A Few Thoughts on Tyler Cowen's New Book

[Another guest post from Charles Johnson, one of our summer interns.]

Tyler Cowen's new book, Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World is one of the more engaging books I've read recently. It rests comfortably in the niche between books about behavorial economics and social technology. Careful readers of this blog will note that Tyler Cowen was a participant in the Kauffman Economic Bloggers Forum in February. We prepared videos of the participants. You can see him on video discussing blogging here. Cowen is a seasoned blogger at his blog, Marginal Revolution. 

The thesis for Cowen's new book is that technology is allowing many of us to become autistic-like in our processing of information and consumption of entertainment and culture. We've moved into a "bits" culture where we can constantly be orienting and re-orienting our culture. This remix culture is evident in everything from iPods, to blogs, to delicious, and to Facebook. In a way, I took this part of the book as a kind of demonstration that we can all become renaissance men because the costs of such renaissance have plummeted. We don't need Jefferson's library when we have a worldwide web with easy information at our fingertips. 

Cowen's book can be read as an appeal, that, for the sake of society at large and the individuals in particular, we should embrace neurodiversity, or the different ways in which our brain is wired. (You can hear him discuss the book in an interview with John J. Miller of National Review here.)

I was struck by this paragraph about autism and the foundation of companies. We know that dyslexics tend to have high rates of firm creation. (See here for more details). But what about autistics? 

Here Cowen points to the work of Simon Baron-Cohen, who is a researcher of autism at the University of Cambridge. (Simon Baron-Cohen created an AQ test -- or autism quotient -- that you can take here to see if you might have autistic-like tendencies.) Cowen recounts that Baron-Cohen believes that there may be a lot more autistic high achievers than most people realize. On p. 24-25, Cowen writes about some of these high achievers. [The bolding is mine.] 

Craig Newmark, founder of the web forum Craigslist, has written on his blog that his history as a "recovering nerd" is connected to Asperger's. It is perhaps no accident that autistics are known for their attachment to lists as a means of processing, recording, and ordering knowledge. Bram Cohen, creator and former CEO of BitTorrent, also describes himself in terms of Asperger's syndrome. He founded the company at age twenty-nine and BitTorrent has been a pioneer in exchanging digital information over the web; one of his key insights was how BitTorrent could break up files into smaller bits and send through the bits rather than the whole file at once. Cohen mastered three programming languages by the age of sixteen and his work on BitTorrent is regarded as brilliant. The best-known example of an autistic high achiever is Temple Grandin, a woman who has pioneered commonly used improvements in animal treatment and slaughterhouses; her unique cognitive perspective has helped her understand when animals are afraid and how they can be made to feel more secure. 

I've yet to see a scientific paper or serious clinical discussion of the autistics who hold political office, work in Hollywood, start web 2.0 companies, or run major U.S. corporations or hedge funds.

If Baron-Cohen is right that there is the huge reserve of highly successful autistic achievers, I wonder why there hasn't been some kind of online, Craigslist-type sorting website that seeks to place autistic people with the things in which they specialize or some kind of wider texting that seeks to identify and help autistic people find their niches.  

I came upon this idea when I was spending time with my next door neighbor, who has Asperger's. He has an obsession with clocks and with taking them apart and putting them back together. Imagine the societal benefit if he could be placed with a clock making company. 

Indeed, if I could fault Cowen's book for one thing, it's that it doesn't take the ideas he's advocated and move towards policy. Still, perhaps policy is not one of those things for which Dr. Cowen is wired and I ought to respect his neurodiversity. 

Comments

[Michael F. Martin]

If Baron-Cohen is right that there is the huge reserve of highly successful autistic achievers, I wonder why there hasn't been some kind of online, Craigslist-type sorting website that seeks to place autistic people with the things in which they specialize or some kind of wider texting that seeks to identify and help autistic people find their niches.

The answer is because there is a huge stigma attached to being labeled "mentally ill." It would be nice if neurodiversity were embraced by society at large, and this books fits nicely with that project, but we are not there.

Given how people tend to conceal their quirks, you have to get to know people in person to see these effects. There is at least one prominent Obama Administration official who I would guess has been or could be diagnosed with Asperger's.

The other angle to this is that I think Asperger's is probably more treatable than we recognize yet. It's just that we haven't found the key levers to pull to affect neuroplasticity in this regard. The observation that RSS readers can make us "more autistic" might be useful. I haven't read the book so I'll withhold judgment until then, but I'm skeptical in general of this claim. It seems that autism is associated with highly efficient processing of very particular stimulus (clocks, e.g.); RSS can "feed" into that if you will. But RSS also connects us to more stimulus if we sweep broadly. (189 feeds here).

[Charles C. Johnson]

I agree with you that the stimgatization of Asberger's can be very high, but I imagine then that the returns must therefore be equally high. What's to stop some enterprising entrepreneur from serving as the middle man between the people who need the skills of Autistics and the people who have those skills? I can't simply be the stigmatization factor...

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