INTRODUCTION 



It became clear early in this inquiry that any treatment of the economics of 

 the fisheries of North Carolina, a small part of those of the whole country, 

 was bound to be superficial and of little value. Viewed in small scale, locally, 

 and for short periods of time, and dominated by the uncertainties of weather, 

 erratic markets, and fisherman's luck, the fisheries appear to be capricious and 

 unpredictable. Yet when viewed statistically in larger perspective of time and 

 place, regularities or patterns of economic behavior might be expected to 

 appear, as they do in such other fields as insurance, trade and commerce, 

 wherein ''large scale order rests on small scale disorder." 



Public thinking and official policy-making in the fisheries are usually based 

 on the assumption that purely biological factors of abundance of fish, or even 

 of particular species of fish, are the main if not the only determinant of the 

 welfare of the fishing community. Since the sole motive of all persons engaged 

 in the commercial fisheries is self-interest in making a living and making 

 money, and the magnitude of production and sales is determined by how 

 much fish the public will buy, of what kind and at what price, and sihce 

 demand by consumers, expressed by prices, must inevitably react on fisher- 

 men in their choices of what to catch, or try to catch, when and where, it 

 seems obvious that economic determinants have an importance and deserve 

 consideration at least equal to those of biological nature. The two sets of 

 determinants, economic and biological, act, react, and interact upon each 

 other so as to set the pattern of the whole, and a picture based solely on 

 biological considerations is bound to be one-sided and often erroneous. 



As example, the decrease in abundance of Great Lakes fishes as indicated 

 by the statistics of catch of all and of particular fishes over a series of years 

 has created the impression in the United States and Canada that the Great 

 Lakes fisheries are in a serious state of depletion and threaten to become 

 worse, or exhausted, and to somebody's disadvantage, if measures of control 

 are not put into effect — an impression which seems well justified if biological 

 factors alone are considered and such economic factors as money values, cost 

 of catching, prices, numbers of fishermen engaged, etc., are disregarded. 



Quite a different picture is presented when economic factors are con- 

 sidered. Our analysis of the data indicates, to the extent that the primary data 

 used can be relied upon, the following facts: that while the total catch by 

 United States fisheries in the Lakes is somewhat (15 per cent) less now (avg. 

 1921-1940) than formerly (avg. 1887-1908), the number of fishermen de- 



289 



