[PEN-L:30273] Re: autism and autistic economics

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings Economists,
I will reply in a complex manner to this short request for how to apply
metaphors to the description of "Autistic Economics".  To quote in full what
JD writes:

Jim Devine,
Recently, I was trying to convince my son, who has Asperger's Syndrome
(borderline autism), that nothing can ever be perfect. This goes against his
perfectionism, a common symptom of AS, which encourages him to give up too
easily -- since perfection is unattainable. Then I continued, with a list:

1. Nothing is ever perfect.
2. Change is normal.
3. The future is uncertain.

Then it struck me, that these represent major oppositions to the dominant
form of autistic economics, i.e., neoclassical economics, which values
perfect and static models of an imaginary world with no uncertainty.

Can anyone think of what to add to the list?

Doyle,
First of all I will pursue my point about the bigotry that lies behind the
label, "Autistic Economics".  I am not accusing JD of being bigot.  Clearly
JD loves his son.  Clearly too, the left will defend the rights of the
working class.  What I will challenge is the notion that the label can be
used to describe Economics in a way that does not use the formula of
anti-disability thinking, i.e associate disability with an opponent to
indicate the depths of the failings of someone or some group.

I will challenge this on the grounds that similar analysis of mathematics in
cognitive science does not refer in any way to "autistic" elements of
mathematics.  That there is not a serious scientific methodology to the
label therefore, instead the label is ad hoc and unusable as a technical
method of analyzing the social methods of neo-liberal economics.  I will
expand my own thoughts on the economic implications of the language like
value of mathematics in order to shift the discussion to areas that reflect
serious economic insight.

To begin with, the disability rights movement has never achieved the level
of acceptance of it's aims as has the civil rights movement for African
Americans and other minorities, or the Women's rights movement.

"Narrative Prosthesis, Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse", David
To. Mitchell, and Sharon L. Snyder, University of Michigan Press, 2000,
page 35;

"Whereas "Black is Beautiful" or "Gay Pride" redresses the derision heaped
upon a minority community by a dominant culture, disabilities have been
clocked from access to a similar political status (245).  The category of
disability, according to many of the most "liberal" advocates, represents an
undesirable state of being that no political triage can repair.  Disability
has been portrayed within many circles as the straw that breaks the camel's
back of identity politics."

...

"Yet, the other social movements, advocates for disability rights, artists
and scholars have recognized the power available in re-signifying terms such
as "cripple" and "gimp".

Doyle,
This is typical identity politics thinking but is a clear description of how
there is not acceptance of the disability rights movement on the same level
as has been with other historical rights movements.  The problem in my mind
with identity politics is the divisive process of organizing that it
represents as opposed to the unifying concepts of class structure that
Marxist organize toward.  Never the less without an awareness of the
pervasive thought process of how disabled people are the literal bottom of
the barrel in class society it is impossible to think of how to unify the
working class.

For the left then we approach the dialectical components of contradiction in
society, that contradiction become the means for moving out of rigid reified
social structures that class division imposes.  In the case of disability,
the deepest level of social structure (70% of all disabled people are
unemployed in a long term manner) for human beings are the relationship of
work to language in the economic structure of society.

To understand this point we need to visit Autism, and we need to visit
Mathematics from a Cognitive Neuroscience point of view.  Then we need to
address the deeper problem of how to conceptualize structure and knowledge.

"Autism, An Inside-Out Approach", donna Williams, Jessica Kingsley
Publishers, 1996

"Around the age of ten when consistent (though generally delayed) meaning
started coming more consistently through my senses, the problem was that my
mind was bombarded with placeless fragments of literal meaning that I hadn't
had the interest or want or need to find and didn't know what to do with.
My answers to this were to find structures with which to use these things.
I expanded the only things I had in place of interest and want: obsession
and compulsion."  page 2

...

"those who do see 'autism' as the 'enemy' do so for all sorts of different
reasons:

Because it is not what they see as 'normal'.

Because they feel that a disability is unquestionably a burden that they
should assist in the unburdening of.

Because they just don't have the energy, personal resources or social
support to cope with someone's 'autism' as it is

Because they imagine that, like peeling a banana, beyond the 'autism' there
is some sort of 'normal' child

Because they think they have seen a trappedness in the eyes of someone with
'autisms' that tells them that, whoever the person with 'autism' is, that
person is more than just a bag of 'autism' with no personality independent
of the effects of their condition.  page 18

"Stored rules and (generally involuntary) copying can replace felt and
self-driven thought.  These things are, in my experience, wholly stored and
rife with copied expression and devoid of self-expression, and yet may be
fiercely defended as being self-expression.  Indeed, if someone has never
experienced the connection between something emotionally felt or personally
thought and expression (such as language or action) then defence-evolved'
expression may be the only expression they have ever known and they well
assume it to be self-expression (and be quite terrified to admit
otherwise)." page 268,

Doyle,
The point of the above quotes is to high light the time frame for the
remarks which show back into the 90's the persistence of how for a disabled
person consistent structures of anti-disabled thinking are encountered.  How
the disabled persons interpret that, and especially with this person how
they actually think about their life rather than a hypothetical guess at
what an Autistic person can and cannot do.

What is the central point of the label "Autistic Economics" is the use of
mathematics as the only serious way to do economics and how it fails.  The
point of the label is to say about this form of Economics the same thing one
might say about the poor social skills of Autistics.  or to quote JD,

JD,
On the other hand, autistic economics is a waste of resources on the playing
of mathematical games. (They don't even develop new mathematical
principles.) However, the real problem here is not autistic economics _per
se_ but the fact that this brand of economics dominates the profession as a
whole.

The phrase "post autistic economics" is not "anti-disabled." Rather, it is
the application of a general term (autism, being cut off from the reality
perceived by society at large) to two separate phenomena, i.e., a
neuro-biological disorder (psychological autism) and a socio-institutional
phenomenon (the domination of the Bourbakist school of economics in the
minds and hierarchy of economists).

Doyle
What is missing is the deeper understanding of the problem of the use of
mathematics in whatever division of intellectual labor.  In particular how
to understand the language and cognition issues that are involved.  For
insight into this arena I think there is no better work than George Lakoff's
work,

"Where Mathematics Comes From, How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into
Being", George Lakoff, Rafael E. Nunez, Basic Books, 2000,

page 1
2. Is brain-and-mind-based mathematics all that mathematics is?  Or is
there, as Platonists have suggested, a disembodied mathematics transcending
all bodies and minds and structuring the universe-this universe and every
possible universe?

Doyle,
In other words Lakoff states in more traditional philosophical terms that a
Platonic view of Mathematics is probably what underlies the use of
Mathematics in Economics as labeled "Autistic Economics".  That Platonism is
a theory of cognition in regard to the material meaning of mathematics.
That we cannot attack the use of Mathematics in Economics by drawing a
parallel to Autism because we only say that Mathematics is as JD writes
above,

JD,
autism, being cut off from the reality perceived by society at large

Doyle,
In particular I want to quote what Lakoff writes later in his book,
page 339 (writing in a beautiful series of a materialist view of mathematics
first stating the Platonist positions, and then Lakoff at length refutes
these claims with the materialist reality of cognition)

"Mathematics is an objective feature of the universe; mathematical objects
are real; mathematical truth is universal, absolute, and certain.

What human beings believe about mathematics therefore has no effect on what
mathematics really is.  Mathematics would be the same even if there were no
human beings, or beings of any sort.  Though mathematics is abstract and
disembodied, it is real.

Mathematicians are the ultimate scientists, discovering absolute truths not
just about this physical universe but about any possible universe."...

Doyle,
There is not a single time that Lakoff ever needs to say that thinking about
Mathematics as the Platonist do is better understood as something like a
mechanism we also see in Autistics.  Rather what Lakoff does is look at
really existing cognitive structures in real human beings as that says why
we create mathematics.  This approach yields real ways to deal with the
problem of what is going on with neo-liberal Economics in regard to the
Platonist assumptions of the cognition of mathematics.  It gives the left
the means to provide real answers to the questions that arise around the
issue of the use of Mathematics in Economics.

Lastly, to what extent can an economic analysis be brought to bear upon this
issue?  We might draw a conclusion from studying the disability of Autism
that language structures have a great deal to do with how human beings
socially construct society.  What sort of properties of language are
economically important in this area?  The label "Autistic Economics"
purports to point at the problem of social isolation imposed by the class
related needs of using Mathematics in neo-liberal Economics.  But what can
we possibly see in this that examines the language processes of cognition of
mathematics?

I say we can see in the lack of exchange processes in this sort of economics
the same sorts of economic barriers of production and exchange we see in
other forms of in-equality of expression where human language cognition
processes are concerned.  That is the language like ability to exchange
information between people either happens in communication or it doesn't.
This is materially there to understand when we compare for example motion
pictures with the telephone industry, or video game industry.  The movie is
not meant to be a medium of social exchange, it is meant to be shown, and
seen and then disappears from further usage in the commerce between human
beings.  Telephone conversations transmit talk back and forth between
people, and the production of such information has value to the exchange
process that cannot be had in a system that cannot be exchanged like
contemporary motion pictures.

Such a point of view can be verified by how information is produced and used
in society.  The exchange value of information is measurable in a various
ways over that which cannot be exchanged.  The dispute in intellectual
property rights between the motion picture industry and Napster is a very
good example of how that conflict is arising in contemporary terms.
Capitalism is perfectly capable of changing a business plan to encompass the
exchange value of information, but the exchange value of information in a
language like way is what underlies criticism of neo-liberal Economics
labeled "Autistic Economics" strives to indicate.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor