This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, August 20th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

As we take smaller and smaller bites of the cultural world around us, what will it mean for how people

think and interact?

What are the economic and social implications of the massive increases in data that we face

each day.

What can the rest of us learn from autistic?

Economist and Cato Institute adjunct scholar Tyler Cowan answers these questions in his new book,

Create Your Own Economy,

The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.

We spoke following a forum for the book held August 4th.

You use Don Quixote as an example of sort of what you're talking about and I

reading your book I thought that that sort of is a nice illustration why use

donkey? Well the story of Don Quixote is a man who is on a

quest and he's a man who tells himself stories all the time about what he's doing.

One of the points of the book is to look at how we structure our lives using narratives and the emotional impact of that, how it brings so many things to life,

but at the same time it also biases us, it causes us to make mistakes, and if you look at Don Quixote, he follows his stories of

chivalry into a variety of absurd situations and mistakes, and he almost kills himself

and his companion, Sancho Panza, in a number of different occasions.

At the forum you talked about if I were a progressive, perhaps I would think like this, and

Mataglacius was perhaps an example of somebody like that. If I were a progressive I might say well

isn't this just a terrible thing that we're that this culture we're living in

and perhaps going to be increasingly living in will allow us to feed ourselves all of these false

...