Marginal Revolution is a watering hole for all sorts of oddballs, some of them benign, some of them not so much. Lasker and Sailer are examples of the latter kind. In Lasker's case, you kind of have to be "read in" to know what their deal is, so it's not surprising to see them quoted without any context. That context is probably not relevant to what Tabarrok is talking about anyways.
Every public-intellectual economist gets accused of that. I don't take anything they say on faith and I don't regularly read MR because the scene around it is icky, but I also don't reflexively assume they're wrong about everything. Tabarrok and Cowen are not stupid.
That's fair. He's a prominent figure on Twitter who posts a lot of charts and graphs on different and often benign subjects which get shared around a lot. It's not until you follow him that you realize his core obsession is promoting ideas about race and IQ in broad strokes. For example, singling out ethnic groups as intellectually inferior or more likely to commit crime. He has a history of posting misleading or falsified charts or data if their convenient to his agenda.
If you go deeper, his old Reddit account under a pseudonym was discovered to be a little more mask-off than his Twitter personality. From Wikipedia:
> between 2014 and 2016 Lasker had made many anti-Semitic and racist posts on Reddit under the pseudonym Faliceer.[7] In 2016, the account Faliceer self-identified as a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi". He also wished Adolf Hitler a happy birthday, promoted eugenics and attacked interracial relationships.
If only we lived in an era of instantly-available information easily accessed through ubiquitous supercomputers that we have in our homes and in our pockets.
For those who don’t know, Cremieux is a prolific Twitter poster. He posts a lot of graphs and charts and presents himself as purely objective and data driven, but follow him for a while and you’ll start to see he’s highly politically motivated and will pretend to be completely blind to any data that disagrees with his agenda.
He has become a popular figure in the “rationalist” community which this blog (Marginal Revolution) belongs to, so you won’t find criticisms within this sphere.
Cremieux is the type of poster who posts 90% accurate information to build trust and then slips in 10% agenda-pushing material. If you’re not paying close attention or following people who will debunk him, it all looks equally scientific. He was highly active during the last election with political claims and data that were easily debunked or shown to be taken out of context.
He’s also a big proponent of buying GLP-1 peptides from questionable sources and mixing your own injections, which he advertises broadly but then puts his “guides” behind a paywall as a source of income. Because he profits from subscriptions to his guides, he has a huge conflict of interest when explaining the safety of buying these underground peptides and mixing your own injections, but he’s held up as a source of scientific truth for how completely safe it is by people who don’t recognize his conflict of interest.
> Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism.
I agree, but it’s worth pointing out that this is kind of his whole schtick: Most of the topics he posts about are probably objectively based and generally accurate. He uses this to build trust before slipping in the bananas claims about immigrants, race/IQ stuff, and other political topics, or when it comes time to sell followers on subscriptions to his GLP-1 guides (which do not contain any information you couldn’t find freely from numerous other sources)
I agree that's the dynamic but I don't think it's useful to call him out for the accurate stuff, since, again, I think you really have to be paying attention to "that part of Twitter" (you and I apparently both do so for oppositional reasons) to know what's going on here.
Lasker won't make you wait long before bringing the racist stuff out!
My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer and his generation just accepted his oddities as part of his personality.
I think one of the paradoxes of our age is that we are overtly more accepting of different lifestyles while being less accepting of personalities faults. Having low EQ has always been a thing and yet in the social media era we've been very comfortable ostracizing those who suffer.
> My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer
It's interesting how much the definition of "severe" Autism has changed in common language. Typically, someone with "severe Autism" would not be capable of holding down a complex job like engineering, let alone having a successful career and a family.
The families I know with severely autistic children (now young adults) are still working on basic self-sufficiency without a job or in one case basic verbalizations. So it's strange for me to see someone casually described as having "severe" autism but also having a successful engineering career and a family.
I blame the DSM for this. DSM 5 merged multiple diagnostics into a single "autism spectrum disorder", which means that the average case of autism became more mild overnight. This moved where the boundary for "severe" autism is in people's heads.
There is always a social acceptability component to psychiatric diagnoses. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was classified as a disease.
Being less accepting of neurodiverse people being different is directly linked to greater need to diagnosing them as society does not accept their differences.
In some cases there is expert acknowledgement that some differences are not necessarily a bad thing. For example:
> It can be helpful to think of ADHD not just as a deficit or disorder but as a ‘difference’. Some people view some aspects of their ADHD as strengths in certain situations or environments:
The example I often end up pointing to is the "rise" in left handedness [1]. It didn't actually increase. We simply stopped punishing people for it.
There have been seismic changes in the understanding of autism (and ADHD) over even the last 10-15 years, let alone 30-40+. Once autism was considered only for people who were largely or totally nonverbal. It was only in the 2010s that the consensus formed that people could have both ADHD and autism. They were previously considered to be exclusive.
I've heard many stories from teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism. With a modern understanding, it tends to be pretty easy to spot.
I, as a non-professional in the field, have no business diagnosing anybody based on casual interactions.
If I am at a party and I tell my friends “that weird person I just met is pretty autistic,” I am not diagnosing them, I am just saying something speculative behind their back.
We used to call such people nerds, but then it became cool to be a nerd. Now we've repurposed "autism" as a word to denigrate the smart but antisocial, but since high functioning autistic people are running successful businesses and creating cool things, autism is becoming cool too.
I can look at a politician or a CEO or just someone I encounter in life and see autism (or not), narcissism, sociopathy or any number of other conditions. Is this a diagnosis? No. But it's part of my mental model for dealing with such people. I'm not sure why you played the faux offense card at people making casual observations.
It's also clear to anyone who pays attention that there is a genetic link with autism and it doesn't take much to see it.
More deeply, you rcomment reads as a typical neurotypical response (or possibly internalized ableism from someone who isn't diagnozed but probably should be). There is a real safety issue here because autistic people can spot the neurotypical vs neurodivergent difference pretty darn quickly and have come to realize that neurotypical people are a real threat, particularly in the job market.
And if you still don't think neurodivergent people can spot neurotypical people, what about the reaction autistic people get from allistic people? Allistic people tend to instinctively dislike, distrust or even bully autistic people from the moment they meet them. They create conditions where autistic people have a harder time in the workplace, are less likely to get promoted and more likely to be fired or forced to quit.
You’re making a lot of assumptions, and without going into detail, you couldn’t be farther off about my personal experience.
The point of TFA is that the mild/borderline diagnosis rate has exploded. So apparently those professionally tasked with diagnosis now see autism where they used to not see it. But now we have self-styled autism spotters out there labeling people definitively based on tweets.
Even in your response you said my response was neurotypical, OR undiagnosed atypical. You don’t see the irony?
Most comments here are bashing the author and reference, not the material. Applied to a left-leaning professor (is: Chomsky) would be an interesting thought experiment.
Tabarrok
"
In 2012, journalist David Brooks called Tabarrok one of the most influential bloggers on the political right, writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way."[6]
"
Cowen
"
Cowen’s work spans economics, philosophy, and cultural commentary. He is known for advocating a pragmatic form of libertarianism that emphasizes strong governance, economic dynamism, and technological progress—an approach he terms state capacity libertarianism.[3] In 2011, he was included in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and Prospect magazine ranked him among the world’s most influential economists in 2023.[4][5]
"
Those people and this blog is not at all a scientific institution, editor, publisher.
And as mentioned in another comment, the person we're invited to read from Crémieux ("Earlier Cremieux showed exactly the same thing based on data from Sweden and earlier CDC data.").
"
He was a speaker at the 2024 Manifest conference. Eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly was also a speaker.[2] Lasker has spoken out in favor of natalism.[2][14] Early in 2025, Lasker was a speaker at the Natal Conference, which has been criticized for including speakers promoting far-right ideologies such as Raw Egg Nationalist.[2][15]
"
---
Those people are not scientists, they cosplay knowledge and scientific process and will use data to serve their narratives.
Yet another example that the info shared here in HN are vastly influenced by some angry teenagers with some kind of libertarian edgelord imperialist agenda. I mean, I'm assuming that's what they imagine they think between two games of League of Legends or wanking to deepfakes
I find Lasker repellant and am wary of Tabarrok and even I think you need to dial this back a bit. Tabarrok and Cowen are both research professors of economics at GMU. It's no surprise people pay attention to research they call out.
The All-In pod was talking about this on their latest episode. In 2018 Minnesota had $3M in Medicaid Autism claims. In 2023 that number rose to $400M! That’s a 13233% increase in 5 years. Nothing suspicious about that at all.
Skimming this it is a shocker to see the author citing Jordan Lasker (Cremieux) without even some sort of disclaimer.
Lasker has repeatedly falsified results, given some feigned apology or redirection and continued the practice of falsifying results.
Marginal Revolution is a watering hole for all sorts of oddballs, some of them benign, some of them not so much. Lasker and Sailer are examples of the latter kind. In Lasker's case, you kind of have to be "read in" to know what their deal is, so it's not surprising to see them quoted without any context. That context is probably not relevant to what Tabarrok is talking about anyways.
Marginal Revolution is basically just cherry picking data to fit whatever narrative is convenient.
Every public-intellectual economist gets accused of that. I don't take anything they say on faith and I don't regularly read MR because the scene around it is icky, but I also don't reflexively assume they're wrong about everything. Tabarrok and Cowen are not stupid.
Skimming the comments it is a shocker to see people attacking Jordan Lasker (Cremieux) without even some sort of link to more context.
That's fair. He's a prominent figure on Twitter who posts a lot of charts and graphs on different and often benign subjects which get shared around a lot. It's not until you follow him that you realize his core obsession is promoting ideas about race and IQ in broad strokes. For example, singling out ethnic groups as intellectually inferior or more likely to commit crime. He has a history of posting misleading or falsified charts or data if their convenient to his agenda.
If you go deeper, his old Reddit account under a pseudonym was discovered to be a little more mask-off than his Twitter personality. From Wikipedia:
> between 2014 and 2016 Lasker had made many anti-Semitic and racist posts on Reddit under the pseudonym Faliceer.[7] In 2016, the account Faliceer self-identified as a "Jewish White Supremacist Nazi". He also wished Adolf Hitler a happy birthday, promoted eugenics and attacked interracial relationships.
If only we lived in an era of instantly-available information easily accessed through ubiquitous supercomputers that we have in our homes and in our pockets.
oh, wait: https://lmddgtfy.net/?q=Jordan%20Lasker
Well said :)
For those who don’t know, Cremieux is a prolific Twitter poster. He posts a lot of graphs and charts and presents himself as purely objective and data driven, but follow him for a while and you’ll start to see he’s highly politically motivated and will pretend to be completely blind to any data that disagrees with his agenda.
He has become a popular figure in the “rationalist” community which this blog (Marginal Revolution) belongs to, so you won’t find criticisms within this sphere.
Cremieux is the type of poster who posts 90% accurate information to build trust and then slips in 10% agenda-pushing material. If you’re not paying close attention or following people who will debunk him, it all looks equally scientific. He was highly active during the last election with political claims and data that were easily debunked or shown to be taken out of context.
He’s also a big proponent of buying GLP-1 peptides from questionable sources and mixing your own injections, which he advertises broadly but then puts his “guides” behind a paywall as a source of income. Because he profits from subscriptions to his guides, he has a huge conflict of interest when explaining the safety of buying these underground peptides and mixing your own injections, but he’s held up as a source of scientific truth for how completely safe it is by people who don’t recognize his conflict of interest.
He's also a main character in white supremacist Twitter, for whatever that's worth.
Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism.
> Whatever the deal is, he's probably not wrong about autism.
I agree, but it’s worth pointing out that this is kind of his whole schtick: Most of the topics he posts about are probably objectively based and generally accurate. He uses this to build trust before slipping in the bananas claims about immigrants, race/IQ stuff, and other political topics, or when it comes time to sell followers on subscriptions to his GLP-1 guides (which do not contain any information you couldn’t find freely from numerous other sources)
I agree that's the dynamic but I don't think it's useful to call him out for the accurate stuff, since, again, I think you really have to be paying attention to "that part of Twitter" (you and I apparently both do so for oppositional reasons) to know what's going on here.
Lasker won't make you wait long before bringing the racist stuff out!
Graphs and charts are the best way to lie.
And if someone is a prolific poster of them, there's always an agenda.
It's marginalrevolution.com, what does one expect?
Tyler is all-in with the racists and fascists these days
A couple of hit dogs hollering here
My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer and his generation just accepted his oddities as part of his personality.
I think one of the paradoxes of our age is that we are overtly more accepting of different lifestyles while being less accepting of personalities faults. Having low EQ has always been a thing and yet in the social media era we've been very comfortable ostracizing those who suffer.
> My father in law clearly has severe undiagnosed Autism. But he was a successful engineer
It's interesting how much the definition of "severe" Autism has changed in common language. Typically, someone with "severe Autism" would not be capable of holding down a complex job like engineering, let alone having a successful career and a family.
The families I know with severely autistic children (now young adults) are still working on basic self-sufficiency without a job or in one case basic verbalizations. So it's strange for me to see someone casually described as having "severe" autism but also having a successful engineering career and a family.
I blame the DSM for this. DSM 5 merged multiple diagnostics into a single "autism spectrum disorder", which means that the average case of autism became more mild overnight. This moved where the boundary for "severe" autism is in people's heads.
What is "severe" in this case?
There is always a social acceptability component to psychiatric diagnoses. It was not that long ago that homosexuality was classified as a disease.
Being less accepting of neurodiverse people being different is directly linked to greater need to diagnosing them as society does not accept their differences.
In some cases there is expert acknowledgement that some differences are not necessarily a bad thing. For example:
> It can be helpful to think of ADHD not just as a deficit or disorder but as a ‘difference’. Some people view some aspects of their ADHD as strengths in certain situations or environments:
https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/mental-illnesses-and...
The example I often end up pointing to is the "rise" in left handedness [1]. It didn't actually increase. We simply stopped punishing people for it.
There have been seismic changes in the understanding of autism (and ADHD) over even the last 10-15 years, let alone 30-40+. Once autism was considered only for people who were largely or totally nonverbal. It was only in the 2010s that the consensus formed that people could have both ADHD and autism. They were previously considered to be exclusive.
I've heard many stories from teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism. With a modern understanding, it tends to be pretty easy to spot.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/s9x1ya/his...
> teachers who, when faced with an autistic pupil, will play a game of sorts to see which parent has undiagnosed autism
Great, diagnosing people based on casual observations. Wasn’t friendly enough, not great eye contact, said something odd…must be autism.
Our tolerance for weirdos of all kinds seems to have gone both down and up at the same time. Why can’t they just be people who are a little unusual?
>Great, diagnosing people based on casual observations. Wasn’t friendly enough, not great eye contact, said something odd…must be autism.
If it's done systematically and has predictive power, there's nothing wrong with that.
How else do you propose we diagnose something that doesn't show up in MRIs and bloodwork?
Or we could just as well dismiss any mental issues entirely, and say "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist".
I, as a non-professional in the field, have no business diagnosing anybody based on casual interactions.
If I am at a party and I tell my friends “that weird person I just met is pretty autistic,” I am not diagnosing them, I am just saying something speculative behind their back.
We used to call such people nerds, but then it became cool to be a nerd. Now we've repurposed "autism" as a word to denigrate the smart but antisocial, but since high functioning autistic people are running successful businesses and creating cool things, autism is becoming cool too.
I can look at a politician or a CEO or just someone I encounter in life and see autism (or not), narcissism, sociopathy or any number of other conditions. Is this a diagnosis? No. But it's part of my mental model for dealing with such people. I'm not sure why you played the faux offense card at people making casual observations.
It's also clear to anyone who pays attention that there is a genetic link with autism and it doesn't take much to see it.
More deeply, you rcomment reads as a typical neurotypical response (or possibly internalized ableism from someone who isn't diagnozed but probably should be). There is a real safety issue here because autistic people can spot the neurotypical vs neurodivergent difference pretty darn quickly and have come to realize that neurotypical people are a real threat, particularly in the job market.
And if you still don't think neurodivergent people can spot neurotypical people, what about the reaction autistic people get from allistic people? Allistic people tend to instinctively dislike, distrust or even bully autistic people from the moment they meet them. They create conditions where autistic people have a harder time in the workplace, are less likely to get promoted and more likely to be fired or forced to quit.
And you still think it isn't obvious?
You’re making a lot of assumptions, and without going into detail, you couldn’t be farther off about my personal experience.
The point of TFA is that the mild/borderline diagnosis rate has exploded. So apparently those professionally tasked with diagnosis now see autism where they used to not see it. But now we have self-styled autism spotters out there labeling people definitively based on tweets.
Even in your response you said my response was neurotypical, OR undiagnosed atypical. You don’t see the irony?
Not to mention smartphones and vertical videos that weaponized parental neglect.
Most comments here are bashing the author and reference, not the material. Applied to a left-leaning professor (is: Chomsky) would be an interesting thought experiment.
The website is https://marginalrevolution.com/about
Whose founders are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Tabarrok and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen
Tabarrok " In 2012, journalist David Brooks called Tabarrok one of the most influential bloggers on the political right, writing that he is among those who "start from broadly libertarian premises but do not apply them in a doctrinaire way."[6] "
Cowen " Cowen’s work spans economics, philosophy, and cultural commentary. He is known for advocating a pragmatic form of libertarianism that emphasizes strong governance, economic dynamism, and technological progress—an approach he terms state capacity libertarianism.[3] In 2011, he was included in Foreign Policy’s list of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers,” and Prospect magazine ranked him among the world’s most influential economists in 2023.[4][5] "
Those people and this blog is not at all a scientific institution, editor, publisher.
And as mentioned in another comment, the person we're invited to read from Crémieux ("Earlier Cremieux showed exactly the same thing based on data from Sweden and earlier CDC data."). " He was a speaker at the 2024 Manifest conference. Eugenicist Jonathan Anomaly was also a speaker.[2] Lasker has spoken out in favor of natalism.[2][14] Early in 2025, Lasker was a speaker at the Natal Conference, which has been criticized for including speakers promoting far-right ideologies such as Raw Egg Nationalist.[2][15] "
---
Those people are not scientists, they cosplay knowledge and scientific process and will use data to serve their narratives.
Yet another example that the info shared here in HN are vastly influenced by some angry teenagers with some kind of libertarian edgelord imperialist agenda. I mean, I'm assuming that's what they imagine they think between two games of League of Legends or wanking to deepfakes
I find Lasker repellant and am wary of Tabarrok and even I think you need to dial this back a bit. Tabarrok and Cowen are both research professors of economics at GMU. It's no surprise people pay attention to research they call out.
GMU econ and Tyler in particular are not truth-seeking academics anymore
The All-In pod was talking about this on their latest episode. In 2018 Minnesota had $3M in Medicaid Autism claims. In 2023 that number rose to $400M! That’s a 13233% increase in 5 years. Nothing suspicious about that at all.
Source: https://youtu.be/bhpd4NeTbCI Timestamp @25m : 20s