The Ingenuity Gap
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Summary
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.
Reviews
Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the wisest possible readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of copying with tow emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer-Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently
Michael Ignatieff