Create Your Own Economy
Lately I feel that the nonfiction book world has been awash in book titles and subtitles that do too good a job of explaining what the book is about. Tyler Cowen’s Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World is just the solution we’ve been waiting for. What’s this about? Well, it turns out to substantially be about autism. But not particularly about the science of autism or research into the condition. Rather, you get an extended riff on the idea that there are certain characteristic cognitive strengths associated with autism spectrum neurology, in particular an enhanced ability to order information. Cowen’s argument is that these skills are becoming more important in the modern world, and that modern technology is making us better and better at it.
Far from suffering from an “information overload” or unduly “short attention spans,” we’re getting better and better at slicing information into small chunks and reordering it. A somewhat trivial, but typical, example is the difference between playing a record and assembling an iTunes playlist.
It’s a bit hard to do the book justice because the subject matter is so unorthodox. So I’ll put it this way instead. I first cracked the book one afternoon intending to read for about ninety minutes and then go get on my bike and meet someone. While reading, I decided to change plans and take the bus instead so as to create more time (both coming and going) when I could read more Create Your Own Economy. There’s no real discussion of policy issues here, but you do get a fascinating analysis of Sherlock Homes.
30 Responses to “Create Your Own Economy”
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July 7th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Sherlock “Homes”? Is he like “Blacula”?
July 7th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Amazing how these characteristics typify Tyler Cowan and Matthew Yglesias, isn’t it?
July 7th, 2009 at 9:05 am
What is that, a retirement community for superannuated detectives?
July 7th, 2009 at 9:06 am
Stop making excuses not to bike, fatass.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:08 am
That’s nice. What are we simultaneously getting less good at?
July 7th, 2009 at 9:12 am
… and then the Almighty State will induce specific, *focused* forms of autism spectrum to enhance its coercive power during the Long Emergency. I read that book too.
When did supposedly serious people start getting their ideas from crappy science fiction writers? Wait, I know: with the Citizens’ Advisory Council on National Space Policy.
We need better futurists.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:12 am
Were people never good at slicing information into small chunks and reordering it? The itunes playlist doesn’t sound much different than the analog method of creating a mix tape back when we had all these big chunks of information and apparently had no idea what to do with them.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Not sure if this is the book or your own paragraph summary, but your pat summary of autism is extremely flawed. The primary aspect of autism is an inability to read social cues. A fraction of the spectrum of autistic people might be super-organizers, but that’s far from a standard cognitive strength of autism.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:22 am
There’s been so much to read out there, in the last several years, talking about all the good sides of autism. It’s troubling, to me, because I feel like the average person is starting to think that every autistic person is some savant whose developmental and social deficiencies are made up for with some supreme gifts. But most autistics aren’t like that. Many of them may be good at ordering information. But they are so impaired that this strength is rendered functionally useless to them. I understand the spirit of charity and diversity that these sort of narratives are undertaken in, and I know that people mean well. The problem is that many autistic people are simply deeply disabled, prevented from living entirely fulfilled lives because of their disorder. But this new narrative threatens to obscure that.
Far from suffering from an “information overload” or unduly “short attention spans,” we’re getting better and better at slicing information into small chunks and reordering it.
How are those mutually exclusive, exactly? Anecdotally, it seems very likely that people are in fact less able to handle tasks that require long attention spans. And, yes, certain tasks continue to require such things, and always will.
Once again, my least favorite thing about the Internet: the enforcement of optimism. Not every change is always for the good.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Well, Cowen must be on to something, considering that the first seven posters in this thread are evidently holding a conversation that only autistics can understand.
Yes, we’re in the middle of the greatest information revolution the world has ever seen, and just in the nick of time if we’re going to stop ourselves, as the greatest per capita energy users in the world, from roasting the planet like a peanut.
Futurists? We don’t need no stinkin’ futurists. Take a picture and send it to yourself on your cell phone- we’re living in the future. But not as much as we’re going to be.
This is really the big one- how does the ability of the functionally illiterate individual to access real-time data translate into a functional self?
Judging from the early comments here, it’s not an easy question to answer.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Tyler isn’t autistic, he’s a cunt.
July 7th, 2009 at 10:02 am
you mean Sherlock Homey
July 7th, 2009 at 10:05 am
J’s comment 5 was actually pretty deep.
So is Tyler’s thesis that society is becoming more “autistic” (as Tyler defines it, at least) with both its positive or negative traits or that, happily enough, society gets the positive without the negative? And depending on the answer, what are the consequences for society’s future?
Presumably, he could be saying that society gets the negative but not the positive traits of (Tyler-defined) “autism”, but the book’s title is too happy, fun times to allow that.
July 7th, 2009 at 10:13 am
The reduced ability to read social cues is a sliver of something larger. One aspect of autism is a reduced ability to discriminate the value of sensory information. In extreme cases, autistic people take it all in and treat it as all equally valuable. The posture and facial expression of a person they are talking to are only as important as the color of their shirt and the shape of their glasses. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, the man standing over the body with a bloody knife is only as important as the leaves of a rare plant next to the body. If the man with the knife did it, there’s no story. If the leaves lead to a different killer, that’s a story.
Autistic people are actually more likely to suffer from what Matt calls “information overload”. Many dislike noisy crowds because they try to take in and process all of the information which most of us ignore. They listen to the hundred conversations that most of us shut out. In addition, they are the most common sufferers of sensory integration dysfunction.
Any increased capacity to order information is not inherent, but rather due to practice. When you treat all sensory information as equally valid, you need to do something with it. Constant practice may create an ability to organize which does not exist inherently.
J asks what we might be getting worse at. I’d say focus. Some information is more important. Although, there are some autistic people who are just the opposite. They ignore everything except the object of their interest. Autism is certainly several disorders. Generalizations about it are hazardous.
July 7th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Autism is certainly several disorders. Generalizations about it are hazardous.
Right. The problem is, do to the nature of our media and of our therapeutic culture, we are fed the “autistic genius” narrative again and again, at the expense of what are much more common realities regarding autism: people with autism who can’t stop hurting themselves, people with autism who are incapable of controlling their bathroom functions, people rendered entirely noncommunicative by autism. That’s not counter-intuitive and it’s not uplifting, so it goes under reported, but it’s certainly more common than, well, Sherlock Holmes.
July 7th, 2009 at 10:35 am
I agree with this. My autistic son has no savant talents at all, and my daughter’s savant ability is vestibular. I’d much prefer that she converse than she never lose her balance. The devastating affects of autism should not be underestimated.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:08 am
*due to the nature, Jesus Freddie….
July 7th, 2009 at 11:12 am
I’ve always kind of suspected that Bill Gates has Asperger’s or something like it. That rocking behavior is bizarre.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:18 am
In the realm of self-help books there is an incestual process where the same circle of authors are constantly endorsing each others’ books. Authors like Deepak Chopra, Jack Canfield, Tony Robbins, and John Gray are constantly showing up on each others’ book jackets telling us how wonderful the author’s new book is. Sadly, I think some of the same is occuring in the blogosphere.
Tyler Cowen is always giving props to Matt Yglesias on his blog. How can Yglesias now turn around and give a fully honest critique of Cowen’s book? I am sorry, bu this “review” doesn’t tell me anything, other than that Yglesias doesn’t own a car. I have been looking forward to reading Cowen’s book (I read his blog daily). But if his book falls short of the mark, say so. There is currently a refreshing debate between authors Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, centering on the latter’s criticism of Anderson’s “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”. The authors know and respect each other, but neither is pulling punches in responding to each others’ views. I think bestest best buddies should refrain from reviewing each others’ works if they can’t do it honestly and openly.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:31 am
Weird. Michel De Certeau sort of wrote the same book in the 80’s (The Practice of Everyday Life), only it argued that the paths taken by the autistic work as an extended metaphor for the ability for people to tactically make their own meaning in a consumption-driven postmodern world…I’m guessing Cowen doesn’t really come to the same conclusions.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:35 am
The primary aspect of autism is an inability to read social cues.
certain characteristic cognitive strengths associated with autism spectrum neurology, in particular an enhanced ability to order information.
I’m rasing a son on the functional end of the spectrum, and neither of these sound right. He specifically struggles with what is called “executive dysfunction” (no auto industry jokes, please) which boils down to an inability to organize information. Processing social cues is an important example of the kind of information he has to work extra hard to deal with, but that is a key symptom, not the primary aspect of the condition. I suppose he can “order” information well (he certainly has remarkable recall about things he focuses on), but he needs a lot of help to learn how to process information in ways that allow him actually make use of it. As noted above, he’s particularly susceptible to information overload, not some kind of savant in how to deal with it.
July 7th, 2009 at 12:10 pm
Cowen can’t be referring to actual autistic people; he must be referring to high-intelligence economists who insist that tunnel vision is particularly helpful in making sense of a complex socio-political-economic world. Bleh.
July 7th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
spot check billy: It’s a spectrum. I’ve been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and executive dysfunction is something with which I’ve never really had to deal.
July 7th, 2009 at 3:12 pm
I can only assume Tyler Cowen knows more about autism than MY displays here. I certainly hope so, if someone was willing to publish a book by him on the subject. This type of post is a pretty good example of the limits of all-purpose punditry that Matt engages in.
July 7th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
Matt, this is an odd thing to say in the comments, but I fervently hope you don’t actually read the comments on your blog… their low quality is so incongruous with the high quality of the content here. 90% of the commenters are irrelevant trolls.
July 7th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
[...] Yglesias of Think Progress couldn’t put down Create Your Own Economy: It’s a bit hard to do the book justice because [...]
July 7th, 2009 at 7:22 pm
Well I wrote a long and thoughtful response, but it got swallowed by a “You forgot to fill in a field” data loss episode. I don’t know if I need to switch browsers, or just whinge about the design of this blogging platform, because those never seem to happen to me much these days.
The somewhat tl;dr version was that this is all interesting, but I’d like to see more of the “general discussion” type bloggers who are interested in neural atypicality talk about conditions not on the autism spectrum, like Bipolar Disorder, which I happen to suffer from.
Oh and I spent a couple of sentences rebutting B.Y.’s comment about everyone being a troll. Reconstruction left as an exercise for the reader.
July 7th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
[...] review is here, [...]
July 7th, 2009 at 9:49 pm
Create Your Economy is subtitled “the path to prosperity in the disordered world.” Having read the book I’m no more enlightened re: the prosperity path. Did I take the title too literally? I need to be a little bit autistic? Really?
Cowen’s speculation, or post-diagnosis, of literary and historical figures being autistic is laughably absurd and pointless. It reads as a murky, disorganized and borderline idiotic synthesis of somebody whose skimmed online sources a bit too much.
I like the blog…and since I finished the book I’ve been trying to find a reasonable defense of it as I’m not looking to take the piss out of people who are trying to make sense of things. But I did feel somewhat scammed by this book. I mean, my expectations were low, but I did expect a few interesting insights…I can’t think of one “take away” in this instance…expect that Tyler Cowen is good at blogging, and catchy book titles.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
Yes, yes, autistics have a great ability to concentrate, sometimes to the point where they can’t take care of themselves. When that concentration is broken… they can become a danger to themselves and others. Another bonus: a profound inability to deal with, understand, or empathize with their fellow human beings. This is, in fact, one of the defining features of the disease, not some superhuman organizational ability. Yes, I suppose we can “learn something” about our limitations from the disabled, but it should also teach us something about what it means to be human.
The goal should not be to make human being more amenable to society or the economy; just the opposite, in fact. I’m all for interdisciplinary study, and I believe in the importance of economics in every aspect of society. However, economist should not be allowed outside their bailiwick without adult supervision. This reminds me of the, very smart, economist Gregory Clark’s assertion that England’s economic success and global hegemony were due, in large part, to superior genetics. There is tendency in economics to make modest proposals that show an incredible ignorance of the fields on which they are trespassing; no to mention common sense.