So what happened during this simulation you just took? Most likely you started off with profitable fishing seasons with increasing revenues and profits and you invested - you could invest at least part of those profits in purchasing new ships and things were doing OK, in fact quite well. Until a certain point, you probably have experienced a rapid worsening of the situation, not only the fishing stock are reduced, but actually the value of the ship dramatically drops and essentially revenues and profits and your wealth disappeared very rapidly, right? So essentially you experience this boom and bust in the sector that you are working in the fishing sector. So ask yourselves why this happened? There are essentially two main reasons. The first one has to do with the complexity in understanding the systemic conditions, the fact that your decisions were replicated, were same or similar to those of many other fishers in the same system, and so it's very difficult to understand what is it that might happen to the system when all the actors act in a certain way. And in particular in this case, the failure to understand that by acting together in essentially maximizing the fishing quantity, essentially there was a very rapid over-exploitation of the
common resource and the problem of essentially running out of the common resource, because the reproduction - the capacity of nature to reproduce - obviously was surpassed. The second problem though, was related to the functioning of the market,
the financial market, the valuation of the ships for example. Markets amplify both the positive and the negative consequences of collective action, and while things go very very well and increasingly well when the commitments and the prices and the profits are there at the same time, things can spiral down when the first fishers - it might be you - actually start anticipating that we're getting close to the limits. Sometimes those limits can be psychological, right? And that's where the boom and bust, combining the two issues, are produced. This is often referred to as the 'tragedy of commons', essentially the fact that in many situations, individuals that pursue their own self interest end up damaging the common resources that actually are at the basis of their own well-being and the well-being of others. This, if you want, blends the problem of short-termism, right, the lack of long term thinking, with the problem of lack of systemic thinking. Essentially the fact that a business focusing on the immediate profit realization ends up actually hurting its
own capacity to produce, both economic and non-economic value for the long term. And this is not only due to the destruction of natural resources, but it can be also, because of the damages that it might cause, to the social fabrics of the communities in which it operates.