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The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy

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"The Age of the Infovore" is economist Tyler Cowen's personal panegyric to the cognitive abilities of people on the autism spectrum, and their critical importance in an age of endlessly flowing and incoherent information. He discovered his place on the autism spectrum when an adult with autism suggested the possibility. He has embraced his neurodiversity and explored it's possibilities and the contributions that people who are neurodiverse make to our society.

The central cognitive dimension that Cowen examines is the drive to create order that characterises many neurodiverse people. This drive allows such individuals to focus on a single arena of the world, and to bring a depth and scope of understanding to that arena that neurotypical people find very difficult. Sometimes the focus seems out of step with the larger society, and sometimes it seems prescient. In any event, it is driven by the internal experience of the person, and the activity brings great meaning to that person, and can do so to others (see how much of our entertainment focuses on collections).

I know in my heart what Tyler Cowen means.

I learned to read at the age of four and got my library card at the age of 6. From that first discovery of an infinite world of knowledge, I relentlessly tried to learn everything. I read whenever I wasn't asleep, and when I wouldn't be punished for it. I read everything regardless of topic. I often carried 2 or 3 books with me as I moved through my world. I won an award at a Catholic elementary school for a poem I wrote that praised science as the ultimate source of knowledge.

I was hooked.

I didn't find my personal focus until, after 21 months in Vietnam, I came to work in a medical clinic in 1970 that supported families with children who had significant brain damage and other characteristics, including autism. I latched on to the idea that I needed to understand change, and most especially intentional change, and I have pursued that understanding for the 40 years since.

Whether my particular obsession will result in anything generally useful remains to be seen. I have used what I learned in my work in human services and rights advocacy to the good of myself and others.

I want to thank Tyler Cowen for bringing dignity to what has always seemed to me a peculiar personal trait, and for his offering of a larger community to all of us with that drive for order. I think the book will have a wide audience of appreciation, but most of all to those who always felt outside the community of the normal, and wondered what good it was to be different.

Tyler Cowen also has a great blog called "Marginal Revolution".

BOOK REVIEW: 'The Age of the Infovore'


Reviewed By David M. Kinchen

A few years ago, relates Tyler Cowen, author of "The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy" (Plume Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, 259 pages, index, notes, bibliography, $16.00), a woman named Kathleen Fasanella asked the author if he was an Asperger's Disorder person or a high-functioning autistic.

He relates the anecdote in his quality paperback book, a work that stretched my thinking like the best books of the late, great Neil Postman (1931-2003, especially "Amusing Ourselves to Death" and "The End of Education.")

Fasanella, a devoted reader of Cowen's website, [...], described herself as an "Aspie," the current shorthand for people with Asperger's Disorder, Cowen said. At first he was shocked to be so described, but he writes that in the years since receiving the e-mail he's become comfortable with autism, "and indeed proud of it, but it's not a thought I was ready for at the time."

In the six or seven years since he received Fasanella's e-mail, the world has been transformed into a universe of information, overwhelming many of us, but not autistics, Cowen writes: "Autistics are the true infovores, as I will call them. They have the tendency to impose additional structure on information by the acts of arranging, organizing, classifying, collecting, memorizing, categorizing, and listing."

He posits that many of the geniuses of the past and present have had more than a touch of autism, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Both Doyle and his famous fictional detective exhibited the traits of someone with autism, albeit the high-functioning kind like that of Temple Grandin.

Cowen writes that Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist "has written on his blog that his history as a 'recovering nerd' is connected to Asperger's. It is perhaps no accident that autistics are known for their attachment to lists as a means of processing, recording and ordering knowledge."

Cowen writes in his book -- originally published as "Create Your Own Economy" -- that autistics "have, on average, superior abilities for pattern recognition and superior abilities for spotting details in visual pictures, compared to non-autistics." That certainly applies to Grandin, the subject of a recent HBO movie, who developed facilities for the humane treatment of animals by visualizing the structures in her mind.

Cowen also writes that Dr. Hans Asperger, for whom the "disorder" is named, wrote that "Another distinctive trait one finds in some autistic children is a rare maturity of taste in art. Normal children have no time for more sophisticated art. Their taste is usually for the pretty pictures, with kitschy rose pink and sky blue....Autistic children, on the other hand, can have a surprisingly sophisticated understanding, being able to distinguish between art and kitsch with great confidence."

Cowen explores the diversity of the ways we think, often drawing on traits of high-functioning autistics (He cautions us to put the images of Dustin Hoffman in the movie "Rain Man" out of your thinking). In his book, Cowen tells us how we can learn from autistics in the spheres of politics and sociology as well as music and information.

"The Age of the Infovore" will show you how to manage the massive daily flow of data better, no matter how adept you may already be at Facebooking, watching television, or studying for that test.

Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" transformed how we thought about industry and trade. Tyler Cowen now delivers a manifesto for this century's industrial revolution: the information explosion.

About the Author: Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA. He's the author many books, including "Discover Your Inner Economist," and writes regularly for The New York Times and Money, and been a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Slate.

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Original, well-written, thought-provoking. Would have been nice to have more suggestions about how specifically one might improve one's ability to categorize, organize and otherwise succeed. Still, an excellent book.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand a bit about autism. It skillfully connects our neurologies with the rise of the information age. I was disappointed at first the the subject matter seemed to be to far afield of the title, but was pleased that I was given the economics 'treatment' I was looking to initially purchase.

Potential readers should be aware that this book is Cowen's badly titled "Create Your Own Economy", published last year, under a different name. This is only made clear when you look at the small print at the bottom of the cover of the book (caveat emptor, I suppose). When I read this book under its original title, I found it to be long on autism, short on "succeeding in the information economy". I still don't think that the book title is an accurate reflection of the content.

I have read and enjoyed Tyler Cowan's other books. What's not clear either from the editorial reviews or the other user reviews I've seen is: this book is about (a) how autistic people think and (b) why Cowan thinks it's better-suited to the information economy than non-autistic thought processes. I'm not sure I know how many people can learn to be autistic: I had thought it's something that's hard-wired into your brain. Presumably not being autistic is equally hard-wired. So if being autistic is better-suited for the information economy, what exactly are the non-autistic supposed to do about it? This whole premise seems engineered as a post hoc ergo propter hoc justification for why Cowan is smart and thinks he might be autistic.

That was the question that bugged me while I was reading. Perhaps a bigger point is that the book seems to beg the question: is being autistic actually more-suited to an information economy than not being autistic? Economists usually err on the side of trusting data that shouldn't be trusted; here, Cowan doesn't seem to have a whole lot of data. He just thinks intuitively that it must be right. Again, this could be interesting to some people, so if what I'm describing sounds awesome then you should buy this.

So this is a little embarrassing. After thoroughly enjoying Cowen's last book about the culture of personalized information and entertainment, I ordered this book thinking it would contain more insights and practical ways to absorb and filter information. I was wrong, it's the same book. Apparently 'Create Your Own Economy' was a poor performing title so they made the paperback with a different name. I now have 2 copies. I'm not sorry about that, since I can now lend out a copy without giving up mine. But I do feel silly for the error nonetheless.

So a brief review of both:

This is a counter-argument to the raft of recent books published that lament the loss of deep thinking that is caused by being able to google everything and be constantly inundated with data. (the shallows, etc) I've noticed this change in myself over the years, how I read many times more information than I ever did but it's in smaller digital snippets. That I do still read books but that is no longer the majority of my information consumption and furthermore I have much less patience to finish books. On the surface, many people would just assume this is a bad thing and means I'm not as deep or critical of a thinker as I used to be. Cowen argues otherwise.

Remember how in grade school we were taught to read every boring word of the entire textbook chapter and felt guilty or were reprimanded if we didn't? Remember how we were taught that it was bad to mark up (interact with) our textbooks? We also learned that you are supposed to read the book cover to cover. I STILL have a hard time feeling guilty about not finishing books that start to become a waste of my increasing scarce attention. Cowen argues that we shouldn't confuse depth of thinking with sticking to one textbook of one subject for hours. He reminds us to let go of those old ways of learning and make it the fun exploration that it should be. I would wager that I know more about world history from reading articles on Wikipedia over the last 3 years in my spare time (maybe an hour per week on average) than all of the total history I learned about in my k-12 'education'. That's precisely due to fragmentation and focused engagement based on MY direction, not in spite of it. This is one of many examples of the advantages of information surplus.

So the book has a lot of positive reasons on why it's not so bad to keep up with many brief information streams than the few that we grew up doing. The other thing the book is about it the autistic spectrum. I now have a better understanding of why I've always been obsessed with certain narrow subjects at every period of my life. I also now see the Autistic in a new light and recognize that I, like the author, certainly have some of those traits. It makes sense to me that most people labeled as Autistic are simply further down that spectrum than the rest of us and that there are certainly a good number of 'high functioning' people that are just not as far along that spectrum. By understanding the extreme cases we can have a better understanding of ourselves.

I would like to see more books about HOW to go about filtering and organizing information that is written specifically for infovores. This is more a 'why' and 'what' book than a 'how' book. But embracing the idea that our current culture of info overload is a fundamental evolution in how we learn and live is a great start.

This is an interesting book and well written but it is not what the reader is led to believe via the title. What was the publisher thinking? The author starts with material about autistic and neuro-diverse individuals and how they think and keeps coming back to it. This is important and valid work...just needs to be billed that way.
I thought I was buying a book on the Information Economy, which I am interested in and I did not get it.
In addition, the Library of Congress did a bad job of assigning subject headings to this book. Did anyone there really read this book?
The book was delightful and sometimes provocative. It was just too misleading for this reader. I often review books on multicultural topics. If I had this book for review, I would not recommend it. Color me disappointed.