The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future? - Softcover

Homer-Dixon, Thomas

3.72

297 ratings by Goodreads

9780099286288: The Ingenuity Gap: How Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099286289 ISBN 13: 9780099286288

Publisher: Vintage, 2001

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Is our world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage? The challenges facing human societies - from international financial crises and global climate change to pandemics of tuberculosis and AIDS - converge, intertwine, and often remain largely beyond our ken. Most of us suspect that the 'experts' don't really know what's going on and that as a species we have released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is the 'ingenuity gap' - the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon - the critical gap between our need for practical and innovative ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas. Homer-Dixon shows us how, in our complex world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, our own rich countries are no longer immune. When the gap widens political disintegration and violent upheaval can result, reaching into our own economies and daily lives in subtle, unforeseen ways.

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Review:

In Speed and Politics the French thinker Paul Virilio famously developed the theory that speed defines today's world. The communications revolution makes the world smaller, faster and infinitely more complex. In his fascinating new book The Ingenuity Gap, White House advisor Thomas Homer-Dixon, takes this argument a stage further, claiming that "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. But societies, whether rich or poor, can't always supply the ingenuity they need at the right times and places. As a result, some face an ingenuity gap: a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their adequate supply" Homer-Dixon's updated version of Darwin's theory of evolution rests on brain power, and the need for "copious ingenuity to address the commonplace challenges around us". What follows is an absorbing but rather fruitless attempt to measure and quantify ingenuity, and Homer-Dixon's accounts of how ingenuity has responded to a series of contemporary problems, stretching from pollution, global warming and the crisis of the global economy, to the dark side of artificial intelligence and information technology. However, this is a very long book for such a bold and snappy thesis, that veers between rather dubious forms of social engineering and utopian liberalism, as Homer-Dixon concludes rather hopefully that "as ingenuity gaps widen the gulfs of wealth and power among us, we need imagination, metaphor and empathy more than ever, to help us remember each other's essential humanity". Not a particularly novel or ingenious solution. --Jerry Brotton

Review:

"[C]losely reasoned, accessible, and lucid . . . . [A] welcome reality check." --"The Washington Post
" "No other new concept . . . so fully condenses all of the challenges we face as a human civilization as does 'ingenuity gap.' [Homer-Dixon] is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a mass audience." --Robert D. Kaplan
"This remarkable work, based on an impressive amount of scholarship, travel, and interviews, is the most persuasive forecast of the twenty-first century I have seen."--Edward O. Wilson
"[R]emarkable . . . compelling, original . . . . This book's intellectual scope is truly sweeping." "The Memphis Commercial Appeal
"

[C]losely reasoned, accessible, and lucid . . . . [A] welcome reality check. --The Washington Post
No other new concept . . . so fully condenses all of the challenges we face as a human civilization as does ingenuity gap. [Homer-Dixon] is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a mass audience. --Robert D. Kaplan
This remarkable work, based on an impressive amount of scholarship, travel, and interviews, is the most persuasive forecast of the twenty-first century I have seen. --Edward O. Wilson
[R]emarkable . . . compelling, original . . . . This book s intellectual scope is truly sweeping. The Memphis Commercial Appeal
"

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