The Ingenuity Gap"The most persuasive forecast of the 21st century I have seen." --E.O. Wilson, author of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge and twice winner of a Pulitzer prize.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 inits 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. |
Contents
Prologue I | 1 |
ONE How Are We Changing Our Relationship | 9 |
TWO Do We Need More Ingenuity to Solve | 99 |
Copyright | |
8 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
ability argues Bank become behavior Bihar Biosphere brain buildings Cambridge Canary Wharf capital carbon dioxide century cognitive Comdex communication complex systems create crisis cropland culture decades Earth's ecological economic growth economic optimists economists ecosystems effects energy engine environment environmental especially evolution example experts face factors fitness landscape forests frontal lobes future global groups hominids human ideas increase ingenuity gap institutions interactions Internet Isle of Dogs kilometers knowledge Langdon Winner light lives LTTE Luxor Hotel manage markets ment meters million models modern national edition natural nitrogen nomic nonlinear Patna Paul Romer percent planet political poor countries population predict problems produce reality rich countries scarcities Scientific American scientists seemed social ingenuity societies soil solve supply technical technologies theory things Thomas Homer-Dixon tion today's understand University Press unknown unknowns violence York