July 2009 Tyler Cowen - Will Wilkinson Bloggingheads.tv transcript

Here is the audio, at the little mp3 link, and below.

Here is an earlier exchange between Tyler and Will, from June 2008, with video.

Here is Tyler’s 2009 exchange with Colin Marshall, more about autism and Create Your Own Economy.

The video for this exchange is missing, so I made a transcript. I used Descript and Eddy, cleaned it up and added links. Enjoy!

Will Wilkinson: Hello Tyler. How you doing?

Tyler Cowen: I am fine. Good to hear from you as always.

Will Wilkinson: It’s good to hear from you. Thanks for coming on to Bloggingheads.tv again. I am Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute and we have with us today Tyler Cowen, who is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, one of the co-proprietors of the Marginal Revolution blog and the author of the recently released book Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. And we'll talk about your book today, Tyler.

So let me start by asking you to give your elevator pitch about the book, but I wanted to just mention to get you started that I actually was surprised by what the book was about. What I predicted it would be about, given the title, was — I thought I was going to learn something about how I could sort of create a sort of economic niche of my own.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I think the book is about creating an economic niche of your own, but it's in the space of the economy of attention rather than the economy of money.

Will Wilkinson: Right. So I was assuming the economy of money rather than the economy of attention, I guess. So that's why it was surprising in some ways, and also I wasn't expecting it to be largely a book about autism, which it deals with all through the book. So tell me a little bit about how you came to write this particular book and what your project is in it, and your elevator speech about what the book is about.

Tyler Cowen: Well, here's one way to view the elevator speech. Part of the book is an optimistic vision of the new information society, and it's about the value we're creating for ourselves by using the Internet and using the web. It's a defense of all that against the view that Google is making us stupid. I also view the book as a kind of tribute to what I call human neurodiversity, which I think is a very underrated idea in the social sciences. It's also an underrated idea in business books and from a business and economics point of view.

More specifically, the book uses autism and the information processing abilities of autistics to shed light on what's going on in society more generally. So in part, the book is arguing that non-autistics are using technology to mimic a lot of cognitive advantages of the autistic brain. Part of this endeavor is actually to outline to people that autism is not just by definition some series of impairments or problems, but there's another notion of autistism as a cognitive profile, which involves a lot of cognitive strengths.

Now I don't actually think that counts as an elevator speech. I'm not sure this is an elevator speech book.

Will Wilkinson: No.

Tyler Cowen: But that's what it's about. It's about how we ought to be more open to appreciating different intelligences. I think, in an indirect way perhaps, but it is very much also a business book and an economics book. It just doesn't look like one. Because again, it's operating in these alternative spaces.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit more about the idea of neurodiversity in general, and then autism in particular. So in the beginning of the book, you reveal that your interest in the topic has something to do with your discovery that you are somewhere on the autism spectrum. Can you say something about that?

And also the politics of the usage of the language is interesting to get out at the beginning, because when you're talking about autism, you're not talking about what a lot of people think of as a disorder, right? And there's a distinction that's fairly conventional between like, Asperger's syndrome which people think of as a high-functioning autistic who is perfectly capable of doing the things that everyone else does, maybe even a little bit better. But autism is reserved for people who have some sort of serious problem that acts as a real disability. And you declined to make that distinction. And so I'd like to hear a little bit about why.

Tyler Cowen: Well, let me start with the first question. We need to be very careful when we talk about the autism spectrum. If you talk about the formal definition of the spectrum that you find in diagnostic manuals, I would not count as being on the autism spectrum. I do think I have autistic cognitive features in the following sense that I can absorb information at a rate that is really quite a bit higher than even people I think of who would be as smart as I am can do. And this has been a big advantage to me, and it's something I was trying to figure out when I wrote the book.

So in terms of what it means for a person to be on the autism spectrum, no one really agrees on the definition of what that is, so I would just inject that as a cautionary note. You asked about the difference between autism and Asperger's. The Asperger's concept was really coined in 1981 by Lorna Wing, and a lot of people view that history as the fact simply that some people started doing things or achieving things that autistics supposedly could not do. And as a result, a new category had to be coined.

But I think that's scientifically not really the best way to go. It's common practice to define autism in terms of outcomes. Like, does a person have a particular series of impairments? Starting with social communication, but not restricted to that? I think when autism is defined that way, there are two problems with that.

One is an ethical problem. You're taking a whole group of people and just defining them as a bunch of people who don't do well, or can't do well, or won't do well. But I think there's also a scientific problem that if you prejudge the question of what autistics or other people are capable of learning, that should not be an a priori decision. So it seems to me a more consistent approach is to think in terms of the cognitive profile. At least definitionally leave the question open as to what the outcomes will look like. I think in the real world, what one observes is a high variance of outcomes — some very bad life outcomes, and also a lot of good life outcomes.

And when you view it in those terms, when you view it as a cognitive profile and you then try to ask, “What's the difference between autism and Asperger's?”, it's much harder to define. The common-sense view is something like, autistics are the people who do really badly and Asperger’s are the people who do okay. But I think that's a mistaken approach to the whole concept. Does that get at your question?

Will Wilkinson: Yeah, that's perfect. That's exactly what I was asking about. And one of the things that was useful to learn was to think of this cognitive profile that you mentioned as containing a lot of different possibilities. So you can have two different people with aspects of the autistic cognitive profile and they might both count as autistic in some sense, but they can be completely different.

Tyler Cowen: Absolutely.

Will Wilkinson: And so we have a lot of variation among the kinds of people who we count as autistic in some sense. And I guess that brings us to the bigger point that even within the category of people with an autistic cognitive profile, there's a lot of variance and individuality. And that sort of highlights the extent to which there is what you call neurodiversity.

So maybe you can say something more about just the idea of neurodiversity itself, and what you think that means. Well, the whole book is about what you think that means, and we'll get to some of that. But say a little bit of something about neurodiversity.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I view the book as a whole as a defense of individualism, and when you think about human neurology in terms of this cognitive profile, rather than defining it in terms of good or bad outcomes, I think you get a much richer appreciation for the different kinds of intelligences out there — how important they are and how difficult it is in the usual ways to stereotype them.

And when you ask me about neurodiversity, the most commonly understood other examples of neurodiversity would be something called ADHD — which a lot of laymen don't even think exists, but I actually very much do think it exists — Tourette syndrome… But I think there's just a lot of neurodiversity that hasn't been formally studied yet, and it exists in individual lives. And that's what I mean when I say it's an under-appreciated concept.

Even in the literature on autism, there are a lot of debates, like, is there just autism? Are there different kinds of autism? If people have what's called Fragile X syndrome, is that the same as classical autism and so on? No matter what your point of view on those questions, they're extremely complicated and a lot of them are still viewed as fairly open.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah, it's impossible to read Create Your Own Economy without thinking about yourself. It pushes you into thinking about how your own cognitive style, or sort of overall psychological style is unique. And that's a fascinating question, especially for those of us who are narcissistic and like to think about ourselves a lot.

So after reading your book, I was like, oh, you know, am I on the autism scale? And I took like three different quizzes online and — not at all. Just don't even approach the autistic scale.

Tyler Cowen: I should warn you, those quizzes are very misleading. I'm not trying to suggest, Will, that you're autistic. But if anyone out there is taking those quizzes, I would say overall don't take them very seriously. Because those quizzes are based on the notion of autism being a kind of personality profile.

So for instance, it's assumed that autistics are introverted people. But when you view it as a cognitive profile, I believe actually a lot of autistics are quite extroverted. That sounds very counterintuitive. They're not extroverted in the sense that their behavior necessarily is the behavior of what we think of as extroverted people. But they may have a personality temperament that is in a way extroverted, or wanting to be extroverted. That may just be hard for them to somehow realize, or satisfy that operating in what is largely a non-autistic society.

Will Wilkinson: One of the things that I hadn't thought about very much in terms of these kind of feedback loops between other people's cognitive styles and the way you end up behaving. So I might be an incredibly sociable person and love being around people and love having a lot of company. But if I'm not the best at reading subtle social cues, being in the company of certain kind of people might make me feel really uncomfortable. I might feel like I might be missing something important.

And so my desire to be around people might be stymied a little bit since I'm not able to relate in the normal way. And I hadn't really quite thought about it in that way and I was fascinated by your accounts of the conventions of autistics and the flourishing subculture of autism-based discussion groups on the Internet that all exhibit a high level of interest in sociality. But on terms that are just different than the typical social interaction.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. You know, the person who cleared up a lot of these distinctions for me was a woman named Michelle Dawson, who is herself autistic, which I think is interesting. But she and Laurent Mottron and some other researchers in Montreal are the people who have fleshed out this notion of autism as a cognitive profile. I think that's very important work, and I think it has a lot more general implications for appreciating the diversity of human beings and the importance of an individualistic perspective. So part of what I wanted to do in the book was to communicate that in a more systematic way.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. Say a little bit more about what characterizes the autistic cognitive profile, and then we can move on to talking about how modern technology and the modern economy increases the demand for certain kinds of cognitive traits characteristic of that profile.

Tyler Cowen: Well, again I would stress a lot of this is recent research and it's still up for grabs exactly which are the relevant features. But I think what I focus on in the book is this extreme interest in a certain kind of information processing, which has to do with assembling small bits of information.

It's not small bits at the expense of the larger picture necessarily, but that there's interest in varying levels of the architectonic structure of information and the idea of collecting, enumerating, ordering, classifying information as being something that's just downright fun and interesting and important.

I'm not sure I want to say that is the essential element of an autistic cognitive profile, but it's the element that I focus upon, because I think it's the one most important for understanding the modern information economy and also for understanding the world more generally. But there are a lot of other features of autistic cognitive profiles that one can talk about, and they come up in other parts of the book.

So some researchers, for instance, argue that autistics are less likely to think in terms of stereotypical narratives, and they're more likely to have an accurate memory for certain kinds of facts. That would be an example of another autistic cognitive feature that I talk about.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. The point about the objectivity of narrative memory reminded me of — there's this whole literature that I'm sure you've heard about, like depressive realism, where people who are suffering from various kinds of depressive disorders, their self-assessments tend to be more accurate and objective, and their evaluation of how well they did in a particular episode tends to be more objective. And it sort of sounded like that aspect of the autistic cognitive profile gives you the kind of realism of a depressed person without the depression.

And that would be valuable, right? Like to have that kind of un-blinkered, not overly distorted by your sunny hopefulness, but not have it be driven by the fact that you're sad.

Tyler Cowen: It's a very interesting economic study, which I discussed in the book, and they put autistics through what we call in economics economic experiments. And it turned out the autistics had much smaller framing effects in terms of how they perceive the asymmetry of perceived gains and perceived losses. And they came much closer to making what would normally be considered the correct decisions.

That's only one experiment. I'd like to see it replicated. But to me it's highly suggestive. It's consistent with my intuitions, which is that there are some cognitive profiles which predispose people towards greater objectivity along particular dimensions. Not necessarily all dimensions, but at least some.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. So the experiment you're talking about was an experiment about the endowment effect?

Tyler Cowen: What's framing, what's the endowment effect? There's actually a little bit of confusion of that in the literature itself. But it's a way in which the autistic people in the experiment saw through to the underlying economic reality more clearly than did the non-autistics.

Will Wilkinson: So one of the themes that comes up early on in the book, which is really interesting and important, is the importance of framing. And there's this giant literature in economics and law and econ and psychology about the way the context in which people make decisions can affect the decisions that they make in ways that people aren't necessarily aware of. And you make the case that to some extent framing is something that's up to us, that we can make decisions about what kinds of context we're going to put ourselves in.

And I found that a fascinating argument. That this just adds a more abstract level of choice. If we know that there's a certain kind of context, or a certain kind of frame, in which my decision-making will tend to be biased in a particular way, then that's information I can use about what kinds of context I wanna put myself in.

Tyler Cowen: Yeah, behavioral economics is typically negative about framing effects. There's something to be overcome, maybe nudging people, taxing people, forcing people, whatever. While I do think framing effects can be negative or dangerous, I wanted to show a much more positive side of framing effects. They're a big part of what give our lives meaning.

So try taking a movie that you think is wonderful and walking in and just watching the last three minutes. The movie will actually seem pretty crummy, because whatever's going on on the screen, it's not framed for you in a meaningful way. So we can view Facebook and Twitter and a lot of what's done on the web as basically creating narratives, creating contexts, giving us framings. Things just making sense to us, being fun, being suspenseful.

And in general when you view framing effects this way, you don't want to get rid of them in all cases. What you wanna do is get as many of the good framing effects as you can and try to avoid some of the bad framing effects. And I think that's a healthier perspective.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah, one response that you can make to people like Robert Frank who talk about the way other people's consumption choices affect our frame of reference for what we take to be an adequate car, or an adequate house. So there's a certain kind of frame for your consumption choices that's built by other people's consumption choices.

And you can see people as kind of victims without agency. If there are some rich people buying bigger houses, that shifts the frame of reference for an adequate house up. But individuals do have the agency to, say, decide where they're gonna live, for one thing.

Tyler Cowen: Sure, you can drop out of these races. And I think in general framing effects are fun. The pursuit of different kinds of relative status very often is fun. Not always, and it's not always fun for the losers. I understand that. But if you look at Frank himself, he's worked very hard and he's at a top university and he's achieved all kinds of honors and and awards, which he's deserved. And I don't know Bob that well, but I suspect it was a good deal of fun for him.

And I don't think that his gain is directly canceled out by the people who ended up choosing other professions because they couldn't make it as top economists the way he has. I think there's a big net gain and the people who ended up losing that race actually ended up winning some other what you might call relative status contests and that it's a positive sum game. And that if we didn't have these contests and framing effects, our lives would have a lot less meaning, is my view. So I'm much more optimistic about that whole process.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. And it seems to me that's one of the major tasks of meaning-making in life, is to challenge frames that are just sort of given to you by your culture and to push against them and create different contexts for your own life. That's one of the things that makes the choices that you make meaningful, is that you've embedded them within a broader context that is in some sense yours.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. And the web is amazingly flexible for helping us do that in new ways. And that's a big reason why I think we're underestimating its benefits.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. So let's talk about the web a little bit more, how it fits into your thesis about how it's helping some people, or encourages some of us to think in ways that are more characteristic of the autistic style.

But I just had one more thought about the framing effects. One thing, like, how about getting married, right? Like, you're reframing your entire life.

Tyler Cowen: Absolutely.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. And so everything you do takes on a different cast and there are real economic consequences to getting married, probably because your set of incentives changes pretty systematically based on that kind of relationship that you've entered into. Now that's something you can choose to enter into, or not choose to enter into. But if you do, then it kind of reframes all your choices. It puts them all on a different context.

Tyler Cowen: And your whole sense of what creates meaning changes, or at least it ought to change. Usually it does. And you'll be married soon. We’ll see.

Will Wilkinson: And similarly with the friends that you choose to be around, that they can restructure the way a lot of your experiences seem. That if you have a friend who's particularly interested in certain things and you care about that person, you might start paying attention to those things in a way that you didn't before. And that really changes your experience. Reframes it.

So anyway, I love that thought of, in some sense, having control over the frame in which you act. So tell me more about the how the Internet is changing the way we think and the kind of thinking that it's encouraging.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I think a common criticism is that the Internet is just about multitasking and making everyone more impatient, and we flip from one thing to the other. I view this process as having a lot more coherence than do the critics. I think you assemble a stream of daily experience and you pursue a set of stories and narratives, and it's really quite suspenseful.

You want to know what's gonna happen next with your favorite people, your favorite writer, the debates you follow. And it's this rich inner stream, or this blend of meaning that we assemble. And I think this is displacing, to some extent, some of what you might call mainstream culture, whether it be high culture or television or whatever. These stories we're creating. And I think very often they're a lot more fun.

I was on the phone last night with a reporter and I said to her — she was complaining that she “wasted time” on Facebook and Twitter — and I said, “You're pursuing stories. Why is it that you think the stories of your own life are so much worse than the stories in whatever novel you think you ought to be reading instead?”

Especially once you get past the best 50 or 100 novels, to just pick up some, like, median indie intelligent, new out, smart-people-are-talking-about-it sort of novel, but not a great world classic of all time — are the stories in there so much better, more interesting, more meaningful than the actual real stories of your life and the lives of your friends? And I don't think they are. I think actually I convinced her. So this new web culture, if culture is even the right word, that's something I want to celebrate.

But the other point I would make is we also use the web to be very long term in our orientations, not just to be short term. So take something like Google. You can use Google to find information very quickly. That frees up some of your time for longer-run projects, but Google also helps you follow things over very long time horizons. So if you have, say, a favorite rockstar that you've been following for 30 years, or if you want to follow debates on global warming or egalitarianism or whatever, you use Google to do that.

So it's very easy now to follow a topic for a year, five years, 10 years. You don't have to be geographically close to it. You don't have to be an insider. So to have a long-running interest and always be up to speed on it is today much easier and far more possible than ever before. So it's a way in which Internet culture, it's not just about short term and immediate gratification, it's also supporting long-run intense commitments.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. Well, the point about following the stories of your friends and following the story of the development of different issues — that really rang true to me, partly because I've just moved from DC to Iowa, but the extent to which I'm embedded in the Internet really made that change in context less dramatic than it might have otherwise been. Because the means through which I was following the stories of all my friends and my frenemies and all the people in the DC policy and journalism world who I consider an acquaintance, whose work I'm interested in, my main means of following all that didn't change.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. I still follow you on Twitter.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. So I follow the Twitter updates. I follow their Facebook updates. I read their blogs. And the difference is that I don't get to see them as often face-to-face. And that's an important difference. It's a profound difference. And the people that I do see face-to-face in Iowa City are a very different kind of person. So something about my frame has changed a lot, but it changed a lot less than it would have just 10 years ago. And so I've got a certain sense of social continuity that I wouldn't have otherwise had.

And that's fascinating because that helps you realize that at one level you're more free to move where you'd like to be without actually losing all your friends or losing access to the stream of stories about them that is part of your own internal life.

Tyler Cowen: When you see people that you know, even if they still feel like your friends, they're not starting from scratch. You don't have to walk through some kind of list: “Here are the seven things that are new with me since we last met.” These people are more or less up to speed. They may even know what book you've been reading, what concert you've seen, so you pick up with them much more like that, in an instant. And it's more real and more immediate. It's more visceral actually. So this way in which the Internet complements the visceral emotional nature of our lives is an idea I very much wanted to push in the book, that it's about emotional connection.

Will Wilkinson: So here's the main criticism that I can think of of this line of thinking — at some level this feels like a kind of alienation and it seems kind of inauthentic or something like that. So the line of thinking would be that our real sources of meaning, or what ought to be our sources of meaning, that we ought to be deeply and richly embedded in our local communities with our next door neighbors, with the people that are the parents of the kids that my kids go to school with — I should be intimate with those people, and the sources of meaning in my life ought to be my thick, deeply rooted connectedness with the place where I am and the community there.

And this kind of following people half a world away on Facebook is a way of — it's not free. The time you're spending on Facebook is time you're not spending at a PTA meeting maybe.

Tyler Cowen: Thank goodness. Yes.

Will Wilkinson: So it seems like this is a mechanism by which we can become more and more detached from our localities and our local communities, and that leaves us, in some sense, and especially our communities, poor. How do you respond?

Tyler Cowen: It doesn't have to be about detachment. If you think of your own situation, to continue with that example, it will be much easier for you to marry and be together with your partner because you can connect with others at a distance. So it's very much strengthening what is your most important thick tie. That would be just a simple point.

But another is, it may be that we really want to have close, thick, durable ties with people who are very particular in some way, or have particular interests, or a particular kind of personality, or a particular cognitive profile, for that matter. And the Internet is the way you find them. So to get something truly that fits you, or is what you want, is what they want. It's not necessarily the seven people who live next door to you in the house where you were born. Or even the 150 people who would've been in your tribe, in hunter-gatherer society. You have a new potential for long-lasting thick ties.

So the Internet's all about diversity. Clearly people use it to flit around and be superficial. But this other side of the story, the more durable, thicker, more emotional and more connected side is what I feel we're overlooking.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about your idea that the contemporary economy, especially the information economy, that aspect of our economy that encourages and rewards certain elements of the autistic cognitive style and therefore some of the education that we are getting — that people who don't naturally have an autistic cognitive style, and what we need and some of what we're getting is training in how to be a little more autistic in a certain sense.

Tyler Cowen: Sure. I would just say the word “profile” I think is better than “style”. Because “style” implies it's more matter of choice than it might be for a lot of people. So I would say autistic cognitive profile. But I think one clear pattern we find in the autistic cognitive profile is extreme focus on particular areas. And this is very often discussed as if it's just a kind of pathology. But it doesn't have to be, it can be extremely useful, it can be extremely productive.

And Adam Smith, a long time ago, wrote a book about the division of labor and basically glorified this, with qualifications. But people who are very good at some things and not so good at other things, people who are more cognitively specialized, which tends to describe autistics, you would expect that on average they do better in a society with more division of labor.

And that's one of the arguments of my book. That one thing, I think even Smith himself saw this in some fashion — the division of labor mobilizes human neurodiversity in a way which is extremely powerful and often overlooked by economists.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah, that's a fascinating point.

Tyler Cowen: And I don't just mean autistics there. There are just people who are really good at some things and really bad at other things. It includes a lot of autistics, but it's a very general point. And then there are people who are more jacks of all trades. And over time, we're favoring the people who are in some ways specialized.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah, I do think that that's a profound point. It's actually hard for me to wrap my head around. But you know, as the division of labor deepens, the returns to specialization increase, niches open up for more and more kinds of people, the menu of jobs. There's all these models in labor economics about matching workers to jobs, and if there's only five kinds of jobs, but 20 kinds of people, then there's gonna be lots of mismatches, right?

Tyler Cowen: That's right.

Will Wilkinson: But if there are a proliferating number of kinds of jobs, then the probability that an individual at random is going to be able to find something that suits their distinctive neurological profile has gone up. And so that is a really interesting rebuttal to one of Adam Smith's own arguments, right? That Adam Smith worries deeply that the division of labor and that specialization in particular will be sort of soul-killing.

That if all you're doing is, you know, shaving the tips off of little pieces of metal to make pins all day long, that's completely stultifying for anybody really. And that's something that Marx picks up on later, just the completely soul-crushing nature of monotonous, specialized labor. And there's obviously something right about that argument, but it misses this other thing that you're talking about, and I think that's fascinating.

Tyler Cowen: No, I view division of labor as supporting human authenticity. Imagine if we lived in Smith's time and I had to end up with a job working on a farm, I think I would actually feel pretty alienated and pretty unhappy. I'm not sure how I’d do working on a farm, but I'm pretty sure I prefer what it is I'm doing now.

So the division of labor, and in particular the Internet, I think it's making us all more like who we really are in a way, which on net I view as fulfilling and again supporting authenticity, and I think that point is overlooked. Even in discussions of the division of labor subsequent to Smith, it hasn't really gotten enough play.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. Sometimes at Cato interns will say, “You've got the job that I want, how do you get that job?” And I don't have an answer for them because I don't know what my job is. My job is: they're just paying me to do things that I happen to enjoy and happen to be relatively good at. And so I can't tell somebody, “Be good at the same things that I'm good at. That's how you get my job.” I would just tell them to be good at the things that you're good at and see what jobs you get.

Tyler Cowen: And for you to be good at what you do you need a very particular cognitive profile, which it turns out you have. You're probably better suited to do what you're doing than to be an academic, which of course you could have chosen. But there's a sense in you, this desire for an immediate connection to debates in the real world that you have, that I think in a way pushes you away from academic life, is essential to working at Cato. And so many philosophers don't have that.

And when you, you know, put together all the parts of your profile which make you fit, it really requires a lot of different things for you to be successful in what you're doing. To be, say, very good at communicating with other people. Very clear speaker. Very good debater, I might add, and so on.

Will Wilkinson: Well, that's all kind of you, but I think it gets to the more general point that it's possible to — and again, everybody doesn't have the same set of advantages growing up, so everybody doesn't have the same set of opportunities — but the possibility of doing something that's sort of uniquely suited to you I think has gone up partly because of new technologies. But I'd also mention, and this is an interesting thing too, and I don't mean to talk about me, but I know most about me.

Tyler Cowen: No, let's talk about you.

Will Wilkinson: So I'll just use myself as an example. But I feel like I have certain strengths that lend themselves to my doing what I'm doing. But at the same time a lot of things that are just demands of my job and most jobs, in the kind of economy we have, are things that I really struggle with.

But I'm diagnosed as having ADHD. I don't know what it means in terms of the neurological underpinnings of it, but I suspect that things like ADD, so that kind of neurodiversity — sometimes the thing that bothers me, and I think it bothers me in the same way it bothers you, in thinking of autism as a disorder. Is that like attention deficit disorder? I really just don't have a sense of myself as having a disorder. What I have a sense of is a kind of like ecological mismatch.

Tyler Cowen: That’s right. Exactly. And I feel the same way.

Will Wilkinson: So my job, it really is customized to me in an incredible way, but there's still some things that are non-optional. I have to make deadlines, I have to produce so much stuff, and my ability to just do work on command, or to focus in a very intense way is very, very difficult. So it causes me a lot of anxiety and a lot of stress. But I don't think I have a disorder. It's just that I'm not well-matched to those demands, but those demands are going to be out there, and so I have to learn to cope with them in one way or another.

And I think it's something that's actually been unhelpful about modern psychiatry and psychology, to try to think of anything that is a mismatch between a person, psychology and the needs of the socioeconomic structure as evidence of a disorder rather than evidence of just a poor fit.

Tyler Cowen: No, I've been reading papers lately on ADHD and I'm surprised by the overall low level of quality in them, or just question-begging assumptions. But I'm even at the point where I wonder if ADHD is not a cognitive advantage on net. I think a lot of people take what is considered attention deficit, and I would not use that phrase, but they learn how to use it as a kind of mechanism to propel them from one kind of learning to another. And they're perpetually active learning things, soaking in information and doing something useful with it, in a way that people who are not “ADD”, whatever that might mean, cannot do.

There was a recent study on entrepreneurship supported by the Kauffman Foundation, and it found that entrepreneurs are more likely than average to have dyslexia. And one thing it found is that people who have dyslexia, they're extremely good at delegating authority to others. Because they know they can't micromanage everything. They have a lot of cognitive strengths and the things you would think are their weaknesses, there are ways in which they can act to either learn to overcome them, or somehow adjust or compensate for them.

So the whole word “disorder” as applied to any of these areas, I think we should be extremely cautious in applying it. We shouldn't deny there are people who are very troubled by circumstances and try to help those people. But calling those people a disorder isn't really actually helping them at all.

Will Wilkinson: No.

Tyler Cowen: And I think we're just scratching the surface in terms of understanding ADHD and autism and how it relates not just to the lives of people who might serve as, you know, poster children, but people you actually encounter in your life and how it feeds into the productivity of American business. Information technology, scientific advance. I think we're really at a very rudimentary stage in understanding this.

And one of the big things I wanted to do with my book was just scream and wake people up. Look, there's a question here. We're all just assuming this is disorder, but it's actually one of the big stories of human society in my view.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. I think that's the core of the book and is one of the most fascinating things about it. Let's talk a little bit more about about stories. I really liked this chapter. You talk about one of my favorite papers, your dissertation advisor at Harvard, Thomas Shelling wrote this amazing essay called The Mind as a Consuming Organ.

And you put a pretty heavy emphasis on the importance of being able to craft narratives. But at the same time you think that there are important limits to stories, to basing your identity heavily on a narrative, or on a set of stories. And I found that illuminating, so I wanted to get you to talk a little bit about that.

Tyler Cowen: Well, we can start with public policy. I think a big problem behind voting behavior is voters remember things in terms of stories with good guys, bad guys, very simple narratives. That can be great for watching, you know, blockbuster Hollywood movies. But if you're trying to understand the complex public policy issue, it becomes far too simplified. I think it's one of the most important biases in human cognition. For all the work in behavioral economics, it's one that I think is understudied by economists, that most people, especially non-autistics, they tend to convert information into story form.

You see it in the case of religions. Religions tend to be story-based, and again, it has big advantages. It's easy to remember because of our nature. But again, you're gonna simplify, they're gonna be heroes and villains. And it's very dangerous. It's a kind of form of self-deception. And just to raise some of these limits to storytelling I think is very important. We need to be very cautious about our propensity to tell stories to ourselves, even though it's a great joy and it's often an efficient way of keeping information at your fingertips, but it's distorting the information at the same time.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah, I just recorded a dialogue with Kurt Andersen [mp3 link works], who is a novelist and a journalist, writes for Vanity Fair, used to be the editor-in-chief of New York, and he has this book called Reset that we talked about, which is the lessons that we can learn from the big financial disaster, the economic downturn we're going through.

And I mentioned this to him, that one of the problems that I had with the book was partly because it had a narrative structure to me that just seemed too enticing to be true. Where the narrative structure is that we've gone through a period of kind of gluttony and decadence and overconsumption, and now we're experiencing the reckoning. I feel like that's a really natural and profound…

Tyler Cowen: Thousands of years old.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah.

Tyler Cowen: I’m sure you find it in the Bible, among many other places.

Will Wilkinson: That's a story that hits home. We recognize that story. We became decadent and now the chickens are coming home to roost. But when I'm reading about, like, the actual mechanisms that led to the collapse of the financial sector, I don't see that story. The failure of the ratings agencies or the oligopoly that the government granted the rating agencies, for instance, that doesn't fit into a narrative of the American consumer becoming a decadent glutton.

Tyler Cowen: That's right.

Will Wilkinson: It's a different story, but it's a harder story to tell. And when I write columns for the week, or you get 900 words or maybe 1000, and it's hard to write a true story in a thousand words, that you end up leaning on these narrative tropes, these kind of story arcs that we've already internalized and recognized. But most of the time when you tell a story with one of those pre-written arcs, it's just a lie. It's not really the story.

Tyler Cowen: That's right. And I'd like people to be more aware of that. I think my own book, Create Your Own Economy, it's not written in classic story mode. There are particular stories. But the information in the book is organized in a somewhat different way. And you know, it's an interesting question how readers will respond to that. I think it's a clearly written book. Things are explained in a direct way, but at the same time the sense of looking for a story, with parts of that story in every chapter, it's not exactly what the book is.

Will Wilkinson: No. There's a common set of themes that ran through, but each chapter is in some ways self-contained. And each one of them is kind of exploration of a slightly different set of ideas that overall create a big picture. But I couldn't explain to somebody — this is why you probably said you didn't have an elevator story in this sense, is that you can't just summarize it in a simple way. That a lot of it is provocative and trying to get you to think new thoughts. And so because it doesn't fit into a familiar story arc, it's hard to explain to somebody who hasn't already read it, in some ways.

Tyler Cowen: Malcolm Gladwell is a great storyteller as a writer.

Will Wilkinson: Yes, he's fantastic. I described to somebody that I felt like Create Your Own Economy was like a Malcolm Gladwell book if Malcolm Gladwell wasn't such a good storyteller and was actually really smart.

Tyler Cowen: I think I'll take that as a compliment.

Will Wilkinson: It was, because it's full of a-ha moments. You hadn't thought of that before. But they don't fall out of these little potted narratives. Comparing the story of, you know, a business executive in Kansas City and a hairdresser and a bunch of guys at the Naval Observatory, and everything that they're doing supports this one hypothesis that I have — it doesn't have that kind of structure. But I found it compulsively readable. It was hard to put down, even though it wasn't written in the style of books that attempt to be hard to put down.

Toward the end of the book is some of the most profound reflections. So I really enjoyed the chapter on beauty, which I think really gets to a lot of the upshot of the idea of the relationship between neurodiversity and individuality. So your claim and your chapter eight is “beauty isn't what you think it is”. So what is it? Why isn't it what we think it is?

Tyler Cowen: The chapter on beauty to me is the best chapter in the book, though I think it may be the chapter the smallest number of people will understand, but it tries to lay out how much beauty is relative to neurology, and it looks at the literature on who likes what kind of music. And a lot of that is sociological. So people go to the opera for reasons of status, or maybe because they heard classical music when they were a young kid and they learned how to like it.

But a lot of it I think is just plain old neurology. Some people have neurologies where they don't really enjoy music much at all. Other people have neurologies where they're quite comfortable with very information-intensive music that to others sounds like screechy or unpleasant. So personally, I'm a big fan of atonal music, serialism, twelve-tone music. Those classes of approaches, and I'm well aware that to the clear majority of listeners, not only are they not interested, but they're actively hostile toward those styles.

And for a long time, 20 years I think I've been thinking about the question, how can it be that I like this stuff and they don't like it? And I spend all my time reading in aesthetics, trying to find an answer to this question and I failed. But when I read some of the empirical work on neurology and music, it struck me. I think there are basically people who have cognitive profiles, probably from birth, who are able to enjoy this music. It's inevitably a minority taste. It will never be that popular. But for those people, this is truly wonderful music and it's a way of thinking about beauty. It's also a way of thinking about some perspectives on autism.

One thing that differentiates autistics from non-autistics is, I think, different ways in which they perceive matters aesthetic. And a lot of autistics will say that they feel they find more beauty in life than do non-autistics. So they find beauty in different ways and they don't want to give that up. And if you ask them, like, do you want a “cure for autism” or Asperger's or whatever, they'll say no. And this notion that they have this different aesthetic perspective, those are some of the ideas I try to communicate in that chapter.

Will Wilkinson: I think it's the best chapter too, and has the most profound implications. So one of the things that it made me think about were some of the more sophisticated theories of both aesthetic and moral value, which is that aesthetic properties, or moral properties, or what are sometimes called response-dependent — that goodness or beauty, what that is is a property of the external thing that tends to create a certain response in an observer.

Tyler Cowen: That's right.

Will Wilkinson: And I think there's something quite right about that, that there's something I like a lot about response-dependent theories of value. But in order for them to be normative in a very strong way, you need to assume a lot of uniformity in listeners, or a lot of uniformity in the observers of human action. If different individuals have different dispositions to respond in different ways because of different neurologies, then some properties — you’re right to call them beautiful because they do tend to create a particular kind of response on people constituted in a particular way. But they really might not be beautiful to anyone. Response-dependence theories really are relativistic theories.

Tyler Cowen: Absolutely.

Will Wilkinson: The status of the property is based on the observer. It's relative to the observer. And so if we have got lots of different neurologies, we might end up with a kind of value pluralism, or just value relativism, where there's some things that are genuinely are valuable to some people but aren't valuable to other people. And I think that has a lot of implications for a decent politics, a decent idea of the respect that's owed to food, or to music, or art that you don't personally like.

Tyler Cowen: And that connects to how I view this as an individualistic book, a defense of individualism. I'll also say I went back and I reread David Hume on aesthetics. And when you read Hume through this lens, I believe he understood it fully. I was shocked at how clear it was in a way, even though I'd read those essays by Hume five or six times before, but I never understood them in this way.

And this heterogeneity point, it's there very clearly. At times he sounds like he's someone writing on cognitive autism. That human beings differ in the extent to which they can perceive fine gradations in quality or experience, and that this is a fundamental fact of human existence and a fundamental fact for aesthetics. And it's right there on the page. Hume, along with Kant, is maybe the most famous writer on aesthetics ever, or Plato. And I don't feel that anyone's really brought this out from Hume at all.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah, I'm not sure that they have. I think Hume's essay “Of the Standard of Taste” is one of my favorite things that anybody's ever written.

Tyler Cowen: Phenomenal, yeah.

Will Wilkinson: And the influence that had on me was profound. To the extent to which my own view of intellectual life was influenced by it, where I consider questions about difficult intellectual issues, I think of them as somehow having to do with taste. I have a notion of epistemic taste, that there are certain arguments that that taste wrong.

Tyler Cowen: Exactly.

Will Wilkinson: Because you don't necessarily explicitly see the logical structure of an argument, but you're like, there's something wrong with this. And a lot of what you do when you're trained in a discipline, whether it's philosophy or economics, is that you're cultivating a kind of epistemic taste, because you're not implementing an algorithm to tell whether a certain policy argument violates a fundamental principle of economics. You have to develop what people call economic intuition. But what is that? And it feels like what you have when you can taste the elements in a good Merlot. Oh, there's a little bit of blackberry in there.

Tyler Cowen: Economics and politics are much more about taste and aesthetics. I think often we have realized, and there are thinkers that see that, when you go back in the history of ideas. They're not always the most salubrious thinkers, but there's a lot to it. So the notion of how aesthetic, political and economic perspectives somehow intersect or might ever agree. It's a question I've thought about and tried to write on really for the last 10 years.

Will Wilkinson: Well, it's a profound set of issues. You brought up politics. Let's talk about that. One of your last chapters is on autistic politics. So give us a quick rundown of what you take autistic politics to mean.

Tyler Cowen: Well, two of the cognitive features of autism. One is this possibility of greater objectivity across certain kinds of decisions. And we don't exactly know what is the domain there, but I think of autistics as people who in general are not obsessed with revenge. Revenge is something that's narrative and it's a kind of emotional imprinting of information that I see as occurring in a weaker manner in autistics.

I tend to see autistics as naturally-born cosmopolitans. If someone is autistic or quasi-autistic or somewhat artistic, however everyone wants to think or talk about it, but they grow up with a sense of being different, and to then tell such a person, “Well, the real differences are defined by national boundaries”, I think usually they're pretty naturally skeptical of that idea. So this notion of autistics as natural-born cosmopolitans I think is very important. And it's another way in which there's this cognitive or perceptual strength in autism that we don't find enough of in non-autistics.

Will Wilkinson: You also stress, in addition to the natural-born cosmopolitanism, the ability to grasp the functioning of kind of abstract systems, which leads you to say that there's something about autistic politics that inclines people toward more general explanations, appreciation for, say, the rule of law. Can you say something about that?

Tyler Cowen: Yes. Simon Baron-Cohen uses the phrase “systematizer.” He views autistics as naturally born systematizers. I'm not sure that's exactly the right way of conceptualizing it. But you just go with that for the moment, since his theory is quite well known — it implies you'll have a lot of autistics who devote themselves to understanding the operation of highly abstract systems.

So principles laid in political points of view I think will have an overrepresentation of autistics in them, whether it be consistent progressivism or libertarianism or a lot of other different views. The notion that there's a person who just wakes up in the morning and believes in the status quo and gets it all from TV, I think you're a lot less likely to find that, and you're more likely to find some interest in, like, reexamining what are the fundamental principles of ethics and science and politics.

But I don't think it makes autistics any particular partisan point of view. I think it just leads to a kind of style of political thinking, which I very much like.

Will Wilkinson: I would love to see a study on the distribution of people with autistic traits, or who have many of the traits in an autistic cognitive profile, what sort of fields in academia they are most likely to end up in. And I would guess that it would be — maybe there is such a study — but I would guess that it is in sort of systematizing fields. So I would imagine there are a lot of people in engineering, a lot of people in the sciences that create a systematic framework for understanding things.

And when it comes to the humanities or social sciences, I'd expect to see a fair number of somewhat autistic economists, a fair number of somewhat autistic philosophers, people who are involved in very systematic enterprises.

Tyler Cowen: Baron-Cohen finds strong representation in math and engineering. I don't think he looked at all of those other areas, but again, that makes some sense.

Will Wilkinson: Yeah. So what do you make of the French society for post-autistic economics? And autistic there is used as a pejorative, I think.

Tyler Cowen: Well, they changed the name. A lot of autistic people complained. And complained on websites and I think wrote to them. And they changed the name, but they didn't change their explanatory statement. But it's again a simple example of how a term which refers to real human beings who are reading this stuff is used in a very pejorative way.

And even in today's era of political correctness, now that I started noticing it, I'm continually astonished how frequently it happens and how acceptable it is to insult other people just by calling them autistic in some way. And that's another example.

Will Wilkinson: Well, Tyler, it looks like our time is about up. Let me give you a chance to put in a last word. If you were going to say anything that would describe your book, or tell people why they should buy it, go for it.

Tyler Cowen: Well, I'd say this, Will. You're one of my favorite public intellectuals. And if all you people out there listening want to buy a book written by someone who has Will as one of his favorite public intellectuals, you should buy my book. How's that?

Will Wilkinson: That's really sweet. I don't know what to say to that, but thank you very much. It was a great book. I really found it profoundly interesting and stimulating in a way that most big think books aren't. It’s by Tyler Cowen, it’s Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Thanks so much, Tyler. That was fun.

Tyler Cowen: It's been a great chat. Thanks for having me on. And thanks to Peter for making it possible. Bye.