There's one phrase that jumps out at me here. "If you marry your high school sweetheart," you have narrow horizons; you're living in what even I, a serious prac

There's one phrase that jumps out at me here. "If you marry your high school sweetheart," you have narrow horizons; you're living in what even I, a serious practicing Catholic with a relatively favorable view of monarchy, am fine with calling the bad old days: an age when physical mobility was expensive, social mobility was negligible, and most people lived their whole lives within 100 miles of the place where they were born -- and didn't think they'd missed out on anything, either. These were the conditions of the United States at least as recently as the beginning of the Second World War... (See Lee Sandlin's essay "Losing the War", on this and many related subjects. Note that the title is primarily about losing the memory of the war -- especially losing the memory of how strange the experience was.) So: increased prosperity and increased cultural literacy lead to increased assortative mating (and to later marriages) -- and thus, among those predisposed to autism, increased rates of autism... This is probably inevitable, more or less -- unfortunately...