Will I love The Invisible Hook?

Whether you instantly recognize this book as economics depends on whether you internalized the last quarter of Kirzner’s The Economic Point of View. Economics is not merely about human behavior in one narrow domain (say, traditional markets using traditional money).

Wherever human beings make choices, economics applies. Read this book, and marvel as your economic intuition expands with every page. 

Given the above books, one might ask: Can free markets and unchecked self-interest ever work for the social good? Leeson offers an answer in the affirmative: Yes! For pirates! This delightful and readable book applies Adam Smith's metaphor of the invisible hand to pirate life at the turn of the 18th century, arguing that purely profit-seeking motives led pirates to adopt norms of cooperation, democratic governance, and (sometimes) racial equality. Recent events like the subprime mortgage crisis led many to argue that our government's failure to check risky profit-seeking behavior led to market collapse. This book provides an interesting complement… show more.