On Saturday, I received my hard copy of Tyler Cowen's latest work of popular economics, Create Your Own Economy: The Path To Prosperity in a Disordered World. Although a work of popular nonfiction, which read easily over the course of a few hours this weekend, this book is chock full of creative insights into what might be called an alternative economic vision of social life. I say "alternative" because until recently most academic economists had confined their interests to finance rather than culture, although Cowen is careful to trace the threads of Adam Smith, F.A. Hayek, and Thomas Schelling (among others) from which his unique vision is woven together. In the sense of developing this alternative vision, this book is actually the continuation of his last, Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. In both books, Cowen assumes the point of view of individual consumers; his data is drawn from individual stories and experiences; his understanding of group behavior and consumption are correspondingly richer with local and temporary detail than most economic analyses of culture. Read in conjunction with Schelling's Micromotives and Macrobehavior and Robert H. Frank's The Economic Naturalist, one can see how the methodologies of Thomas Schelling are facilitating a gradual evolution in economic thought among his students and (thanks to their attention to the needs of non-economists), the public at large. All are recommended reading.
A central premise in Create Your Own Economy is that technology is fostering a more "autistic" lifestyle. Cowen envisions "autism" as a superior ability to filter out particular bits of information from the barrage of stimuli we experience in everyday life, to absorb those filtered bits, and to imbue those disparate bits with meaning by ordering and re-ordering them into a collage of our own creation. John Milton would be proud. It is part of Cowen's project in this book to encourage a more positive definition of autism, a definition that focuses on the cognitive strengths of people who might otherwise be called autistic only because of their inferior ability to communicate in traditional social settings. We might even call this "positive abnormal psychology." Although this aspect of the book is interesting, and is sure to get attention from both the autistic community and the community of psychologists and clinicians who specialize in working with people diagnosed with autism, my focus as reviewer will be on how this vision of culture could be seen through the lens of science. More specifically, I'm going to explain how Cowen's vision of a more creative economy fits with the systems theory that has been the theme of Broken Symmetry. I think it would give Prof. Cowen pleasure to see somebody using his own work as a source of information to be re-ordered within the particular mental framework I bring to bear on understanding economics and culture -- i.e., to see me creating my own Create Your Own Economy. So here's how this book fits within my interior world.
I see Cowen's book as premised on a particular epistemology of culture. Although that epistemology is not quite laid out systematically, what is clear from his unique vision of autism, Hayek's Sensory Order, and his pyramid diagram is that culture is embedded in the neural networks of individuals. For Cowen, economics and culture emerge organically from a process of filtering, absorbing, and reordering information. This is an appealing vision because it promises the possibility that someday economic theories might be understood in terms of biology. And Cowen mentions neuroeconomics in passing, but again Cowen's focus is on culture.
What is interesting is what Cowen does not say about these neural networks and their process of development. Cowen's emphasis is on the largely individualistic process of ordering information that flows into our neural networks. What he does not emphasize is the activity -- especially the social activity -- required to obtain desired bits of information and (perhaps more importantly) to decide what bits should be given privilege in our internal ordering.
For example, in his Chapter on the contrast between autism and Buddhism, Cowen's vision seems heavily weighted in favor of the autistic approach to interior life. On Cowen's view, educational institutions are mostly about using social influence to encourage non-austistic young people to develop more autistic habits. The trouble with this view is that it does not seem to leave enough room for the possibility that some learning and information processing may occur at the social level -- i.e., that some ordering of information cannot be done autistically.
In that vein, I find another theory of learning interesting. According to psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, learning is an individual process, but one that alternates between modes of openness and closedness to external feedback. There is potentially a deep scientific basis for Csikszentmihalyi's theory, which is drawn from the science of networks and self-organized criticality. Given the right balance of external stimuli and internal constraints, networks can self-organize into structures that optimize the flow of information. Optimal flow through networks was studied by Mandelbrot in connection with Zipf's Law. But today it is known that the same self-organized critical structure can be found in an incredibly diverse array of networks in nature, including neural networks and even our economy. In each case, the network structure emerges from an evolutionary process whereby particular network structures persist over time only so long as they can accommodate the stable or unstable variations in flow through the network.
This theory of flow is complementary with Cowen's vision of autistic culture. In particular, the closed mode of operating corresponds directly with Cowen's vision of autism. What seems to be missing from Cowen's vision is the other phase, the phase of extreme openness to feedback and diverse stimulus. (Is this what zen meditation is designed to facilitate?) Within the theory of autism presented by Cowen, it would seem that such openness would be difficult for autistics. Yet it would seem equally important to the creativity and learning characterized by Csikszentmihalyi as "flow."
But why is it so important to maintain balance between openness and closedness? By the end, what becomes clear is that Cowen envisions a radically different structure for society in which individuals cluster into small units -- perhaps even as small as one. And perhaps Cowen is right that this is where current technology is leading us. But can that kind of culture survive?
Robert H. Frank, also a student of Schelling, provides an answer in a recent NYT editorial titled, "The Invisible Hand, Trumped by Darwin?":
By calling our attention to the conflict between individual and group interest, Darwin has identified the rationale for much of the regulation we observe in modern societies... Ideas have consequences. The uncritical celebration of the invisible hand by Smith’s disciples has undermined regulatory efforts to reconcile conflicts between individual and collective interests in recent decades, causing considerable harm to us all. If, as Darwin suggested, many important aspects of life are graded on the curve, his insights may help us avoid stumbling down that grim path once again... The competitive forces that mold business behavior are like the forces of natural selection that molded elk. In each case, we see instances of socially benign conduct. But in neither can we safely presume that individual and social interests coincide.
Technology has enabled us to take finer and finer control over the flow of information and goods that we access as individuals. But over very long times, the benefits of finer control over flow have tended to accrue to the most well-organized groups rather than the most well-ordered individual minds. So perhaps the most dramatic impact of technology will be in how it enables us to be more social, even as autistics.
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