I really wanted to like this more, but for the most part it was a collection of warmed-over Gladwellian "entrepreneurship" and "innovation" clichés about slightly unorthodox ways to, in the end, make a boatload of money. So much of this is the modern state of neoliberalism in a nutshell, from the guy whose nonprofit employer fired him for trying to make money off of indigenous rainforest-dwelling tribes' products to the woman whose career was left in tatters after she was helping recently-released convicts acclimatize to society and ended up in relationships with several of them.

That being said, the chapter on intellectual property - "Copy" - was better than most, if not only because it offered some actual transgressions in the form of subverting IP law (which truly is a deterrent to much actual innovation).

At least this was fairly short. ( )

I met Alexa back at a New Economy Summit in Asheville in 2012, during her time researching this book.

Although I find the concept fascinating, I was not as enthusiastic about the execution of this book. It feels to me as though it bounces around too much between various "misfit" stories with out going that far in-depth on any one, and lacking much of a common thread. The structure of this book was loosely organized around five attributes of misfits: hustle, copy, hack, provoke, and pivot. In some ways, I feel as though the ways in which the formal economy can learn from the informal economy—"pirates, hackers, & gangsters"—is self evident. I was hoping that I would hear some startling stories of misfits I'd never conceived of before, but none of the case studies had this hook to them for me.

Certainly, we do fail to learn from and integrate misfits. But this book doesn't get very far as far as practical cultural hacks to get the most out of misfits [which is something our world direly needs].

I met Alexa back at a New Economy Summit in Asheville in 2012, during her time researching this book.

Although I find the concept fascinating, I was not as enthusiastic about the execution of this book. It feels to me as though it bounces around too much between various "misfit" stories with out going that far in-depth on any one, and lacking much of a common thread. The structure of this book was loosely organized around five attributes of misfits: hustle, copy, hack, provoke, and pivot. In some ways, I feel as though the ways in which the formal economy can learn from the informal economy—"pirates, hackers, & gangsters"—is self evident. I was hoping that I would hear some startling stories of misfits I'd never conceived of before, but none of the case studies had this hook to them for me.

Certainly, we do fail to learn from and integrate misfits. But this book doesn't get very far as far as practical cultural hacks to get the most out of misfits [which is something our world direly needs].

Also, the book never gets to a deeper critique of capitalism and the entrepreneurial economy as it stands. What use will it be if the formal economy just gains strength from learning about misfits? The formal economy needs to pivot itself—away from growth-based economics and towards sustainability [in the original sense] and regeneration—and that is totally absent from this book. ( )

In het bijzondere boek De buitenbeentjeseconomie, de vertaling van The Misfit Economy: Lessons in Creativity from Pirates, Hackers, Gangsters and Other Informal Entrepreneurs, van Alexa Clay en Kyra Maya Phillips eens niet de uitgemolken succesverhalen van Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jack Welch of Warren Buffet. Van gekken, dwarsliggers en omdenkers kunnen we evengoed veel leren. De auteurs deden onderzoek en interviewden gangsters, Somalische piraten, kamelenmelkers onder Amish, Mennonieten en moslims en bijvoorbeeld ethische hackers, sommige volstrekt legaal, anderen in het grijze gebied tussen boven- en onderwereld, weer anderen illegaal.

Vijf manieren om te ondernemen buiten de gevestigde orde worden belicht in het 2e deel. Sjacheren: van niets iets maken, vindingrijk zijn met je poten in de modder. Het boek schetst mooie voorbeelden als gedetineerden die na hun straf opgedane vaardigheden inzetten om anderen op het rechte pad te helpen. Omdenken, iets ontlenen aan de ene wereld en de volgende een nieuw perspectief aanbieden. Het namaken, waarop Chinezen patent hebben en daarmee menig patenthouder het leven zuur maken. Heeft het registreren en uitmelken van patenten überhaupt nog levensvatbaarheid, of laat je het los om vrij baan aan innovatie te geven? Dan het hacken, het aangaan van een intellectuele uitdaging om creatief grenzen teniet te doen of te ontwijken. Van Anonymous tot hedendaagse hackatons bij grote bedrijven.

Als vierde het provoceren, zoals een tiener die zijn droom 'eens niet naar school hoeven' uitwerkt tot een serieus huisonderwijs gebaseerd op een just in time aanleren van kennis en vaardigheden. Of Jules Verne die in de 19e eeuw de reis naar de maan, of onder zee visualiseerde en menig astronoom of marinier sindsdien inspireerde. Als laatste het bijsturen, het in beweging zetten van bestaande organisaties, verzetten van bakens en ontdekken, dat de reis belangrijker is dan het (bewegende) einddoel.

De Nederlandse vertaling is houterig, soms zonder inzicht in de context toegepast. Het levert een overdaad aan anglicismen op. Boektitels konden beter in het Engels gehouden worden. ( )

Free review copy. I wanted this to be an interesting book and not a bunch of business book platitudes. Oh well. Some pirates and lawbreakers are very successful! Unfortunately the book doesn’t have any theories about when breaking the rules/laws leads to success and when it leads to failure (indeed, the authors talk to a Somali pirate in a jail cell and a former convict who served a number of years for killing someone, and discuss what they say as if it were exactly what the non-caught people say). Perhaps the ultimate expression of the book’s failure to define or interrogate its terms is this sentence: “A significant majority of the misfits we spoke with (aside from the con artists, of course) had this commitment to authenticity in common.” Sadly, I think they’re serious.

This is perhaps the apotheosis of using “disruption” as a buzzword to cover anything that might someday make money, or at least anything that takes money from other people. The authors even say that hierarchy is bad, then discuss successful pirate endeavors with elaborate chains of command. And no, attacking ships with guns does not “build market opportunity where one does not seem to exist.” Actually, the Somali pirate story is the most interesting part in that it’s clear that the failure of the Somali state to keep poachers (also disruptors!) away from fishermen is what drove some of them into piracy in the first place. “[T]hey recognized an opportunity and seized it”—along with ships’ cargo; one interviewee describes how awful it was to board ships where people were crying and begging for their lives. If we wanted to draw lessons from the Somali pirates, rather than looking to lawbreakers, we might fruitfully look to law as the foundation for innovation and productive success instead of armed theft.

In one sense the book represents so much immersion in neoliberalism that the authors don’t even notice—embrace uncertainty, improvisation, living in the cracks, they say. Another feature of the US-based examples of successful rulebreaking is how much they were usually dependent on white privilege—some people can get away with moving fast and breaking things; others have to worry more about ending up shot for either. They cite research studying entrepreneurs (defined as those who engaged in inventive or risky activity, not just people self-employed in a known line of business) that found that a key characteristic associated with a successful entrepreneur was juvenile delinquency. But of course Bill Gates’ juvenile lawbreaking didn’t land him in jail. In this vein, you could think of today’s school-to-prison pipeline for black Americans as a perfect technique to strip minority communities of many potential go-getters—it couldn’t work better if we’d planned it that way. Now that would’ve been an interesting book, but unfortunately the authors didn’t write that book.

In a get-off-my-side moment, the authors condemn the patent system for helping sustain monopolies. Points, though, for giving me an example of a sentence where the Oxford comma provides no succor: “Pirate gangs also employ pimps to service gangs with prostitutes, lawyers, and banknote checkers who use machines to detect fake money.” ( )

The central conceit of The Misfit Economy seems to be that those who have any sort of spark of creativity or business drive are misfits. Anyone who sees a solution where no one else does is a misfit. It’s a good thing, because these misfits sometimes implement innovation, create jobs and new products. The authors show this has always been the case, so there’s nothing special about today. They give a myriad of examples of people all over the world following their passions and talents. Most weren’t driven; they stumbled onto their calling doing something else or nothing at all. So why call them misfits? They seem pretty typical humans: curious, passionate, chance takers. They have nothing in common, and there is nothing we can learn from their combined experience because they are all entirely different. There is no Misfit Economy.

The word misfit has a negative connotation; they did not fit the corporate culture. They could not conform to the rules. There was a conflict either with the culture or within themselves. But the people profiled rarely showed any of that. They came to a new calling and followed that path, sometimes without even leaving the company.

It’s hard to see why this merits a book. The way they wrote it is flat and detached, a series of unconnected stories. It doesn’t build to anything, and has no sense of drama or excitement. Nor does it go very deep. No secrets are uncovered. The various players are not outrageous characters, colorful rogues or slick intellectuals. They are just people scrambling to make a living or achieve some level of satisfaction with their lives. No one stands out as particularly memorable. This is hardly the Misfits Hall of Fame. At just 155 pages, it changes nothing and leaves no impression. The book concludes with the thought that world is coming to accept the unconventional.

The Misfit Economy would have been better if it had been written by misfits.

David Wineberg ( )