There&#x27;s one phrase that jumps out at me here. &quot;If you marry your high school sweetheart,&quot; you have narrow horizons; you&#x27;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&#x27;t think they&#x27;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&#x27;s essay &quot;Losing the War&quot;, 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.)<p>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...