Orrin:

I suspect this terrible problem has not affected your extended family.

I have three relatives with autism. It's a hammerblow problem for families suffering from it. Nobody signs up for autism services on a whim.

I can't prove that it's really up in the general population, but _it sure seems that way_. There's nothing unusual about diseases becoming more common. Asthma is a noncontroversial example.

For all we know, autism could be caused by a slow-moving infection. You'll note that AIDS became highly more common because it was a slow moving infection.

Yes, the disease, when real, is terrible, but when you incentive the diagnosis you inevitably boost claims, no?

Mr. Judd;

Or you cause a problem that would have been diagnosed as something else diagnosed as autism because that enables help.

Just as every rambunctious boy in America is now ADHD

Maybe. But I read a pretty persuasive article a couple years back in some tech mag (Wired, I think) arguing that it's a real result of increased assortative mating in Silicon Valley and similar nerd-heavy areas. Autism seems to be just a tragically amplified version of "nerdiness," and Asperger's Syndrome seems to be just a relatively mild version of autism. Finally, autism, Asperger's, and nerdiness all seem to be partly hereditary.

So when you have lots of 140-IQ code nerds moving to Palo Alto, marrying each other and procreating (in itself a fine thing), you apparently get a leap in autism and Asperger's as a sad side effect.

Or maladjusted parents have maladjusted kids and now we have a name for it and you get money.