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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 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
Thomas Hughes,
"Closely reasoned, accessible and lucid. . . . Displaying impressive breadth of learning."
Book Description
"Looking back from the year 2100, we'll see a period when our creations--technological, social,
ecological--outstripped our understanding and we lost control of our destiny. And we will think: if
only--if only we'd had the ingenuity and will to prevent some of that. I am convinced that there is still
time to muster that ingenuity--but the hour is late."
--Thomas Homer-Dixon
In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon asks: Is our world becoming too complex and
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 understanding. Most of us suspect that the "experts" don't really know
what's going on, and that we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is the
"ingenuity gap," the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, renowned political scientist and
sometime adviser to the White House: the critical gap between our need for practical and innovative
ideas to solve our complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas.
He shows us how, in today's world, while poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity
gaps, our own rich countries are no longer immune, and we are all caught dangerously between a
soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. As the gap widens, political
disintegration and violent upheaval can result, reaching into our own economies and daily lives in
subtle, unforeseen ways. In compelling and lucid prose, he makes real the problems we face and
suggests how we might overcome them--in our own lives, our thinking, our businesses, and our
societies.
From the Back Cover
"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.
Homer-Dixon looks beyond the miracle of technological and economic growth to the vast
complexities of the real world that will increasingly put even the most advanced
societies at risk."
Edward O. Wilson
University Research Professor and Honorary Curator in Entomology
Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology
"Homer-Dixon explores how the soaring complexities of our world create monumental
challenges for our institutions and governments. This is a powerful book -- an
intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journey to find answers to some of the most
pressing problems of our time."
Senator Timothy E. Wirth
President, The United Nations Foundation
"At the beginning of the last century that great seer, H. G. Wells, wrote that
humankind was engaged in a race between education and disaster. The world, he sensed,
was becoming ever more complex and harder to manage. Each new invention brought
unintended and often calamitous consequences as well as material benefits, and human
minds could not always keep pace with the knowledge explosion."
"A hundred years later, and with the world changing at a much faster pace than in
Wells' time, 'The Ingenuity Gap' offers an updated caution against human hubris.
Homer-Dixon's casual, sometimes anecdotal prose is undergirded by serious scientific
data and a truly global range of case-studies suggesting that the world is becoming a
lot more complex than our minds can grasp or our capacities can handle. Recommended
reading for those who are still in a millennial party mood."
Paul Kennedy
J. Richardson Dilworth Professor of History
Director, International Security Program
Yale University
"At the beginning of the last century that great seer, H. G. Wells, wrote that
An idea is only an idea if it causes unease, debate, and reflection. By that
standard, Thomas Homer-Dixon's concept of an "ingenuity gap" is truly a new idea. I
can think of no other new concept that so fully condenses all of the challenges we
face as a human civilization than the "ingenuity gap." Homer-Dixon has found a way to
unite all of our concerns about economics, war, population growth, complexity, etc.
under a single heading. He is one of an elite group of academics who can write for a
mass audience."
Robert Kaplan, author of Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History
About the Author
Thomas Homer-Dixon is Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program and Associate
Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He is the author of
Environment, Scarcity, and Violence. He lives in Toronto.
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