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.