The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?
Language: English
Published by VINTAGE CANADA, 2001
- Softcover
- Used
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.World of Books (was SecondSale)
AbeBooks seller since December 20, 2007
Condition: Used - Good
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Add to basketItem description from seller
As crises multiply, ingenuity lags. This prescient classic explains why societies falter when problems outpace solutions--and offers a roadmap to close the gap before risks from climate shocks, pandemics, inequality, and AI spiral beyond control. First published at the turn of the millennium, The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon anticipated the turbulent world we now inhabit: pandemics, climate disasters, political polarization, disruptive runaway technologies, and escalating global instability. With remarkable foresight, Homer-Dixon warned that the complexity of our problems would accelerate faster than our collective ingenuity to solve them--and that failure to close this gap would leave societies fragile and exposed. A quarter century later, his vision has proven prophetic. Homer-Dixon takes readers on a global tour of ingenuity under pressure: from the desperate improvisation of pilots fighting to land United Airlines Flight 232 in Iowa, to the water-hungry expansion of Las Vegas, to a harrowing search for a missing child in Patna, and the collapse of Canada's cod fisheries. Vivid and far-reaching, it is a sweeping portrait of what happens when societies are stretched beyond their capacity to adapt and an enlightening case for why ingenuity is humanity's most vital resource. Celebrating over twenty-five years in print, The Ingenuity Gap remains both a visionary diagnosis of our age and a call to reimagine how we generate creativity, resilience, and leadership in uncertain times.…
Seller Inventory # CIN0676972969G
- Title
- The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?
- Author
- Homer-Dixon Thomas
- Publisher
- VINTAGE CANADA
- Publication year
- 2001
- Condition
- Good
- Binding
- Paperback
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0676972969
- ISBN 13
- 9780676972962
“Human beings have been smart enough to turn nature to their ends, generate vast wealth for themselves, and double their average life span. But are they smart enough to solve the problems of the 21st century?” -- Thomas Homer-Dixon
Can we create ideas fast enough to solve the very problems -- environmental, social, and technological -- we’ve created? Homer-Dixon pinpoints the “ingenuity gap” as the critical problem we face today, and tackles it in a riveting, groundbreaking examination of a world that is rapidly exceeding our intellectual grasp.
In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon, "global guru" (the Toronto Star), "genuine academic celebrity" (Saturday Night) and "one of Canada's most talked about and controversial scholars" (Maclean's) asks: is our world becoming too complex, too fast-paced to manage? The challenges facing us -- ranging from international financial crises and global climate change to pandemics of tuberculosis and AIDS- converge, intertwine, and remain largely beyond our ken. Most of suspect the "experts don't really know what's going on; that as a species we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. We are fast approaching a time when we may no longer be able to control a world that increasingly exceeds our grasp. This is "the ingenuity gap" -- the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, political scientist and advisor to the White House -- the critical gap between our need for practical, innovative ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas.
Through gripping narrative stories and incidents that exemplify his arguments, he takes us on a world tour that begins with a heartstopping description of the tragic crash of United Airlines Flight 232 from Denver to Chicago and includes Las Vegas in its desert, a wilderness beach in British Columbia, and his solitary search for a little girl in Patna, India. He shows how, in our complex world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, our own rich countries are not immune, and we are caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. When the gap widens, political disintegration and violent upheaval can result, reaching into our own economies and daily lives in subtle ways. In compelling, lucid, prose, he makes real the problems we face and suggests how we might overcome them -- in our own lives, our thing, our business and our societies.
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World of Books (was SecondSale)
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