The full title of Tyler Cowen's latest book is Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World. I enjoyed reading it – regular readers of his co-authored blog, Marginal Revolution, or his previous book Discover Your Inner Economist will know that he's a clear and stylish writer, and can be gratifyingly provocative. However, I ended up feeling that this was two books masquerading as one.

The first is about the kind of economy being brought about by the internet revolution and the amazing, magnificent explosion of web-based technologies and applications. This is clearly an amazing period of creative destruction, and Tyler Cowen was an early enthusiast for the potential of the technologies, as well as a thoughtful analyst of their impact on cultural economics. One excellent section of the book (which formed the basis of an article, Three Tweets for the Web, in the Wilson Quarterly) argues very persuasively that the web is augmenting human intelligence and creativity – and not destroying our capacity to concentrate and create, as the techno-doom-mongers would have it.

Another terrific section (p198ff) talks about what cultural diversity really means. The doomy view is that the technologies mean everywhere is becoming the same because you can buy a burger or blue jeans anywhere. He points out that this definition of diversity is shaped entirely by national boundaries. For individuals, there really is much more choice and variety. Globalization has not turned world culture into brown sludge; instead its creation and consumption has become kaleidoscopic. The urban and cosmopolitan global economy is massively more amenable to diversity; conformism is the norm in poor and rural isolated economies (p217).

However, there is a second book here, about autism, and its links with the other part of the text are not clear to me. There is a lot of very interesting material about autism, about its links with creativity or genius. It seems to me, a non-expert, a somewhat romanticised view. Cowen is unwilling to describe autism as a disadvantage or disability, and I'm sure that's correct for some people on the autistic spectrum; but it clearly is a terrible burden for others. He argues that the internet-mediated economy is more 'autistic' in the sense that cultural information is being consumed in ever-smaller bits, by individuals in a way that suits them personally – in customized patterns which allow as much eccentricity as desired, in other words. But I'm unsure what follows from this observation, or indeed whether it really has anything to do with autism, a subject which has clearly engaged Cowen's interest. It did remind me of an article in Wired some years ago reporting a surge in the number of autistic children in Silicon Valley, and speculating that autistic people were better fitted, in an evolutionary sense, for the world of the new technologies; but that's not a claim made here.

There is one point in the book which strikes me as very forceful, namely that people have extremely different modes of cognition and behavior, which behavioural economics entirely ignores. The limitations of behavioral economics stem from its lack of universality, and here is another dimension of that. There is, I think, good experimental evidence that some people do respond more like 'rational economic man' than others – and indeed that economists are more likely to fall into that category themselves. One could argue that this is a version of autism, with the assumption of no spillovers between the behaviour of different individuals, and the application of logic and calculation to decisions. Indeed, the 'post-autistic' economics school certainly makes that link.

Understanding better the varieties of human cognition and how that affects preferences and behaviour (and whose behaviour, and how that aggregates) in economic contexts is going to be a fruitful research programme. Cowen describes evidence about the way cognition affects tastes, for example, for atonal music. He reminds us too that the founding fathers of economics, Adam Smith and David Hume, were very preoccupied with understanding perception and cognition. Autism is a powerful prism for thinking about what it means to be human – and I'd commend my friend Michael Blastland's book Joe, about his son, for some amazing insights.

On the whole, though, I wasn't sure what to make of this book's preoccupation with autism. However, in the same spirit as it was written, I welcome its eccentricity and individuality. It's an interesting and engaging read, if not at all what I expected.