| 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 advisor 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. 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. |
