Book review: The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter Leeson.
This is an interesting history of early eighteenth century pirates with an economist’s insights into what influenced them to have institutions such as democracy and to be in many ways pleasanter to serve on than commercial or military ships of the same time.
He has a fairly open bias toward portraying pirates favorably. I sometimes wondered whether there’s enough evidence to support his sometimes surprising conclusions. He makes plausible claims to be getting his historical information from the relevant experts, but without careful checking I can’t tell whether he has slanted his story to make it more entertaining.
He describes some good reasons why “workers’ democracy” doesn’t work as well in modern corporations as it did on pirate ships. But he is too willing to accept the observed absence of corporate democracy as evidence of its inefficiency. I can easily imagine that managers grab more power than is good for the company, and that principal-agent problems let them get away with it (pirates’ relations with the law made it easier for them to remedy this via mutiny). Also, he overstates the claim that “workers don’t have the finances required” for worker ownership of corporations. There are plenty of companies with low enough capital requirements for this to be unimportant. The big difference I see between modern corporations and pirate ships is that pirates had strong reasons to stick together until their venture got enough loot for them to all retire at once and divide the results. Employees in modern corporations want much more flexibility in when they leave the company, which creates complications for workers’ democracy or for the employee who wants to leave however it is handled.
One analysis whose absence disappointed me was whether the long-term benefits to joining a pirate ship were better than those of commercial or military ships. What fraction of pirates retired wealthy? How many of them were fooled by a temporary shortage of law enforcement into adopting a career with an abnormally high death rate once governments increased law enforcement?
He occasionally digresses into standard economics rants that have no relevance to pirates, such as the two pages on lobbyist rent-seeking.
Do they cover the issue of the effects of piracy on marine trade? I.e. how much is trade reduced when piracy is completely uncontrolled, versus when merchants control piracy themselves (through arming their own fleets, contracting to form convoys, etc.), vs. when piracy is controlled by tax-funded navies?
He doesn’t say much about the effects on trade. I doubt there was much change in the degree to which the merchants armed themselves. The big changes were due to the naval effort to control pirates, but those are inversely correlated with war, and it would be hard to seperate out the effects of war vs peace on trade.
He does analyze the incentives merchant ships have to resist pirates (hint: the crew has different incentives from the owners).