Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World

by Tyler Cowen

Book Overview

Economist Tyler Cowen boldly shows that the way people think is changing more rapidly than it has in a very long time. Not since the industrial revolution has a man-made creation - in this case, the World Wide Web - so greatly influenced the way people's minds work and their human potential. Cowen argues brilliantly that people are breaking down cultural information into ever smaller bits, ordering them and reordering them in their minds and computers...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0525951237
• ISBN13: 9780525951230
• Release Date: July 2009
• Publisher: Dutton Books
• Length: 259 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Learn from autistic people and lead a better life in a disordered world

How can you survive in a bad economic time? Will you surrender or change the way you lived? How can we improve our internal worlds to lead a better life? The book "Create your own economy: the path to prosperity in a disordered world" wrote by Tyler Cowen is a guide to help you discover yourself and improve your potential to live a better life. Cowen believes that it is the value and the creative power of the individual that drives the world to be prosperous. How to discover the internal world for ourselves? Cowen answers the question from an autistic way. He emphasizes the cognitive strength of autistic people and their contribution to the society. The contents can be divided into four parts. In the first part, Cowen explains that because of the improvement of technologies, the world is filled with bits of information. This requires mental ordering to make these bits into a coherent vision. In the second part, he introduces the advantages of autistic people which are good to create your own economy in your internal world. The main advantage is the cognitive strengths, which include strong skills in ordering knowledge and perceiving small bit of information in preferred areas. The third part is concerned on what we need to learn from autistic people. In the last part, Cowen describes the future world and suggests showing respect to individuals and diversity of human beings. In the book, Cowen discusses the advantages autistic people possess over non-autistic people in certain fields. Examples of successful autistic people are provided so that readers can better understand his argument. The main message Cowen hopes to deliver is that non-autistic people should learn something from autistics in this chaotic world. With the development of the internet, and technologies like instant messaging, cell phones and internet programs like facebook, the world has become information-centered. We are constantly saturated by new information. This necessitates the development of a framework that allows us to internally relate information and order the information we receive. This is what Cowen refers to as the process of creating your own economy. Cowen argues that autistics typically have significant cognitive strengths which emerge from autism. These include abilities in ordering knowledge and interpreting bits of information in the areas they are interested in. Cognitive skills associated with autism help to self-assembly of bits of information and create an ordered mental world; people possessing such skills are well suited to the present information-heavy landscape. Cowen explores "autism" in nearly every chapter of the book and discusses the advantages of autism on cognitive skills by answering the following questions. Why autism engenders "big-picture thinking"? How cognition provide insights into aesthetics? What we can learn from an autistic interpretation of politics. This book offers a fresh and interesting view on how the culture of autism

An Autism Spectrum Manifesto

Let me start by stating very clearly that I am not in any way removed from this material. I am a long-time reader of Tyler Cowen's (and Alex Tabarrok's) Marginal Revolution blog. I observed Prof Cowen's third or so reference to autism or Asperger's and pointed it out to my wife, who is an Aspie. She and Tyler then began a correspondence on the subject; she is the Kathleen on page 1. We have since met Tyler and his fellow GMU economists. I have also read three other books of which Tyler was the author or co-author. That said, I can honestly say that I enjoyed this book much more than Discover Your Inner Economist: Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist. That book, unlike this book, drew heavily on themes he had already explored on the blog. This book was much more like In Praise of Commercial Culture. To be sure, you may see parts of both IPoCC and CYOE pop up in MR from time to time. How could you not? But he has not explicitly explored the arguments pursued in this book, so much of this should be fresh. (and by the way, Tyler's form of "argument" is pleasantly original but not polemic, so do not let that word put you off if you have grown tired of Crossfire-type shouting matches in pop culture). Both IPoCC and CYOE take very optimistic views of modern culture and the future of humanity. I would not, however, characterize them as Panglossian. Even when I find myself in disagreement with the conclusions or assertions, I do like the arguments Tyler makes in favor of things like Facebook or Twitter, atonal music, and other aspects of modernity. I am not going to relate those here; they are too nuanced to try in a sentence or two. But I will say that one of the themes with which I agree heartily and is one reason why I enjoy much of Prof Cowen's work is that familiar things can become too familiar, and old lines of reasoning can become boring. If we enjoy thinking at the margins, we should seek out the unfamiliar, the different, the thing which we might otherwise reject out of hand. To do otherwise is to revel in confirmation bias. If there is a word of warning, which I think may be warranted because of some of the negative reviews here, it is that Tyler Cowen's economics is not a "Here is how to invest your money and what is wrong with macro policy" type of economics. First and foremost, economics is a social science. It therefore concerns itself with social interaction; as an undergraduate, I remember hearing it defined as the study of human choice, not of marketplace transactions. The title refers to this bigger picture type of economics, and so may be translated as "Create your own set of choices". If the world seems bigger and more complex than ever, it seems that we also have more tools for selecting, constraining, and customizing our choices from that world than ever. Technology is a two-edged sword. As to the other controversy, Tyler's discussion of autism, I would say he has nailed it. Withou

Essential reading for our time

As other reviewers have noted, this book is difficult to summarize. Prof. Cowen insightfully touches on topics ranging from Adam Smith, to contemporary classical music, to facebook. Unlike some books that present one idea in the introduction, then repeat it endlessly, nearly page in prof. Cowen's book contains something new and thought-provoking. I found it difficult to put down. Most exciting for me was the idea that internet, far from making us more impatient, may allow us to assemble long and valuable narratives from 'small bits'. This idea changed how I think about my time spent online. Rather than feeling vaguely guilty about the time I 'waste' reading blogs, I am thinking about the stories that each individual blog post adds to. Cowen's notes that the internet (and computers, ipods, etc.) are exceptionally good at helping us to organize information. Intriguingly, Cowen argues that this may in a positive sense be making us all more autistic. Far from a being a distraction, the internet may be enabling us to appreciate culture in individual ways that were not previously possible. (For the economists out there, you need to read the book to see how much of this is explained by the most important theorem you've probably never heard of: the Alchian-Allen theorem.) Whether or not you agree with all of Cowen's arguments, this book is likely to make you see the world - and yourself - differently. Highly recommended.

Ordering information (and the world) so you don't have to

On skimming this book, your first reaction might be bemusement. What does this book have to do with the economy, when the most common theme threading the rather diverse chapters is autism? Only reading through will finally make you realize that the economy Tyler Cowen talks about is not the one defined classically ( and now in its death throes ?), but the one that broadband connectivity and non-rival goods have made possible. The goods we consume are increasingly virtual, indestructible in that they are bits of information, and yet ephemeral in value because of the low latency of cultural communication. Stuff becomes too passe, even retro-chic perhaps, all too soon. Lolcats are so 2008. How does one cope in this new economy defined by the transaction of small cultural bits like Youtube videos, phatic Facebook status updates, blogs, and tweets? Tyler Cowen suggests that people endowed with autistic cognitive styles, and he self-identifies as one, are well positioned to take advantage of this incarnation of the economy. Much like his blog Marginal Revolution, which is remarkable in its eclecticism and frequency of updates and perhaps demonstrative of the information ordering abilities of an autistic cognitive style, the book offers a smorgasbord of cultural bits, but these bits also ultimately make for a meaty thought stew. In ten diverse chapters, Cowen flits from a comparison of marriage to modern culture, to an analytical demonstration of Sherlock Holmes's autistic ways. Rather than simply and linearly describing the chapters, I will point to some of the many bits that interested and provoked me into exploring further. Cowen suggests that "culture has in some ways become uglier because that is how the self-assembly of small bits looks to the outside observer. But when it comes to the interior dimension, contemporary culture has become happier and more satisfying. And ultimately, it has become nobler as well an more appreciative of the big-picture virtues of human life". There's obviously no mathematical derivation of this statement, but it plausibly extracts meaning from the dizzyingly fast changes broadband connectivity have wrought in the last decade. Youtube may have pushed attention spans downwards; The New York Time recently reported on how even porn has had to do away with its already minimal narrative to accommodate the new distribution channel and its consumptive consequences. However, Youtube also allows us to (almost) costlessly glimpse a one-man-band street performer in Croatia or an exceptionally talented Filipino amateur's mashup of the NBA playoffs (look for renhigotrare). At the risk of making this argument uni-dimensional, it is in ways increasing the variance of cultural quality we can experience, while possibly lowering the mean. Is that true? Who knows, the internet just got started with us. The internet also already is a recognizable if distant cousin of the experience machine postulated by Robert Nozick that Cowen