The very inspiring thread of Tyler Cowen's Create Your Own Economy is muddied by a surprising presentation of autism as primarily a set of intellectual gifts. To hear Cowen sing, you'd think autism was strictly an attribute of heroes—heroes who are sadly abused by the prejudice of mainstream neurotypicals. He argues that we should all emulate autistics by memorizing and ordering information—and that we are already doing so, through social networks and personal technology. He takes umbrage at the notion of autism as a "disorder" and calls those who see it that way bigots. He spends chapter after chapter extolling the virtue and importance of autistics' legendary "ordering" abilities, and the relevance of information-ordering to a modern information economy.

I was perplexed—isn't there some downside to autism? Other sources say so. Wikipedia, citing medical journals, describes it as a developmental disorder, and gives figures showing that autistic adults have a very poor success rate (circa 12%) at living independently from day to day.

Cowen paints far too rosy a picture of autism, it seems. And while he does good to call out its strengths, and rail against prejudice, I'm not sure his book contributes to a good understanding of the condition.

Autistic people, like any others, have the right to be treated with dignity and with all the respect they earn. Cowen is right to point out that, as "autism" becomes a commonplace label for a broad class of people, it becomes easier to write them off: to give them less credit than they deserve, and deprive them of dignity.

But if autism is a cognitive inability to participate in the communication protocols that allow us all to coordinate as a society, then it is a disorder.

And, doesn't Cowen elevate the importance of "information ordering" too far? Studying and organizing information can be useful; but I've seen plenty of such obsessions that are, truly, useless—or at least not paying off. The people who memorize train timetables or baseball stats seem to me to be wasting their time. Lots of people know facts but interpret them too rigidly: they can't apply fuzzier knowledge—established associations and probable linkages—or flex what is known into a fuller understanding. Information should be carried by paper and hard drives, not by human memories. Our minds should be left free to perceive, to compute, and to enjoy.

Here's an alternative heroism: the real heroes of today are those with a holistic, integrative and flexible picture of our information-dense world. These are the torch-bearers of the liberal arts 2.0, the intellectual politics of Barack Obama.