concept

Bioeconomics

The study of what happens when a biological population obeys biological law and market law at the same time. The basic framework is simple enough: the population grows logistically on its own, revenue rises with both price and remaining abundance, and cost rises with effort expended. From that fall three different stock levels — the one giving the highest biological yield, the one an open market settles at when profit runs out, and the one a sole owner calculates as most advantageous. Those three numbers do not coincide, and the gaps between them explain much of the history of living-resource extraction on Earth, including its failures.