Thanks for your support; I’ll post updates at the WRT blog.

With detailed information from a variety of sources on the actions taken, not the words spoken or empathy expressed, we parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and especially self-advocates can become vastly better informed about how to cast our votes. Americans have spread out across the states and towns of our nation throughout the last 50 years; few of us live with our whole families in towns where we can influence political processes to the same extent as those who recognize more clearly defined common interests. But our children our everywhere, and there’s no reason my parents in upstate NY shouldn’t be voting to support ASD issues there just like my friends in California or Massachusetts. The problems of those children ARE my son’s problems. This entire class of children and adults, and perhaps an entire burgeoning ASD generation, needs our protection, assistance, and support so we can build in them the power to speak for themselves.

“…to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men….”

From a technical perspective, I imagine this project as being built in layers as tools rather than documents. What this means is that it starts with a straightforward national layer, since there are a number of good sources to get information about Congress and votes/actions on bills/amendments. It’s also relatively easy to look at something like Autism Votes for a list of important bills to track. Similar tools could be built at the state and then county/local levels to track both legislators and legislation. Then, the system could be expanded to track the executive branch and even judges. A user should be able to designate an organization that maintains a list of the public policy issues that group is tracking (like Autism Votes does here).

So what makes this different than Autism Votes? First off, I see this as a very direct, reductionist verdict, a thumbs-up/thumbs-down on every person tracked. Remember, the premise is that ASD issues are more important to most people in our community than just about anything else. I don’t know at which point this idea crosses over into lobbying and the political influence categories that trigger different regulatory requirements, but it’s not a problem at this nascent stage.

The key to this project is the combination of some straightforward web 2.0 tools with a definite crowdsourced component (only locals will put school board names on a list after each election) and the ability to share judgments OPENLY, so people can advocate for their own views. For example, I would imagine that the science-heavy crowd among parents would diverge greatly from the “warrior mom” contingent on how they would rate people who support/oppose particular vaccine research funding. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. Politics is how we deal with allocations of scarce resources in a democracy. It might as well work!

(As an aside, if this project were built with an open and extensible design plan, such as using references to open-source/public wiki-style definitions files, it could be expanded into a grass-roots political action tool for people with any particular concern.)

As a law student, I took a whole class on insurance law; I practiced insurance defense law (in mass torts, not individual personal injury cases); and I’ve studied the economic principles relating to insurance law (in fact, I keep an economist around for quick answers — it helps that he’s my best friend). I’m a believer in Schumpeterian competition. I’ve see it live in watching my father grow his small business over decades, seen mistakes and successes in my own career and business.

So when I read an article like this, it’s not hard for me to deconstruct the arguments and understand the rationales behind them. Indeed, most of them resonate with me and, I think, philosophically sound. Thursday, I attended the signing of NJ’s autism insurance legislation, which provided a minimum of $36,000 annual coverage for behavioral therapy for children with autism (about 2 hours a day, for those who are counting, assuming no price inflation) and speech/physical therapy/occupational therapy as required for all covered persons with autism.

Of course, this bill, like other state bills, does not reach those insurers that are subject to ERISA, which fully preempts state regulation for compliant plans. This statutory backdrop is the reason that as much as Autism Votes and state groups are working on state statutes, they are also all focused on federal legislation. (The possibility also exists, although I haven’t read the federal bills to see exactly how they’re approaching the issue, to extend insurance coverage for behavioral therapy to all insurance plans by expanding the statutory language to express Congress’ clear intent to preempt the entire field of autism insurance coverage and supersede state schemes (or lack thereof) with a single federal scheme.)

So those statutes are good for people like me: a parent with an autistic child who benefits from ABA therapy. But I probably should consider that government intervention will skew efficiency. I believe that’s true with protectionist trade tariffs, agricultural subsidies, and byzantine tax code provisions that hide the politicized allocation of costs and benefits from taxpayers. I’ve never really been in a situation where something particular to my situation was at real issue: what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to reconcile these two ideas: adherence to a set of theoretical beliefs about how markets function, economic principles of incentives, and federalism with the very clear imperative to help my son and protect my family?

In some countries, and for some people in the US, the answer is simple: take whatever you can and steal the rest. We expect democracy, not kleptocracy, and I still believe that unjust means do not justify the ends; we can turn our country into a mess by expanding government power in the name of security from terrorists just as easily as we can do it in the name of protecting the people from “greedy” corporations.

But how much does it matter to my ASD son what sort of political climate we live in if he can’t fully participate in society, if he’s unable to vote, or advocate for himself? Does it matter as much to my other son what the world is like if his brother is at risk? I think that these questions are easier to answer in a hypothetical than in real life, when faced with a specific child and real choices.

Part of my response right now is to suppor the things that are clearly good ofr my son while helping to build the detailed evidence that they are good for society as a whole rather than a “mere” transfer of wealth. This approach is as much self-interest as it is self-satisfying; if there is societal benefit to spending funds on ABA for people with autism, then it’s far less likely to be removed, whittled away, or excised from future budgets through even more political wrangling.

How have you reconciled your general political or economic philosophy with the “slings and arrows” of real life? Where have you drawn lines?

Today, Seth Godin writes a more colorful post addressing one of the key points — not reacting to bad behavior at all — in the context of a workplace bully.

The basic model that behavior analysts start with is this: ABC.

• A – What was the action that triggered the behavior?
• B – What was the behavior?
• C – What was the consequence of that behavior?

Under a simple example, a child may interpret shouting and scolding as just attention, which might be desired, and not make the connection between positive and negative attention. That’s why Seth’s advice is to walk away (cf. ignore undesirable behavior) when a workplace bully starts ranting. Getting upset — angry, sad, or frightened — is likely to actually reinforce the bully’s behavior and lead to more of the same.

This attention to behavior is one more thing I’ve learned from autism.