This is a fascinating little insight into the interaction of autism and Homo Economicus. First a little background explanation for you. "Homo Economicus" is the model that most economists have of what human beings are and how they act. Well, actually, that's a little strong: it's the simplification of a human being that economists use in their models. We're all rational, we think things through before we do them, we calculate possible benefits and costs of our actions and so on. We're also interested in maximising our utility: that is, we try to get the most of the things we desire. Now there are problems with this idea and such problems are often used to deride the entire subject. From another side, there are many economists looking at when people don't in fact act like this. That latter work is often referred to as behavioural economics. Now, don't forget, a model is exactly that, a model. It won't include everything in it, it will always simplify. So to say that sometimes human beings don't act as Homo Economicous isn't enough for us to abandon the concept. We can see that people do, often enough, act that way for it to be a useful simplification to use at times. But we must be very careful to remember that we are indeed talking about a model, and abstraction of reality, rather than reality itself. OK, so what has this got to do with autism? Well, one of the things that behavioural economics has been able to uncover is that people hate losing money much more than they like getting it. This is not "rational" in the way that we normally mean it. It has a lot of implications for how people invest, how they play in stock markets and so on. However, here's where autism comes in:

One group that does not value perceived losses differently than gains are individuals with autism, a disorder characterized by problems with social interaction. When tested, autistics often demonstrate strict logic when balancing gains and losses, but this seeming rationality may itself denote abnormal behavior. “Adhering to logical, rational principles of ideal economic choice may be biologically unnatural,” says Colin F. Camerer, a professor of behavioral economics at Caltech.

I find that a fascinating insight into where the rational human being model falls down. We know that autism is, to an extent, an ignorance of, an ignoring of, the emotions of others. So we might expect that those with autism would not get swept up in crowd behavior: such crowd behavior being one of the things that traditional economic models have a very hard time explaining. So if those with autism do not get caught up in such emotional responses to profit and loss, are rational according to the classical theories, then the rest of us are not so rational. Which really leads to the thought that we must be very careful in economics where and when we assume that everybody is indeed rational. No, not a death knell to the concept, but a marker laid down to teach us to be careful.