The Economist recently included an article proposing “business may find disability as important as environmentalism.”

The article raises interesting points such as:

• “Thorkil Sonne, the founder of Specialisterne, a Danish firm that finds high-tech jobs for autistic people, says they can focus on repetitive tasks that might be boring to other workers. Britain’s electronic-espionage centre, GCHQ, (pictured) eagerly recruits people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome. Their ability to spot patterns can make them ace code-crackers.”
• While working at Merrill Lynch, Rich Donovan, who has cerebral palsy, looked at disabled people as an emerging market and found it much bigger than he expected: “1.1 billion people, that’s the size of China.””
• Donovan “has devised a “Return on Disability” index, which tracks the shares of the 100 firms that deal best with disabled people. Over the past five years it has outperformed the broader stockmarket. Later this month Bloomberg will include this on its financial-information terminals.”

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