Societal benefits of autism in the USA, and the ‘UK’
After RFK Jr. made his comments about autistic people not working or paying taxes, did he ask himself how much tax Bill Gates pays? It is probably quite a lot, plus Bill Gates shows the classic autistic pattern of ….. dedication to work without the ego directing matters when he stepped down from Chairman back to running the functional side of his company. And how much money is raised in tax for the USA by clever young people who once upon a time would have been accounts clerks, librarians, technical drawers, engineers, natural scientists, indexers, patient teachers of useful subjects like maths and geography, and are now sucked into the digital world of coding and worse, the new AI. Whether they worked in the real world or in the new world, still a great deal of processes underpinning western society are done by those who do not have an ego, do have immense concentration and care about getting things right, and can be relied on to sort it out when a problem is identified.
Yes of course there are some autistic people who don’t work and pay tax but the percentage overall is probably very small for those who don’t. Instead of making a public spectacle of himself in going after a cure for autistic people, who incidentally are not a recent blip in the progress of western civilization but we go back a long way, yes a very long way, and even in more recent history Sir Isaac Newton showed every indication that he was autistic, along with many others who could focus and observe over long periods, RFK Jr. could take a different approach.
In order to improve workplaces generally to enable more work to be done rather than open plan chat, unhealthy buildings of artificial materials instead of stone and wood, bright lights and computer systems which will all fail at the first large Solar flare, RFK Jr. could put forward a policy initiative that there is an autistic person on every Board, every management committee, every facilities department, every school, every everything, and he will see just how useful autistic people are.