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The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics Of Pirates (2009)

by Peter T. Leeson(Favorite Author)

3.54 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0691137471 (ISBN13: 9780691137476)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Princeton University Press

review 1: Floating somewhere between three and five stars. I found this book delightful, but problematic--but also intriguingly problematic. Your tolerance for it may depend on how much tolerance you have for its tendency towards the economist-libertarian and for the cutesy. So, a "Management Seminar" offered by Blackbeard the pirate may not be your cup of tea--I was fine with it, if only in the sense that it made me happy not to have gone to business school. Leeson helped me to specify something present in all pirate literature: that it rests on a fantasy that the "externalities" of pirate communities to non-pirate communities are pretty much ignored, most of the time. So pirates look like whatever the author's fantasy of a rational person is--and that rationale is usually economic... more--so long as you ignore what they actually do to other people. This lines up beautifully with the Lockean account of capital: if all of labor and capital can be reduced to plucking acorns from trees, or to rationally-motivated pirates stealing only from ships' owners, then piracy (as a sort of fantastic/mundane stand-in for labor) can be made into an activity that is at once violent and economically rational. This book helped me to see why pirates are so integral to what might be thought of as the literature of capitalism, as they seem to exist in this floating state of pure economic rationality, unhindered by goodness or other ethical concerns. I'm starting to feel that the best way to get people to think outside of (or at least occasionally alongside) market paradigms is to just get them to read books like this, and indeed all of the documentary history of the growth of economics, and get them to notice how weird some of the prevailing assumptions are.
review 2: I wanted to like this book so badly. I heard an interview with the author that was absolutely fascinating. He looked at historical piracy through an economic lens and debunked much of the lore.Unfortunately, the book is a rough read. The chapters read like a series of facts (or statements) rather than a cohesive essay. Many of these facts contradict one another and the author makes little attempt to add color. In addition, some statements are used many times throughout the book -- which got a bit old.I gave the book several tries in print form and just couldn't get flowing. So, I then switched to the audio book. Unfortunately, the audio book's narrator was beyond dry and the book was a struggle. However, I muscled through the book. Really interesting content, but not written well. less

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