Product Description

Despite all of society’s advances, our problems proliferate. Wars abound, environmental degradation accelerates, economies topple overnight, and pandemics such as AIDS and tuberculosis continue to spread. The Internet and other media help to disseminate knowledge, but they’ve also created an “info-glut” and left us too little time to process it. What’s more, advances in technology have made the world so bewilderingly fast-paced and complex that fewer people are able even to grasp the problems, let alone generate solutions. That space between the problems that arise and our ability to solve them is “the ingenuity gap,” and as we careen towards an increasingly harried and hectic future, the gap seems only to widen.

As he explores the possible consequences of this gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon offers an absorbing assessment of the state of the world and our ability to fix it. Culling from an astounding array of fields–from economics to evolution, political science to paleontology, computers to communications –he integrates his vast knowledge into an accessible and engaging argument. This is a book with profound implications for everyone that we can ill afford to ignore.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #451182 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-13
• Released on: 2002-08-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Amazon.com Review
As the world becomes more complex, so do its problems--and the solutions to these problems become tougher to grasp, writes University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon in The Ingenuity Gap. "As we strive to maintain or increase our prosperity and improve the quality of our lives, we must make far more sophisticated decisions, and in less time, than ever before," he writes. Is the day coming in which our ingenuity can't keep up? Homer-Dixon fears that it is: "the hour is late," and we're blindly "careening into the future." What we face, he says, is a "very real chasm that sometimes looms between our ever more difficult problems and our lagging ability to solve them." There are moments when Homer-Dixon comes close to sounding like a modern-day Malthus, with his never-ending worries about population growth, the environment, the strength of international financial institutions, civil wars, and so on. Yet parts of this book are downright fascinating; at its best, The Ingenuity Gap reads like one of Malcolm Gladwell's stories for The New Yorker (or his book The Tipping Point).

Homer-Dixon is very good when he tackles particular problems, and his interests are wide-ranging, moving from the psychology of an airplane cockpit during a crisis to the depletion of the world's fisheries to differences between the minds of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. He also dredges up fine details. Did you know that "the largest human-made structure on the planet is not an Egyptian pyramid or a hydroelectric dam but the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill near New York City, which has a depth of one hundred meters and an area of nine square kilometers"? There's plenty to argue with on these pages, and some readers will find Homer-Dixon's tendency to write in the first person a bit self-indulgent. Yet fans of big-think books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal will find The Ingenuity Gap riveting. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly
In a virtual tour of the state of ingenuity today, Homer-Dixon reminds us that "the greater complexity, unpredictability and pace of our world, and our rising demands on the human-made and natural systems around us" make it more critical than ever that smart solutions to technical and social problems be ready at a moment's notice. If economists like Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse rely on market forces to keep the supply of ingenuity in line with demand, Homer-Dixon, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, regards such an attitude as dangerously optimistic. Recounting the details and timing of crises like the October 1987 stock market crash and the July 1989 crash of United Flight 232 in which 111 passengers died but 185 miraculously survived, he argues that only a unique confluence of people and experience lets the supply of ingenuity equal the demand to avert total disaster in each case. Given persistent imperfections in markets, breakdowns in feedback loops and the weakening of social structures that have traditionally facilitated ingenuity, he is dubious that such extraordinary conditions can be met time and again. To scare us into action, he provides hair-raising examples of the effects of collapsing systems in Third World countries he has visited and studied. Marshaling a vast amount of information from such disparate fields as economics, ecology and biology, Homer-Dixon makes his most compelling case arguing for increased efforts to nurture social as well as technical ingenuity. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Scientific American
"In this book I'll argue that the complexity, unpredictability, and pace of events in our world, and the severity of global environmental stress, are soaring. If our societies are to manage their affairs and improve their well-being they will need more ingenuity- that is, more ideas for solving their technical and social problems." Homer-Dixon, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program there, cites markets and science as sources of the needed ideas. Markets provide an incentive to produce knowledge, he says, but the incentive is often skewed or too weak and produces wrong or inadequate solutions. In science, "there is often a critical time lag between the recognition of a problem and the delivery of sufficient ingenuity" to solve it. Acknowledging the astonishing adaptability and ingenuity that many societies and individuals have shown, Homer-Dixon nonetheless warns that the hour is late for coping with the world's problems. "When we look back from the year 2100, I fear we will see a period when our creations--technological, social, and ecological--outstripped our understanding, and we lost control of our destiny."

EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN

Customer Reviews

The kind of work society needs
The Ingenuity Gap is a book filled with big ideas that originate from numerous fields of research, and the result is quite stunning. There are so many contentious topics in this 400-page book that every now and then readers are bound to disagree with the author. Notwithstanding, disagreement is the result of conversation, and throughout the book this is the impression I had, that I was having a conversation with a man who has traveled all over the world to find a solution (if one there is) to the growing complexities of the world we live in.

The application of chaos and non-linearity to social science is probably not new, but Homer-Dixon presents this principle in such a way that it is impossible for the reader not to see it extending its long fingers around the world we live in, a world that, thanks to us, is growing in complexity.

This book serves as a wake-up call for policy-makers around the world who believe that every problem can be solved by technical means only (such as providing Internet connections to starving African children in countries ravaged by wars, jingoism, disease and scarcity of natural resources). Such positivism is misplaced, or misappropriated, Homer-Dixon argues. The widening gap between the rich and the poor of this world is a problem that is in urgent need of being addressed, and as long as we blind ourselves to the oftentimes hard realities of this world, or refuse to look beyond the gates of our rich Western communities, the world will not become a better place, and it could even turn for the worse.

Is this book nothing more than the musings of an unfettered alarmist? Some Westerners might argue that it is. But that is exactly what we can expect from people who spend their whole lives working in an environment that has distanced itself from the natural world (see, for instance, the Vegas chapter of this book). We Westerners have erected towering protective walls around our lives, and knowingly or not we have built the very screens which make it very difficult to see what lies beyond and consequently make it even more difficult for us to find solutions to problems people in less-fortunate countries are facing. Eventually, Homer-Dixon argues, the problems arising in a small country on the other side of the globe could very well embark on the bandwagon of chaos and surprise us with a bang on arrival.

The Ingenuity Gap is, to use a word E. O. Wilson resurrected a few years ago, an example of consilience, in that it draws on research from different fields - scientific, social, etc - to make a point, hoping in the process that it will initiate rapprochement and a fine-tuned orchestration (instead of competitiveness) of human efforts to solve the many difficulties we face today and undoubtedly shall face in the future.

Filled with to-the-point metaphors, interesting people, and written with exemplary lucidity, The Ingenuity Gap is the perfect wake-up call for a world that, awash in information, is slowly giving up on itself.

Engrossing, entertaining, and disturbing
This is an extraordinary book, and it should be widely read. Not only does it make a compelling case that the problems we're creating for ourselves are rapidly outrunning our cleverness, but it's also packed with fascinating discussions of technical matters -- from global warming to fusion power to the evolution of the human brain. Homer-Dixon brings all these issues together within one conceptual framework by looking at the balance between our requirement for "ingenuity" (basically, practical ideas to solve our problems) and our supply of ingenuity. He is largely successful. Amazingly, despite the difficult subjects he discusses, The Ingenuity Gap is a good read, and some passages are quite moving. It's full of stories and colorful anecdotes, drawn from the author's travels around world. I know of few other books that blend storytelling and technical writing so well.

This book will be contentious. It will even make some people very angry. It challenges received wisdom over and over again: it raises questions about the sustainability of capitalism, about whether we can rely on science and technology to solve our problems, and about the effects of the Internet on democracy. Techno-libertarians will object, as will advocates of unfettered markets. But it's not easy to dismiss this book, because Homer-Dixon has done his research well (the 60-odd pages of endnotes are packed with citations and fascinating tidbits of information).

The Ingenuity Gap's central argument is straightforward, even banal: we may be creating a world that's too complex and unpredictable to manage. However, nowhere else have I seen this idea developed so thoroughly and so convincingly. After I finished this book, I found the world appeared very different, and the future looked considerably less secure.

Over-rated, but
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a good book. I'd give it 5 stars for social relevance, and 3 stars for 'all things being equal'. But I'm giving it only 2 here because it was so highly recommended by the folks at the bookstore where I bought it.

Given the kudos, at the store and inside the cover, I was expecting something really cutting edge, a landmark work of sorts. As for as those books go, this book is truly subpar.

My problem is that I learned all this before, before even those times when the 'environment' because trendy in the liberal arts. My undergrad degree was in International Studies, with minors in Economics, Political Science and Sociology, and as such, this book reads more like a review for me than anything else.

This would be a great book for somebody at the sophomore level of liberal arts education. It's basically a 200-level read; a bit too far ahead for those who don't know their micros from their macros, yet far too superficial on any given topic to qualify for upper level material. It would be great for those so-called practical types - our business and vocational types - who have never thought much or very deeply about those 'global' issues they hear discussed on CNN daily and Sunday morning whenever a group of DCers gather somewhere in Washington and indulge themselves in what I call 'smart talk'. As one who has lived and breathed this kind of material for many years, I can attest to the fact that this is stuff that a lot of people, most in fact, do need to gain exposure to.

I have no strong criticisms of the book; I just think it's overrated. Even the central thesis of an ingenuity gap, (while novel and expounded upon in a book that's basically as long as a novel itself), is hardly original nor especially clever. Anyone close to these subjects invariably asks questions relating the books core: Do we have the ability to deal with the messes we're creating in time to undo the damage we're doing? Do we have the will? Why do I invoke the term 'clever': because anyone close to academia knows that professors are constantly trying to find some new spin or twist to call their own. I'm not accusing the author of that kind of narcissism here - I don't think that's his intention at all, actually - but given the pervasiveness of those kinds of attempts in the world of social theorists, his play on the 'ingenuity gap' concept does beg comparisons. Qualitatively speaking, I find this particular innovation very average.

If there was one thing I didn't like about the book it would be its introspective quality, eg, 'Seeing Las Vegas made me think of the world at large.' 'Seeing those buildings at Canary Warf made me think of the world at large.' Some of this would be fine but I thought this was overdone. Then again, it actually suits the mindset of the readers for whom I think this book is most well-suited: college sophomores who are in the process of mind expansion, a process which is largely sustained by intellectual epiphanies.

Ultimately though, these criticisms could be rightly regarded as unfair and petty. There's no doubting that this book has immense relevance; it touches on a subject that can hardly be exceeded in terms of overall importance. Perhaps the most relevant aspect of it is the author's sense of realism: without saying it explicitly he leads us to a conclusion which any sane and truly honest person must come to. We're biting off way more than we can chew, and it really might be too late to undo what will turn out to be some major and permanent damage.