Move Over, AI – The Real Boom Industry Is Autism

Everyone is talking about the artificial intelligence revolution, but there’s a bigger, quieter gold rush happening right under our noses: the autism industry. The global AI market is projected at around $250 billion this year. The U.S. autism economy—medical costs, special education, therapy, lost productivity—now exceeds $460 billion annually. And unlike AI, every dollar is guaranteed by law. While AI valuations soar on future promises, autism has already delivered – a guaranteed, government-backed, recession-proof growth story that turns children into lifetime revenue streams by simply changing a few sentences in a manual.

Let me be clear about what I’m not talking about. We all know what real autism looks like. You don’t need a medical degree to spot it – the nonverbal child who will never live independently, who requires round-the-clock care for life. That’s real. That’s tragic. That’s not what this is about.

This is about the hijacking of the word “autism” into something else entirely: a broad spectrum of social differences and socially caused psychological problems rebranded as medical conditions. Shyness, intensity, awkwardness, giftedness – ordinary human variation pathologized and monetized.

And sometimes it’s not even that. Sometimes it’s just normal reactions to mentally unhealthy life conditions – stressed-out parents, overscheduled childhoods, screens replacing human connection, schools that punish any kid who can’t sit still for seven hours. We’re diagnosing children for responding logically to illogical environments.

The Numbers That Should Alarm You

In 1980, autism affected roughly 1 in 10,000 American children. Today the CDC claims 1 in 31. That’s a roughly three-hundred-fold increase in one generation. If cancer or diabetes had jumped three-hundred-fold, we would demand emergency congressional hearings. Instead we expanded a market.

The product is simple: take ordinary human variation – shyness, intense interests, sensory sensitivity, social awkwardness, giftedness, anxiety – and rebrand it as a lifelong brain disorder. Lower the diagnostic threshold every decade, and voilà: millions of new “cases” appear overnight.

This isn’t medicine discovering hidden disease. It’s marketing discovering hidden customers. With roughly 2.5 million diagnosed Americans carrying a projected lifetime cost of $2–4 million each, that’s a trillion-dollar liability – most of it paid by taxpayers and insurance premiums.

Follow the Money

The flagship treatment is Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA): a $10+ billion industry growing double digits annually, now thick with private-equity money. Forty hours a week of compliance training for toddlers can run $100,000–$250,000 a year per child – often until age 21 or beyond. Critics (including many autistic adults) call it traumatic; investors call it recurring revenue with government-mandated margins.

Schools get extra federal dollars for every autism label, so they hunt for it the way colleges once hunted athletes. A single paragraph change in the DSM-5 in 2013 collapsed Asperger’s syndrome and PDD-NOS into one giant “spectrum,” and the customer base tripled almost overnight. No new biology required.

Meanwhile the research money flows: NIH autism funding has ballooned from $20 million in 1997 to $450 million in 2025. Thousands of careers depend on the epidemic never being solved – or worse, never being admitted as largely artificial.

The Conspiracy Theory Factory

The cruelest irony? The broader the definition gets, the more it fuels the very conspiracy theories the medical establishment claims to despise. When you insist that a three-hundred-fold increase is biologically real, terrified parents will demand a three-hundred-fold cause. Vaccines, Tylenol, Wi-Fi, seed oils – something must explain the “tsunami.” The diagnostic inflation itself manufactures the panic that keeps the anti-science crowd in business.

Even Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now HHS Secretary, plays the same game. Here’s a man who built his brand on challenging the medical and scientific establishment – yet he won’t touch this. He rails against Big Pharma and environmental toxins while accepting the exploding autism numbers at face value. He wants more studies into vaccine schedules and ultrasound exposure because he, too, believes there’s a real epidemic needing a villain.

But Kennedy is an ambulance chaser at heart, a Ralph Nader with a laboratory fixation. He needs victims, and victims need perpetrators. Asking whether the epidemic itself is largely a statistical artifact doesn’t generate lawsuits or headlines. It doesn’t give grieving parents a corporate defendant to blame. But if the epidemic is real? Now we can sue the makers of Tylenol, vaccines, maybe ultrasound machines – anyone with deep pockets and a product that touched a pregnant woman. So he never asks the question that would collapse the entire narrative: what if most of today’s “autism” is just yesterday’s normal, reclassified?

Because if he did, the whole growth engine stalls – and so does his. He’s not outside the system challenging it; he’s part of the ecosystem feeding on it.

Where Are the Libertarians?

Here’s a puzzle: libertarians who rail against government overreach in healthcare, education, and regulation are conspicuously silent on this.

Think about what’s actually happening. A 13-person DSM committee votes to expand a diagnostic category. Suddenly millions more people qualify as “disabled.” State and federal governments then mandate that insurers cover treatment. Schools are required to provide services. Medicaid picks up the tab for families who can’t pay. A trillion-dollar infrastructure emerges—funded by taxpayers, enforced by regulation, with the government effectively deciding what counts as “normal” and what requires intervention.

If that’s not the state defining the boundaries of acceptable personhood, what is?

Libertarians will fight to the death over vaccine mandates, mask requirements, or educational curricula. But a government-backed diagnostic apparatus that pathologizes ordinary human variation and forces insurers to pay for decades of “treatment”? Silence.

The left won’t question the expansion because it’s wrapped in compassion. The right won’t question it because they’re busy chasing vaccine villains. And libertarians won’t question it because—why, exactly? Because the money flows to private ABA companies instead of government agencies? Because “autism awareness” sounds like helping children rather than expanding state power?

The silence is the tell. Everyone has a reason not to look too closely. And the industry keeps growing.

The Medical Establishment’s Trap

Here’s what the mainstream medical community won’t admit: they built this trap themselves, and now they’re stuck in it.

There is a form of autism that is unmistakable – nonverbal individuals who require 24/7 support and will never live independently. That’s real. That’s always been real. It shows up at roughly the same rate (0.3–0.5%) across every country and every decade, whether you’re measuring in the United States, Sweden, Japan, or India. No epidemic there.

Everything else – the vast, fuzzy “spectrum” that now captures shy kids, intense engineers, socially awkward artists, and anyone who’d rather skip the office party – is a social construct dressed in clinical language. It’s not medicine. It’s classification run amok.

But the medical establishment has endorsed this expansion for decades. They’ve published the papers, approved the DSM revisions, and cashed the research grants. Which means they can’t debunk the conspiracy theories without debunking themselves.

Think about it: if a doctor says vaccines don’t cause autism, a worried parent can reasonably ask, “Then what does explain a three-hundred-fold increase?” The honest answer – “We changed the definition and went looking for cases” – would torpedo the entire diagnostic infrastructure. So instead, doctors mumble about “better awareness” and “broader criteria,” hoping no one does the math.

The anti-vaxxers and seed-oil panickers are chasing false causes. But they’re chasing them for a largely false condition – at least as currently defined. The medical community’s refusal to admit the second half of that sentence is what keeps the first half alive.

I’ve written before about how we got here: how the original autism definition served a genuine clinical need, how it got stretched beyond recognition, and how the same pattern played out with IQ testing a century ago. (See “What Is Autism Anyway? You Might Think You Know,” “Josef Mengele Comes to Big Sur,” and “Debunking the Bunk of IQ Tests” for the full history.) The machinery of measurement always expands to serve the measurers. The only question is who pays.

Why Nothing Will Change

Imagine instead that psychiatry did the honest thing tomorrow: announced that mild social differences, without intellectual disability or clear genetic syndromes, are not a brain disease. That we overreached. That the “spectrum” was a well-meaning but catastrophic mistake.

The 1-in-31 figure would shrink to perhaps 1-in-300 almost instantly. Billions in spending would vanish. ABA empires would crumble. University departments would shutter. Advocacy organizations would lose half their constituency overnight. A lot of very comfortable people would suddenly need new jobs.

That is why it will never happen voluntarily. The modern autism industry isn’t sustained by evidence; it’s sustained by vested interest wearing the cloak of compassion. And unlike AI startups that at least have to ship working code, this industry ships new customers simply by moving the goalposts of “normal.”

So the next time someone breathlessly tells you AI is going to add trillions to global GDP, smile and remember: we already built a bigger one. We just called it autism.