Create Your Own Economy: Tyler Cowen interviewed on The Marketplace of Ideas (8/6/2009)

Today on the Marketplace of Ideas, a conversation with Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, founding blogger at Marginal Revolution, and author of Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. It's the Marketplace of Ideas. I'm Colin Marshall. Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University, one of the two bloggers behind the hugely popular economics and cultural blog Marginal Revolution, and now the author of Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity In a Disordered World. Tyler, welcome back to the program.

Thanks for having me on.

It's surprising. The book is surprising in a lot of ways, and I really enjoyed it. But thinking back to how I— what I read about the book in various press outlets before it came out and what I knew just from the title and design, I was surprised and eventually delighted to find that it had so much, so much in there about the benefits of what you call the autistic cognitive style. But I had I had no clue anything to do with autism was in the book beforehand. Was that a surprise by design?

Well, if you look at the Amazon site, the Amazon site had the review from Publishers Weekly and also a blurb from Temple Grandin which indicated that. I'm not sure I saw all of the pre-release materials for the book, but I do think of the book in many ways as also being a business book. It's about the diversity of human intelligence The difficulty of seeing intelligence in a lot of ways in other people, but the importance of appreciating those intelligences.

I want to get an idea of how this particular book grew and what it started with. And you do mention in there that you received an email from a Marginal Revolution reader that asked if you, if you considered yourself to be anywhere on the autistic spectrum. Was that actually the first seed of this project?

You could think of that as the first feed. I see myself as having some autistic traits, especially with regard to information processing, and that was the hook that got me interested in a lot of these ideas.

There's a lot of talking about autistic stereotypes in the book, and of course none of us are accepted. You mentioned yourself not knowing much about autism before that, and of course I've never studied it, so I didn't know— you know, what I know about autism is essentially what I've learned from your book. And I don't think— of course I didn't read your blog and think there was there were any signs that you landed somewhere on that cognitive style spectrum, and I don't know how many other readers have. So what did this particular reader latch on to?

Before we say any more about this, it's very important to distinguish different ways in which the word autism is used.

Of course.

The formal definition of autism is a series of impairments, including impairments in social communication, and I don't think that's a very good description of me or of the blog or of a lot of other things. I think it's also a bad definition of autism. So when I'm referring to what I call an autistic cognitive profile, I have in mind the ability and desire to digest, process, and order large amounts of information. And that's very pronounced among a lot of autistic people, especially in what's called their preferred areas of interest. And I think that's pretty obvious on Marginal Revolution that I And I would say a lot of other bloggers have that talent.

And it seems to me it's something that— I mean, this is certainly what I thought, but when I see that in other people, I just think of that as smart.

One can take that as a compliment, but I think a point of my book is to say that the autism spectrum has a lot of cognitive advantages and intelligences, and we've been underappreciating them. I wouldn't just say it's smart. There are different kinds of smart. So part of the message of the book is that smart as a notion is more multidimensional than we used to think.

Indeed. Now, when you received this message from the reader asking you, had you ever thought of yourself as having this sort of cognitive profile, what were your immediate thoughts on that?

I'm not sure how well I remember, but I think I didn't really understand what she was saying, and it took me a while for the point to sink in. And if you go to a lot of sources on autism, you'll find a lot of descriptions that I think are misleading. So it really, I think, takes a lot of people a lot of time to cut through falsehoods and misrepresentations.

Where did the research take you from that point on to learn about, to learn about what the autistic cognitive style really is? Where did you— what was your path after that?

Let me just say, I wouldn't quite call it autistic cognitive style. I think our mutual friend Ben Kasanova dubbed it that. I would call it a profile. 'Cause the style implies a bit you can completely choose whether or not you want to put it on, like a piece of clothing almost. And for a lot of people, that's not the case. You know, one really big lead I got was I came into contact with a woman named Michelle Dawson, who is an autism researcher, and she was extremely helpful in enabling me to understand the literature and what I now see as the important distinctions between like autism as a series of impairments and autism as a cognitive profile. So that for me was really a big breakthrough to speak with her.

Now what— I mean, everybody these days seems to do to some degree throw around words like Asperger's and words like autistic. Of course, I mean, I'm guilty of it as well because of course I— in the groups that I would associate with both on the internet, which is a huge subject in your book, and off for example, libertarian circles, it would become a bit of a meme that that circle contained a lot of, a lot of quote-unquote "Asperger's people." Now, what do perceptions like that or notions like that, what do they not understand about autistic thinking?

Well, there's a lot of preconceptions in that question. First, I'd start with the point that if you mean, you know, autism or Asperger's in the formal sense, It's probably somewhere between 1 in 100 and 1 in 150 in the general population. Ah. And some people have even suggested it's more. And if you think of autistics as having some specialized cognitive features or advantages, in a lot of areas they're going to be pretty well represented. So I wouldn't focus on, you know, libertarianism per se. There have been some academic papers that find a kind of overrepresentation in mathematics and engineering. You know, that would be one example of some areas where autistics have been prominent. I think in a lot of the sciences, but I would just stress that we still really don't know. We don't have really good working definitions of autism, and, you know, to what extent is it like a difference in kind, a difference in degree, autism, Asperger's? I see the words used so frequently or misused, and when people hear the resulting discussions, they mostly end up with a lot of misconceptions. That would be my overall response.

There are two mindsets that seem to be prominent in just casual discussions about this sort of subject. Number one, that as we've said before, there are the formal definitions of Asperger's and autism, and many people seem to think of the— seem to think of the extreme cases of those conditions when they think of them. And then I also hear in discussions people talk about how one can place anywhere along the autistic spectrum, and that there's a lot more people affli— afflicted is not the word— affected, maybe, perhaps, is better— than one might think. Now, that second mindset is the one you're more in in this book, correct?

That's a better way of putting it, but even when people speak of along the spectrum, there's some implied notion of, like, severity or extremes. That I don't think is currently well defined. So if you think just very generally of autistics as being a group of people who are especially good at some things and especially not good at a bunch of other things, uh, one of the first things you learn in the literature is like what exactly they're good at or not good at. It varies quite a bit across individuals, even though there are some common or recurring patterns. Also, the notion of like what's even an extreme case or what the word means. I think of it as something multidimensional. There's a kind of specialization of cognitive ability, and this can, you know, occur in people in ways which are socially useful or ways which are, you know, don't result in high social status. So the notion that like there are somehow mild cases who are less autistic and they're the people who do, quote, do well in life And then there are like the extreme cases who, you know, can't do anything at all. I don't think generally those concepts are well-defined as it currently stands. So to unpack the concepts, think in terms of heterogeneities, variances, variances and outcomes. It's a much more difficult language to speak fluently in, but I think it's really quite important that that's a better way of thinking about what we're dealing with. We're used to talking about like Syndromes and diagnoses and conditions and styles and profiles in terms of like good or bad. And when cases come along where there's a high variance of outcomes, it's much more awkward.

The misconceptions here are rooted then in, as you've just said, that this, this language of disorders and diagnoses— what's— and there's so many more questions than there are answers, many more questions than people might have originally realized. What can we, if anything, can we, can we solidly say, or can you solidly say about about autistic thinking? That is, what can somebody— what should somebody know? What should be the first fact they start with to start righting their conception of this?

Well, I would say this: when you take people who are currently diagnosed as autistic, however imperfect that diagnosis may be, and you put them in the laboratory and you give them tests of, say, pattern recognition or spotting small details in patterns, or pitch perception in music, or not being fooled by optical illusions, or solving certain economic problems with greater rationality. In all of these areas, the autistics seem to do better than the non-autistics. So that's a starting point. You know, what's the full span or domain of those cognitive advantages, and do all autistics have them, just certain subgroups, and so on? That gets murky, but there's a growing body of evidence— you know, done by researchers in the lab showing that autism, you know, it's not a disease, it's not a broken brain, but it's something that is, you know, a cognitive pattern or profile that has advantages and disadvantages. And that's what I'd start with.

Now, how did you start to come toward this idea in the book that in the world as it is now and as it's changing now, we could possibly all handle it a bit better, we could work within it better, if we had a few more autistic cognitive qualities ourselves.

Well, one prominent trait or feature in a lot of autistics is a kind of extreme focus or persistence, or just like willingness to stick at, you know, solving certain problems and also self-educating oneself. I think of autistics as classic self-educators. So if you think about, you know, the world of formal education, higher education, without knowing it, my sense is we're trying to take a lot of people who are mostly non-autistic and teach them to be more autistic with regard to these cognitive skills. And that to me, you know, is an odd irony that when we try to teach autistics the cognitive skills of non-autistics, it's called special needs education, but the opposite's going on all the time.

And this is— it's a way you phrase it in the book that I like, partially due to its paradoxical nature. You say that— and correct me if I'm wrong— this is education as a social way to imbue perhaps more autistic qualities. Is that correct?

It's a part of what we're doing in education is trying to teach non-autistics to be able to mimic autistics in some regards. That's right.

What are the ways that education has done that most effectively, to your mind?

Well, most education to my mind doesn't work.

Ah.

Most people when they go to school, they take classes. It's a mix of they don't learn from those classes or what they learn they never use later in life. But still, there are a lot of cases where education works spectacularly well. We have Nobel Prize laureates and top research universities and classes which change people's lives. Those are the outliers, but there's some kind of like magical click between student and instructor— and a way in which the physical presence of the instructor drives the student to become his or her own autodidact in the future, that's just magical. I wish we had a formula for replicating it, but I think very much we don't.

And now, if one of the qualities of education is to put a bit more autism into students that don't have those particular qualities, how well does education work for those who do have larger share of autistic qualities?

Well, I think a lot of autistic people have trouble in most of the educational systems right now. The systems, not surprisingly, are largely designed for non-autistics, and a lot of special needs education— like, even if you have a class of autistic people together, if you think of autism as having this high diversity of outcomes and difference in terms of interests and cognitive skills, there's not like some single simple method like for teaching the autistic, so to speak, that's going to work with everyone. A lot of autistic education tends to be self-education, I found, speaking to autistics, corresponding with autistics, and that's a kind of saving grace. The school environments have like bullies and peer pressure, a lot of environmental issues for autistics, and in the past very often it simply hasn't worked that well.

In this environment, with the internet at the stage of development it is, with the accessibility of information as it is, this is one that— I don't want to say that it doesn't render formal education irrelevant for reasons that we've mentioned. There's no face-to-face instructor-student communication, for example, but it must make it quite a bit less important for somebody with autistic qualities. They can compensate for that educationally, correct?

Sure, just take all the people who learn economics through blogs. I'm not suggesting they're all or mainly autistic, but the point is if you have troubles with school environments for whatever reasons, you now have a big alternative, and in a lot of ways it's a better alternative if you're self-motivated.

The element absent from this strategy then is, I'm guessing, as your colleague— a point your colleague Robin Hanson makes is that they then still, they lack the signal that will identify to outside parties that they possess that knowledge, right?

That's right. So the social credentials from self-educating are much weaker, and that's a problem. And as a society as a whole, there are some dimensions along which we're investing too much in education. But this kind of— you want a better degree than the guy next to you to get the job, and we haven't figured out a way of limiting those, like, zero or negative-sum games competing for status.

Now for a reader of your book who is, as far as autistic qualities go, they don't have any more than the average member of the population, and they're reading it and they're looking for ways to deal with the modern world. What are the most important, the most important qualities of autistics they could observe if they wanted to learn from autistics? You know, what qualities of theirs they might do better to imitate— isn't maybe the word— but observe and learn from so that they can better deal with information— what, to simplify it a little more, what autistic qualities would be, you think, the most beneficial for people who don't have them to acquire?

Yeah, I use the label in the book, "infovore." So autistics are the natural infovores of our society. Instead of like carnivore, herbivore, infovore are consuming, ordering, collecting information. And this skill, and then synthesizing it, has become more and more important. Having good filters has become more important. Having really strong preferred areas of interest and specializing in those and going on to know a lot about them, that's very important. And those are all connected to this autistic cognitive profile. But, you know, I think a lot in terms of what the average person can learn, I'd give a somewhat different answer. I just say, you know, virtually everyone listening actually knows probably some autistic people. You, and indeed they, may or may not be aware of this fact, but you know them already, you're already learning from them. I think in a way that's the more important point.

You mentioned the quote from Clay Shirky that I've, that I've enjoyed, that I've quoted to many other people myself, that we are living in an age, to paraphrase, of filter failure more so than information overload. And how much, how much better can autistics handle this than non-autistics? I mean, I know that's not the best categorization for those two groups, but people with more autistic qualities, how can they, how can they better deal with filter failure?

Well, again, I'd go back to this idea of high variance. I think of autistics as being people who are extraordinarily good at processing a lot of information in certain preferred areas, which will vary with the individual, but they also often have extreme troubles processing information from other areas. So the simple question of, like, if a fire truck goes by and there's a loud siren, uh, there's some subset of autistics who are very bothered by this, sometimes even to the point where the environment becomes a difficult one for them. So it's not that they're in every way more adept at processing information. They have this more extreme specialization. So it's a big reason why autistics have a lot of problems in a lot of common environments. They experience a kind of perceptual load because they're kinds of information they're not very good at processing. I would say music is another example where a large subset of autistics seem to be more interested in it, more involved in it emotionally, and they're better at understanding it.

This brings up a huge subject in your book, which is of course culture. And I, I think that the average person can see an easy example of filter failure when, for example, they go on the internet and they try to find some new music or a new form of entertainment of any kind to acquire online. There's just so much of it, and I can't help but notice as well, one of the most enjoyable things on your blog, Marginal Revolution, is the way it acts as a bit of a cultural filter. You know, I very often follow your links. I have many friends who who do. I mean, did you know— did you know you were acting as a cultural filter for people early on?

Very much so, and in fact you're my cultural filter for experimental cinema.

Really?

Oh, that's an honor. I was not long ago on my Netflix queue and I put in about 10 movies. That Thai director, his name is too many syllables for me to pronounce correctly.

Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Much better than I could have done, but I learned about him through you and they're in my queue. I'll probably get to them in 3 or 4 weeks' time given my rate of movie watching.— and like what you do for me is this bundling of your personality, your judgment, your filters, and I like aggregate what you say with other stuff I know, and I get something very useful out of it, and it's fun. Like this blend of useful and fun is so much of what the web's about. It's in a way a totally superficial point, but I think it's actually still an underappreciated one.

To sort of reciprocate your point, I was— I was reading in the profile that they ran of you, the 6 questions on The Economist's blog, Free Exchange, when you mentioned listening to atonal music in the morning, and that kind of aligned with my own discovery of my enjoyment of atonal music. So I've used you as a filter for that as well. And I do wonder though, and I'm not perfectly— I'm not perfectly sure how to phrase this question, but When you examine yourself as a cultural filter, I want to say what sort of aesthetics or sensibilities are you filtering to people? I mean, can you explain what sort of qualities that people respond to that you link them up to culture containing seem to be important?

Well, beyond any specific recommendations, the general notion that what I'm recommending ought to be something I'm truly deeply enthusiastic about. You know, Samuel Johnson's point about when the book was over, did you really wish it was longer than it was? And to have that as a kind of gold standard and adhere to it like very honestly and sincerely and just say what you think. I would describe that as my overall style. I'm not like high culture, low culture, or any particular like social level you know, something's drama or sports or reality TV or opera, you know, all that to me is on a kind of methodological par, and if it evinces that excitement in me, I'm willing to push it.

I completely agree with that because it seems to me, maybe you had the same experience, I don't know, but before there were so many blogs, before there were so many Twitter accounts linking people to things, many of my— I couldn't even call them recommendations, but the ways that I found culture to experience the filters would be so crude. I would look in a very broad genre. I would look in the Blockbuster Video drama genre. Of course, there's 10,000 movies in there. This might be a more revealing way to put this question, but when you are searching for cultural filters or filters for anything yourself online, is the same— do you look for the same qualities? You simply want one that is enthusiastic and honest about that enthusiasm?

Yes, and I trust individual people more than any particular outlet. So I'm not sure there's any particular cultural outlet that per se has cachet with me, but there are individual reviewers of many kinds in many areas, and that's a big shift that a lot of people have made. I guess there's still some particular outlets, like there's the notion of a Pitchfork review. Of course, even that is web-only. But the idea that just because something is praised in a newspaper that it means anything Mostly we're all getting over that, I think. I mean, that was just a big mistake in the first place.

A big mistake that is now being framed by the newspaper industry as the way things must be.

That's right. But the notion of, you know, I've read this movie reviewer for so many years, and even if I don't always agree, I can calibrate with regard to him or her. That's extremely powerful, and that's what people respond to. So I find as a blogger, if I recommend a book A lot of people will buy it because I personally have recommended it. They just think I'm a good filter for them.

We brought up before our mutual friend Ben Casnocha, who's been on this program and who I was talking to recently about long-form culture versus short-form culture. And it's a very common lament in trend pieces to say that the internet has made us dumber, has made us more reliant on, addicted to very short-form culture, tweets and and viral videos and whatnot. Ben asked me if I thought that might be a problem. And what I said to him, it was not an idea that I'd formulated before, but it was that it seems to me the way we use short-form culture, it's no surprise that it would outnumber the hours we spend on long-form because the short-form act as the guides, as the channels by which we find our way to long-form culture. Do you think— how much do you believe that? I'm not sure I 100% do myself, close to it. But do you think that's a valid statement?

It's a very valid statement. Uh, trying to break down the distinction between short and long form is a key theme in my book. If you look at what you actually use Google, Twitter, and other services for, most people, not all, but most people, they use them to follow long-running stories, narratives, debates, biographies, and histories. Long-running meaning a year, 5 years, 30 years, 500 years, whatever. And the short bits in our mind are a long-running narrative, and that's what the outside commentators don't get. So it's mostly people doing more of the long, but the coherence of that long-term outlook isn't always visible to outside observers.

It's a hidden long form then. It's just because it doesn't appear in the form of a 4-hour opera or a 1,500-page novel, it doesn't get recognized then as long form?

Absolutely. So if I take myself, I've been following the career of folk rock star Roger McGuinn now for over 30 years. It used to be I'd have to track down obscure fanzines or like find ads in the Village Voice where he might be giving a concert. Uh, now I can follow him on Twitter, I read reviews of what he's doing, I listen to MP3s. I'm really up on whatever's going on, and it's a very long-running story. It's over 30 years long. I finally can do it in a satisfactory way, but to an outsider it just looks, oh, you know, I check my Twitter account, I'm there for 17 seconds, then gone, whatever. But that's a complete misunderstanding of what's really going on. Just like Facebook helps you keep in touch with people from, say, high school. And users, I think, get this intuitively. It's why they do it. They don't even have to think about it. It's the commentators who are screwed up.

And these pieces, as we mentioned, The Atlantic had the COVID story, Is Google Making Us Stupid? not long ago. Where do you think all this idea, and it's such a common one, that in this internet age we are at our culture's dumbest moment, where does that idea come from? Because it is so commonly held.

Well, it's a charge that's been leveled at almost every cultural innovation, including the printing press, the novel, the opera. The one time it was right maybe was for TV, in the early years of TV, like from the late '50s up until the age of cable. Actually, that's the one time it probably was true. But virtually all of these innovations have made us smarter, and they've been a lot of fun as well.

And I, I have to ask this: what do you think was behind the early TV era in actually— in its actually being dumber?

Well, only having 3 major networks was a big part of it, but I think also it was a new medium, and it just took people a while to figure out how it worked. And the time and place where it sprung up, an America of that age, was in some ways not ideal for experimentation on a large scale. There was phenomenal cultural experimentation, you know, in 1959. You have John Coltrane and you have rock and roll and so on, but those were to niche audiences. Like mainstream American life was still fairly conformist. And if somehow you imagine like television having started in 1971, it might have been a lot better more quickly.

It's interesting you mentioned the three networks because I was thinking to myself, that's— I mean, that sounds— that has sounded like a joke to children for a couple generations now that there were ever just those three. But with the plurality of cultural outlets now, how much sense does it even make to comment on quote-unquote "the culture" generally?

Well, it's obviously more diverse, it's more heterogeneous, it's harder to make statements about like major trends or what's culturally central today. I'm very comfortable with that. The neoconservatives used to say this would be the beginning of the end, but I think as Americans we still share a lot of values in common, and one of those values is attachment to the idea of diversity. So the idea that you've got to build a culture around everyone watching I Love Lucy on, you know, whatever evening it was on, I just don't see why that has to be true.

It does get brought up quite often, the collective experience of television being lost, but I think to myself, happening to tune into a show at the same hour as everybody in the country, or, you know, a chunk of the people in the country did, that didn't feel all that collective to me.

Did it to you? People would be, you know, very often alone in their homes or with a small number of family members, and what they saw was not always refreshing or instructive. In my view, that should not be seen as any kind of golden age. The golden age of TV I think we've mostly had over the last 5 to 10 years I think it will continue, but you know, we'll see. The internet to some extent I think is displacing cable TV a bit. I'm not sure the next 5 years of TV will be as good as the last 5 years.

The importance of using cultural filters well and organizing information as, as the autistic cognitive style does so well, I mean, it's clearly important once you learn about that and once you observe the sheer amount and variety of culture out there to be filtered. And to be organized. And but there's a chapter in your book where you talk about— it references Buddhism quite a bit. It talks about the opposite, the— I don't know, I can't quite call it anti-autistic cognitive style, but what's to be gained from viewing existence in its kind of Buddhist-style totality. Now, how does one go about that in this era?

Well, there's a notion in Buddhism— it's by no means the only strand in Buddhism— but of being meditative and contemplative and getting your mind away from ordering and away from ideas of possession, a kind of reduction to a contemplation of a lower information state of affairs. And, uh, you know, maybe just personally I find that hard to do. I think probably for a lot of people it's great. And again, I'd stress it's only one strand in Buddhism. But what I wanted to do was just construct for the reader this notion of there being a broader dialogue about information processing that it's not just some idea someone came up with 7 years ago because of the web, but it's been a key theme in human thought really for millennia, and it pops up in religions and books and a lot of other guises. And like the web and, you know, the newer views of autism, they're really just another step in this ongoing saga of how human beings think about their own abilities to process information. So I wanted to build a kind of tradition for people to see this as something very time-honored and something very important.

If you've just tuned in, this is the Marketplace of Ideas. I'm Colin Marshall. You can hear our complete interview archive at ColinMarshallRadio.com. My guest is Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, co-blogger at Marginal Revolution, and author of Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. It's something that I understand with this particular chapter when discussing the, as you said, the low information state. Now, it is, it's something of a paradox because I, I do agree with it and I don't because I do want information. But at the same time, it's something that I talk often about. I want to get a lot of information from blogs, for example, but I want to read the fewest number of blogs. That I can. That seems like a total contradiction, but is that way of thinking at all in line with what you describe in the book? I mean, it's about information ordering somewhat, but it's also about minimizing it, if that makes any sense at all.

You want to do it effectively, so you can't read 1,000 blogs a day. But I don't quite think it's true that most people want to read as few as possible. Like, if you could get everything you needed to know from one source, like the master blog, think of it I think you'd actually be a bit unhappy. There's some joy in serendipity. There's a joy to like skipping and hopping around and visiting different sites. And you don't want there to be too many, but not too few either. And there's some happy medium. But if it were all just in one place, it would be a less interesting web.

That's true, although I have to say that I do— I consider one blog to be— I know it's technically possible to read one blog, but I should really phrase it as the— as few— reading as few blogs as I can, as is pleasurable, I'll say, because one blog, yes, you're right, that is too few. There's too little randomness. But how do you go about infusing necessary randomness when you find it lacking? I suppose I should phrase it like that.

Well, a simple way is to go to Twitter and put what you're interested in into the search function and see what other people are saying. Depends what time horizon you're interested in. Twitter is great for what are people saying now. You know, News Google is great for what did people say in the last 3 weeks. Google is great for what did people say in the last 5 to 10 years. There are different sampling frequencies, but there's plenty of ways to have serendipity on the web. Or go to Google, you know, they have that function, I'm feeling lucky. Try that.

Oh yes, the good old I'm feeling lucky.

How many blogs do you read, by the way?

I currently have 19 RSS feeds in my reader. I do use Google Reader. I've recently gotten it down to 19. I would actually—

I'm about the same.

Oh, okay. So then I do feel like I'm good company. I would like to have it be somewhat less, but that seems to be as far as I can go for the moment. Nothing else I can cut off. You mentioned Twitter. I can't help but ask why there's such an anti-Twitter bias more so than any other any other information service that I've seen. Why do you think there is so much kind of bitterness and spite toward hate and toward Twitter in the public sphere?

Well, I think Twitter or some Twitter successor will be huge, and it's still underrated in its importance. But if you think about it, it sounds so stupid. Like when you explain blogs to people, some of them get it, some of them don't, but a lot of them say, just from the explanation, "Gee, that sounds interesting." Twitter, no one does. It's like 140 characters or less. They think that's crazy. It's the ultimate dumbing down. Uh, but you can't view Twitter in isolation. Twitter is a way to get to links. Twitter is a way of aggregating information. And it's the fact that a whole set of people are giving small messages that is so powerful, and not just one. And it's pretty easy to search. So I'm a huge fan of Twitter. And, uh, I think it will always have that bad reputation until people start using it. They think it's all about, "Hey mom, I had eggs for breakfast." And you can use it for that, but it's not its real power.

I was just going to bring up that example. People will so often say, "Why do I want to read what you ate for breakfast?" For some reason, that's always the example. And I'll say to them, "Nobody on my Twitter feed talks about their breakfast, or very few." I mean, does anybody on yours do that?

No, you know, I've never tweeted my breakfast, but in fact, if I did, I think it would be Excellent point. My breakfasts are superb. I think a lot of people maybe should want to know what I had for breakfast.

I have to admit you are, I think, the one exception. Maybe you and Mark Bittman, maybe I would like to know what you both ate, you know, whenever and wherever because I do get ideas from that. There's a part in the book that I wanted to make sure to touch on which is the— it's not necessarily the downside of information organization but You talk about how we do tend to organize information into the story form and how there are a lot of positive qualities to that. I mean, what is the positive quality/negative quality balance to the way— how much we like to organize in stories? Because there's obviously a simplification downside to it.

Well, most people love stories and narratives. I think we're programmed to do so. We overall remember them more vividly. They have more force. They have political force. Most religions are organized around the idea of stories. As human beings, most of us have this fixation. The downside tends to be oversimplification, and I think also a lack of objectivity. Stories are a way of encoding bias. One interesting point the book makes is there's some evidence that autistics are less likely to think in terms of stories in the traditional way, and in some regards they encode information more objectively. We can't do without stories, but I'd like us all to be a little more suspicious of them.

There does seem to be a little bit of— a little bit too much credulity where stories are concerned. I often read the blog, the community blog LessWrong, which grew out of Robin Hanson's Overcoming Bias, and it is a recurring theme there that our stories misleading us. It does bring me to an element of the book, one of the most fascinating I thought, which is about, once again, our cultural preferences, what we find beautiful. And how that may be rooted in someone's neurology and in someone's cognitive profile. And I was thinking to myself in the context of stories, you mentioned— so I'll use this as an example. You mentioned how I've written about and recommended films. I sometimes like films with strong stories, but I can equally like films that do not have strong stories. And people will sometimes email me and say, how can you like that film? There wasn't a strong story. And I said, well, I always say that's just That's one way a film can be good. That particular preference of mine, not preferring— not necessarily preferring a strong story to a weaker one, would you say that would be rooted cognitively?

Sure, absolutely. And the kinds of music you like are also rooted in cognition. And you know, there are people who actually can't much enjoy music at all.

That was intriguing, the amusics. Now, how big is that? —how big is that community, I'll call it?

I don't remember the exact numbers from the epidemiology, but I think it's at least 1%. Milton Friedman, Che Guevara, and Sigmund Freud all belong to this category. So it's a minority, but it's not just a few people in the world. It's like a fair number of people in absolute terms. And I think it's also the case the kinds of music we like—yes, there is a big social component, but it also has to do with neurology. And I think people who like atonal music, essentially they're people who have the neurologies that make that kind of information relatively easy for them to process and then enjoy.

I want to get a little deeper into this specific subject because I think it's just so interesting the way that, as I believe you have it framed in the book, that someone who listens to atonal music will enjoy the challenge of putting that music, that information, because of course that's what music is, it's another form of information, into a framework in their head, whereas someone who doesn't enjoy tonal music, they will— I mean, they'll be fine putting maybe more of a pop song into a framework, organizing that information. Is that at all correct?

We're all familiar with the notion of music that's too easy, or like you hear it once, you don't need to hear it again. But different people draw that line at different places. And one point I make is a lot of the stuff that sounds ugly to one group of people It's just another group of people drawing the line somewhere else.

With the examples of what sort of culture is preferred by those with more autistic characteristics, what sort of patterns, if any, do you see there? I know that, I mean, as I've learned from the book, autism is a diverse thing, but are there any patterns of the more autistic qualities, the more types of certain things they tend to like?

Well, I would put it this way. On average, I think autistics have more extreme tastes in music, but not in the direction of any particular genre. The notion of liking some kind of music a lot in a way that's not just a mainstream taste, you're more likely to find that among autistics. And that, I think, includes atonal music, but as one example of many others. That's one example.

And then you as well, you have the quote from the woman in your book who talks about listening to 2 songs or 1 song at once and just looping them over and over and, and not caring if I have this right, who, who made the song or what even the context to it is, just simply listening to the sound of it over and over. That's right.

I would also add it's quite possible that there are more amusics among autistics than other groups, and that gets back to this point of high variance. But on average, autistics seem to enjoy music more or appreciate it more But they also perhaps have a higher rate of people who don't enjoy it at all. So Temple Grandin has described herself in this fashion, that she doesn't really enjoy music.

This brings to mind a kind of an amusing image, but the, the, the fact of, or the idea of, the rooting of cultural preferences in one's neurology, it makes me think of so many of these sprawling extended discussions I've seen play out on the internet where someone will say, You don't like this artist? Well, you're wrong. Here's why you should like them. Here's how I'm going to convince you to like this music, this film, this book. And there seems to be more of a great deal of futility to that in this light, is there not?

That's right. If people for neurological reasons like different kinds of music, you know, I'm all for the dialogue and it's fine if they scream at each other a bit, but ultimately they're not going to convince each other. —So most people I know think atonal music is ugly, and to their ears, I'm pretty sure it is. I don't think there's anything I can say or cite or even play for them that's going to change that.

Things like atonal music or other forms that get publicly referred to as acquired tastes, do you think there's validity to that, that these tastes are often acquirable, or is this more set in stone than that?

I think you can acquire musical tastes, you know, to a pretty high degree. So people who live, say, in the South or West, maybe they're more likely to enjoy country and western music. People who, you know, study undergraduate political science at Brown University are more likely to enjoy indie rock and so on. But that aspect of the problem is pretty well known. The neurological underpinnings are what we've to some extent been neglecting. But absolutely, a lot of people who don't like atonal music could, like, train themselves to like it, but I still think most people just can't.

Now, because you're so well-positioned here, you give cultural recommendations on your blog and you seem to get a great deal of feedback about them. How much do you see this idea play out in the responses you get to your recommendations, that there's some people who consistently like the kinds of things you recommend, there's some who don't, and the Twain kind of don't meet, but some acquire the taste. I mean, you have what seems like a great laboratory there, do you not?

Uh, it is a laboratory, but I don't really collect data on the readers. So while I think your description is a good one, I don't have any running way of keeping track of it. And people do send me emails, and I have a vague sense that what you're saying is correct, but, uh, their emails, much as I enjoy them, but they get deleted. And if people recommend something to me, I either basically jot it down right away or not. So I don't have the data to know exactly what the distribution of taste is there.

I'm curious about this. Are you— do you ever encounter readers who write to you and seem to have figured out your cultural cognitive profile to the extent that their recommendations are consistently dead-on?

Again, I'm not sure I keep track of it well enough to say, but I find when people write to me and recommend things I like what they recommend at a pretty high rate, and those emails have pretty high value to me. So I think a lot of people out there are somehow reading me, whether consciously or not, and figuring out what I like. So it seems to work. To me, it's one of the big advantages of reading a blog. It's like a huge ad. Here's who I am aesthetically, and then like, help! And you get help all the time.

It's great. That is— I operate on a much smaller scale than you do, but that is exactly what I have found. It's wonderful that people actually respond to that too. It feels like almost altruism on their part.

That's right, and every day I get good stuff, good recommendations. I can't pursue them all. I get multiple ideas every day—books, music, travel, food.

Aside from the domain of culture, toward the end of the book you bring the qualities of autistic thought to politics, and that—I mean, the phrase autistic politics kind of threw me for a loop. Right there, because I think of politics, I think of politician, I think of a man like Bill Clinton, who I don't think would ever be categorized as autistic by anybody. And what can the way autistics think bring to politics, to our political discourse, even to the way societies are run?

Well, I think the whole idea of the us versus them mentality is more foreign to autistics on average than it is to non-autistics. And I think that as a society as a whole, if we could get away from us versus them, which is based in over-reliance on narrative, false encoding of information, false, like, attachments to things simply because they're yours in particular ways, that to me would be a huge gain if we could in this way, in this cognitive way, be more autistic, be less about us versus them.

It does seem to me that, I mean, and that's a very appealing thought, you know, to see the end of us versus them ideology would be— I I would welcome it certainly. I'm not sure who in the end wouldn't.

But— Well, most people wouldn't, I would say. Oh, really? They enjoy us versus them. They're programmed to do it. It won't ever go away, but if we could just have a bit less of it, I think it would be a very good thing.

Of course, on some level, you know, I quote-unquote enjoy us versus them, but I mean, it's not that higher-order enjoyment, if that makes any sense. It's a very base thing that I dislike when I see it in myself.

Well, you in this way might already have quite a good point of view, but most people's version of how us versus them should go away is that the uses should win and the thems should lose, and then all will be fine. And that's exactly the us versus them problem.

Now, the idea that autistics are better at categorizing information— in some ways. In some ways, yes, it's true. Well, with the caveats we've laid out. I want to just get clear on this point. We talk about their strengths in terms of not falling victim to bad or negative, more destructive, maybe misleading information categorization methods like stories that might be too simple or us and them categories. But at the same time, they can also categorize well in other areas. This might seem like a paradox to some people listening that they can they're better at categorizing, but then they, they kind of aren't as well. How can this be cleared up?

That's a very complicated question. Let me give you a specific example. There was a paper published recently, you might be interested in seeing it, where they show both non-autistics and autistics some different movies and dramatic scenes, and they ask them to write down what they noticed from the scene. And the autistics are much better at noticing small details in the scene. The non-autistics are more focused on writing down what they saw in terms of a simple narrative, which has a particular structure. Now, you know, you can debate, you know, which is the better way to be, which is the advantage, which is the disadvantage, and those are interesting questions, but I think we should start by putting aside the normative questions. We should start by refusing to assume the non-autistic way is necessarily better, and just appreciate that here is human diversity, here's a group of people, you know, being better at something, and that there's a way we can take advantage of that and learn from it.

And I have to ask this then: do you see a glimmer of a trend toward that?

Of a trend toward appreciating diverse intelligences more? Absolutely. You know, my book is part of it, but I view it as a broader movement sometimes called neurodiversity. And I'm drawing upon the work of a lot of other people and the research and ideas of a lot of other people, and I see it growing all the time.

The title of the book once again is Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. Tyler Cowen, thank you so much for taking the time again to come on the program.

It's been a pleasure. I'll keep on reading you.

You can read all of Tyler Cowen's blogging at MarginalRevolution.com. This has been the Marketplace of Ideas. I've been Colin Marshall. Our music, as always, is produced by Ben Althaus. His website is available at BenAlthaus.com. For more information on the Marketplace of Ideas or for our complete interview archive, visit ColinMarshallRadio.com. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll catch you next time.