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

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

"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