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The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable World | 
 enlarge | Author: Thomas Homer-dixon
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $30.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 1094663
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 496
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.5
ISBN: 0375401865
Dewey Decimal Number: 303.4833
EAN: 9780375401862
ASIN: 0375401865
Publication Date: October 17, 2000
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| Editorial Reviews:
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
Product 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
 Key Piece in a Body of Work of Great Import February 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I have read and reviewed one earlier book by this author, and bought the two more recent works a week ago after realizing I had seriously under-estimated the relevance of this author's work to my holistic integrative "civilization resilience" intent.
This is a five-star book and I expect Upside of Down will be as well.
I was immediately struck by the grace with which the author credits key other minds in the body of the work rather than just as a footnote.
Here are the highlights from my flyleaf notes, and a few other recommended readings:
+ Complexity soaring, need ideas for better institutions and better social arrangements.
+ Delusion of control over complex systems we barely comprehend
+ Citing Paul Rober: ideas co-equivalent to capital and labor
+ Not enough time to reflect (I am reminded of
The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
+ Full credit to H. G. Wells for anticipating the need for a World Brain to manage the complex of complexes
+ Excellent overview of mistakes by the economists. I recommend as well
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
+Wealth gaps + migrations = poor global management
+ Losing 25% of our biodiversity
+ Delays in policy understanding, decisions, action, and outcomes compound losses over time
+ Mike Whitfield cited on need for holistic view, keystone species, and radical differences in compressed time scales. I am reminded of everything written by Richard Falk, Ervin Laszlo and others in the 1970's and 1980's.
+ Population factor is profound
+ Corruption is the primary obstacle to reform
+ Garbage overtaking coastlines while nitrogen leeches into water and carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere
+ Citing David Harvey, "hypercapitalism" compresses time and space while over-producing both wasted production and concentrated wealth
+ Our collective ego is blocking our collective intelligence. See the new book, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
+ Losing our sense of place, not getting enough signals to understand the tipping point circumstances
+ Complexity goes awry (he cited Perrow, whose book Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies remains a seminal work (simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and fix; complex systems have multiple points of failure that interact in unpredictable and sometimes undiscoverable ways; we live in a constellation of complex systems well beyond our ken)
+ Complex systems characterized by multiplicity; causal feedback; some tightly coupled; interdependence; openness; synergy; and nonlinear behavior.
+ Chaos theory warns us that nature will magnify the smallest perturbation from humans
+ Four stages of human perception of nature: 1) Balancing; 2) Anarchic; 3) Resilient; 4) Evolving.
+ Citing Wally Broeker: "Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks."
+ Social systems are path dependent, delay at any point can be disastrous
+ Lessons of financial crises: governments and the IMF are out of touch with speed and breadth of financial systemic changes; computer-driven changes can accelerate and deepen mistakes
+ Citing Kofi Annan: "imbalance between economic, social, and political realms can never be sustained for long."
+ Author: social system out of synch with natural and technological systems
+ Software code doubling every two years, bugs a real problem, still in pre-industrial era
+ Information glut has a critical bottleneck, lack of a sense-making bridge from data to our cognitive absorption
+ Ingenuity is both technical and social
+ Our biggest problem is the failure of our economic institutions and policies
+ Washington DC bureaucrats, including senior CIA analysts, "largely out of their depth"
+ Pace of change, depth of ignorance, and political resistance all assume scary proportions
+ Self-organizing resilience and adapting systems could be key
+ As ingenuity gap widens "need imagination, metaphor, and empathy more than ever."
+ Afterword: relentless increase in complexity while "world economic system is profoundly dysfunctional."
+ Most interesting to me, as I have committed to publish a book on "Cultural Intelligence" in 2009, is the author's citing of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, saying culture is "information--skills, attitudes, beliefs, values--capable of affecting individuals' behavior."
There are other notes but Amazon imposes a word limit. This is a great book, and I honor it by listing other great and relevant works below (to my limit of ten):
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
What we don't know can hurt us... December 16, 2007
This poor book, it languished for three months on a shelf while I crammed my head with political science theories but after a concerted effort in the last 24 hours it is finished. What a great read! It has sent me to Amazon and the library to find several of its references to learn more about complexity, fitness landscapes and moral communities.
To be honest, I found it kind of dragged there in the middle but I loved Parts III and IV and it certainly helps to have the background of the first two parts when Homer-Dixon brings it all together in a damning indictment of our arrogant, materialistic, modern capitalist society.
My favourite idea from this book is that of fitness landscapes - the idea that there is not merely one peak of fitness (social, cultural, physical) that a species or society can evolve to but many alternate peaks, some higher than others. The problem is that we could be at a peak that is not as high as others but in order to get to a higher peak we have to travel through a valley of low fitness which means suffering and regression before we climb back up. Cool idea. Apparently it was first proposed by Sewall Wright in 1932.
Homer-Dixon threads his discussion with the idea that one of the human brain's greatest abilities is its capacity to form metaphors and analogies. The idea of a fitness landscape which was originally developed to explain biological evolution translates wonderfully to political and social theory. Perhaps our society has reached a peak of fitness but the problem is that our social and political elites are now preventing us from trying to find a higher peak and many people suffer as a result. Fascinating.
Homer-Dixon does not claim to have answers, but he has certainly provided us with a source from which to develop inquiry and a sense of urgency about the need to continue questioning.
Very lucid writer. March 20, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The book is most readable and easily followed while discussing some rather complex ideas. The author's ability to use analogies to which readers can relate is most enjoyable.
 All metaphors but no facts May 2, 2004
12 out of 24 found this review helpful
This author is nothing but a medievalist who equates modernity with evil. He has no scientific background (political science is not science) and he is not an economist. In fact he admits: "I have tried to elaborate an INTUITION or FEELING about the future" . Shirley MacLaine anyone? Everything to him is a metaphor for the human predicament: complexity, high speed, crises, unpredictability, confusion, despair, ad nauseum. (Maybe the author needs to read a book on chaos theory.) For those with an epistemology of reason, there is nothing to be learned from this treatise. For those who are as despondent as the author, well the good news for you guys is that life is utterly hopeless.
Probably one of the best scholastic works I've ever read February 10, 2004
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I grabbed this book in a duty free store in Asia and read it all the way back to the US. Needless to say that despite it being an academic book, it was very engrossing and interesting to read. After the first few chapters, I felt both helpless that we're moving at such a pace and have constructed a society where our ingenuity for solving problems is far less than the complexity of the problems and yet optimistic that someone brilliant was able to write a book of this caliber and it was fairly understandable. At times I found it hard to believe I was reading an academic book because it was just a very well written book (and highly researched with dozens of pages of endnotes).I would highly recommend this book to thinkers and public policy students and professionals and to anyone who would appreciate a better understanding of the complexity of the world around them.
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