ask yourself does the proposal have support and is it likely to pass, or can you make it likely to pass?
Values and management are two other criteria that I have not ranked in the top three for this issue. If you take a look at the handout on the board, you'll see why I haven't ranked management as the most important criterion for this issue. We already have the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which is the federal legislation used to manage fisheries.
And since it was revised in 1996 you can see the top map shows-- with the red circles, all the red circles are fish populations that have recovered in the New England states, your home constituency since 2000. And the graph on the bottom shows an overall decline in fish stocks that are having measured as overfished.
So this isn't primarily a management problem because we-- there will doubtless be proposals with management problems, but for this issue, we at least know that management is possible and we know that we have some success in managing this issue federally. So we have some organizational capacity that we're already aware of.
So now I'm going to go over the three top criteria and why I've ranked them that way with some important questions to use to gather information during the hearings for each of the criteria. So number one is science. Science I've ranked as the most important criterion for this issue because science is our best tool for understanding the natural world, which includes fisheries.
Also, it's very important for this issue because as you may know, there seems to be legitimate disagreement about the science on this issue. So it's very important for you to use the hearings to assess-- you're going to have to take a stand on which of the science that's presented to you you think is valid. And that's going to underpin how do you assess the other criteria.
You're going to have to take a stand on science in order to decide which legislation to support. You can't really assess the policy design for example, without knowing what science you think is legitimate. Some really important questions to ask yourself about the science during the hearings, some important information to gather, it's important to find out who funded the research, each research that's presented to you.
Also whether the research was published in a peer-reviewed journal. Peer-reviewed research has been vetted by other scientists and has had criticism from other scientists who weren't involved in it. Non-peer reviewed research there's no guarantee of that.
Ask yourself, is there broad agreement among other scientists with this research or is this research presented by one or two scientists and the rest of the scientific community disagrees with them?
And in general, just ask yourself when a proposal presents a method of management, what ways of management, of fisheries management, have data to show that they're actually effective.
So going on to number two, policy design and economics. That's also a very important criterion because any policies effectiveness is going to be dependent on it being well-designed. And the economic costs of each proposal are real both to your constituents and to the federal government. And so far, we have very little information about the different proposals policy designs. So it is important to gather information during the hearings about the policy design.
So some important questions to ask yourself are what are the economic costs associated with each proposal both to your constituents, both short-term cost and long-term costs both to our state and to the federal government? What are the economic benefits of each proposal again, both short-term and long-term?
It's important to ask yourself of the proposals which proposal is the least coercive while still being effective? So if we can incorporate some aspects of self-organization of the fisheries industry that will often make it a less coercive policy.
Also from the policy design standpoint, an important question to try to suss out from the hearings is, are the fisheries likely to comply with the policy? Who's going to make them comply if they don't? Who will implement the policy?
LAWRENCE SUSSKIND: 20 seconds.
GUEST SPEAKER: And moving on to politics, politics is important because your re-election is important and because the hearings are an important time to gather political information.
LAWRENCE SUSSKIND: Thank you, very much. Good. Good job.