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North Atlantic Cod Collapse
The <em>canonical cautionary tale</em> of efficiency-maximizing management — sophisticated models, impressive metrics, total collapse in 1992.
The North Atlantic cod fishery was managed for decades under maximum sustainable yield principles — the efficiency objective applied to marine resource management. The management was sophisticated. The models were detailed. The harvest levels were calibrated. By every metric the management system tracked, the fishery was performing well. In the early 1990s, the cod population collapsed — not declined, collapsed — to approximately one percent of historical levels. The fishery was closed in 1992. Thirty years later, it has not recovered. The collapse is the canonical demonstration of how optimization purchases efficiency at the cost of resilience, and the cost comes due all at once.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The management regime assumed conditions would remain within the range the models specified. The models did not account for the possibility that the system could shift to a qualitatively different state — a state in which the cod population was too small to sustain itself, its ecological niche was colonized by other species, and the conditions for recovery no longer existed.
The shift was a regime shift