Create your own economy cover up shock! Troppo exposé

Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World coverLots of readers of this blog will be regular readers of Tyler Cowen. I’m not, but that’s just my taste. He often has interesting things to say and there are just too many such people in the blogosphere so he’s not on my feedreader. Anyway, Tyler Cowen is often a good read and a thoughtful guy. When I was killing some time in an international airport last year I came across a hardback copy of the newly released Create your own economy: the path to prosperity in a disordered world by the said T Cowen.

Well if there were a book to illustrate that old proverb that you can’t judge a book by its cover it’s this one. In fact the cover is not just a cover, it’s a cover up! The book, as you may know if you’ve read it or about it elsewhere is Cowen’s paean to autism.  If that surprises you it certainly surprised me. As I read on I figured it would broaden from his own ‘outing’ of himself as high functioning autistic or perhaps others would call it Aspergers Syndrome – into broader themes.  But it never really does. In fact there is one mention of autism on the cover on the second of the four ‘shouts’ on the back cover (and nothing whatever on the front). That’s all the warning you get. I presume this isn’t Cowen’s fault.  I presume the publisher cooked up the cover-up (making Cowen’s point about the stigmatisation of autism).

In one of the back cover ‘shouts’ the book promises to “weave Facebook, Zen Buddism, Sherlock Holmes and so much more into a compelling argument”. Well it certainly seemed intriguing so I bought the book.  The ‘compelling argument’ that Cowen weaves is that all these things can be related in some way to autism or Aspergers. The internet generally is encouraging classification of all and sundry – classification being an autistic trait, Sherlock Holmes is autistic – a case which Cowen argues compellingly. Zen Buddhism gets a guernsey in there somehow, though it’s a while since I read that bit.

Anyway, Cowen makes a good case that autism is stigmatised and that that is 1) cruel and unfair to autistics and 2) stupid because high functioning autistics have contributed an unusual amount to human civilisation. I think he makes his point well.  I have a few criticisms for what they’re worth.

  • I don’t know if this book had its origins in an article, but this is one of those books that should have just been an article to elaborate and argue the thesis and perhaps some blog posts to expand examples. Unfortunately the panoply of examples didn’t really build a richer picture of his argument and so it palled as a book.
  • Cowen’s call is ultimately one for balance between cognitive skills, which is unarguable. And good on him for having the courage of his convictions – and his cognitive style. But, perhaps as one might expect, in arguing the case for greater emphasis on what autistic approaches can bring to the world, he does not report to his readers that some people think that his own discipline is already too autistic. In fact there’s a whole movement started in France at the turn of the century calling for a “post autistic economics“. As Wikipedia observes the movement has “has been criticized for using the medical diagnosis, autism, as a derogatory expression.”  Fair enough too, but the point being made is a serious one. In a book about the appropriate balance between different cognitive orientations, or ‘neurodiversity’ as Cowen pithily calls it, it’s a pity that Cowen couldn’t have discussed this possible weakness in contemporary economics.
This entry was posted in Economics and public policy, IT and Internet. Bookmark the permalink.
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

3 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Rafe
14 years ago

He probably produces too many books, almost one a year lately, that is too much to expect ever one to be good. He wrote a great book on arts funding in the US – re the fusss on the $180 mil of public funding, he pointed out that the appropiation for military bands was near $200 mil.

On the danger of book blurbs, when Mary Martin had a mailing list about half the books that I purchased off the list turned out to duds. When the store came to Sydney about half the books that I bought did not look very interesting in the catalogue. Much the same with Clouston and Hall remainders.

MikeM
MikeM
14 years ago

There’s an interesting piece in the current Vanity Fair about Michael Burry, a successful fund manager who shorted US mortgage-backed securities. Burry had always had difficulty relating to other people and put it down to loss of one of his eyes in childhood. Belatedly he realises after his four-year son is diagnosed as autistic that he is too – that his difficulties with people had nothing to do with the loss of his eye.

Betting on the Blind Side” is a chapter excerpted from Michael Lewis’s latest book.