[anchpop]

It's an amusing story I've seen a few times, but I think it's disconnected from reality and strangely nobody ever discusses how

At his current margins, the fisherman's business is basically entirely fixed-cost. He needs to pay for a house and food for his family and new guitar strings when one breaks and that's it, in terms of expenses bait or whatever is probably next to negligible (I know nothing about fishing)

So he's vulnerable to someone spending twice as much time fishing as he does, lowering the commodity price of fish to 1/2 his current rate, so they'd be able to sell at 3/4ths his rate to undercut him while making a solid profit. Maybe the demand is there that it wouldn't affect our main character, but it's kind of an unstable equilibrium. If all his competitors decided that they actually wanted some of that profit and did full work days rather than only fishing for "a little while", the competition and increased supply would mean cheaper fish for everyone else in town but they'd end up stuck all working longer hours for not actually that much more money (since they'd have to compete with each other they probably couldn't all sustain 33% margins)

What the harvard MBA should have told the fisherman is that his lifestyle was at risk and he needs to form a cartel with all the other fishermen to not work more than a few hours a day (normally he would also have to worry about imports from elsewhere, but maybe transportation costs and a lax regulatory environment in the fisherman's town allow him to undercut external competitors without having to work too hard)

(One interpretation is that their culture is already forming that "cartel" as none of them want to or see a reason to work more. But they're still vulnerable to people from outside the villiage who don't share that view coming in and eating their lunch.)