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The Ingenuity Gap: Can We Solve the Problems of the Future?
"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
“Human beings have been smart enough to turn nature to their ends, generate vast wealth for themselves, and double their average life span. But are they smart enough to solve the problems of the 21st century?” -- Thomas Homer-Dixon
Can we create ideas fast enough to solve the very problems -- environmental, social, and technological -- we’ve created? Homer-Dixon pinpoints the “ingenuity gap” as the critical problem we face today, and tackles it in a riveting, groundbreaking examination of a world that is rapidly exceeding our intellectual grasp.
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 in its 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.
“Human beings have been smart enough to turn nature to their ends, generate vast wealth for themselves, and double their average life span. But are they smart enough to solve the problems of the 21st century?” -- Thomas Homer-Dixon
Can we create ideas fast enough to solve the very problems -- environmental, social, and technological -- we’ve created? Homer-Dixon pinpoints the “ingenuity gap” as the critical problem we face today, and tackles it in a riveting, groundbreaking examination of a world that is rapidly exceeding our intellectual grasp.
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 in its 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.
496 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 34 reviews
September 14, 2017
I read this book many years ago and it shaped a lot of my thinking around humanity, creativity and the future.
The basic premise is that we're not smart enough to deal with some of the problems we have created for ourselves - we simply don't have enough synaptic connections in our grey matter to avert disaster. It was written before 9/11, and in some ways it has been chillingly on the nose in its predictions of how the first few decades of the 21st century would unfold.
The author does offer some insights into how humanity should proceed.
It is an important read for anyone wanting to understanding more about the future and our role in it - if any.
The basic premise is that we're not smart enough to deal with some of the problems we have created for ourselves - we simply don't have enough synaptic connections in our grey matter to avert disaster. It was written before 9/11, and in some ways it has been chillingly on the nose in its predictions of how the first few decades of the 21st century would unfold.
The author does offer some insights into how humanity should proceed.
It is an important read for anyone wanting to understanding more about the future and our role in it - if any.
January 6, 2021
This past September, shortly after publication, I read Thomas Homer-Dixon's Commanding Hope (link to my review) because I"m a big fan of his work. I read his The Upside of Down shortly after learning about it, and I've read many of his shorter pieces (some of my notes here & here) and watched some of his presentations. And I read his first work intended for a general audience, The Ingenuity Gap--except I hadn't finished it! (This used to happen to me on occasion when I had a full-time law practice plus family, etc. You know how it is.)
Of course, my "current read" doesn't scowl at me or chastise me when I set it aside to "take a look" into another book. Oh, no! An uncompleted book just looks at me hauntingly, like a hungry puppy begging at the dining table, as it sits silently on my bookshelf or (more often these days) when it occasionally pops up on my Kindle as a specter from among the uncompleted books of my reading past.
Anyway, I got a copy of The Ingenuity Gap and decided to dig in, expecting that I'd still enjoy it, and this time I'll read it to completion! But then I paused. I looked at the publication date: 2000. Twenty years ago! A generation ago! It was published before 9/11, before the Crash of 2008, and before the rise of authoritarianism and the attendant decline of democracy and the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere. Would it still prove relevant, or would I find it dated by fast-changing events? Well, there's good news and there's bad news. First, the good news: this book is still timely and more than relevant. And the bad news? This book is still timely and more than relevant. And why is this "bad news"? Because Homer-Dixon catalogs examples of, and future prospects for, problems from which we can't extricate ourselves. We create problems so perplexing and entangling that our ingenuity won't be able to tame them. Homer-Dixon describes his thesis:
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. But societies, whether rich or poor, can’t always supply the ingenuity they need at the right times and places. As a result, some face an ingenuity gap: a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply.
Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Ingenuity Gap (p. 1). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Homer-Dixon explores his thesis via both arm-chair theorizing and field exploration, interviewing the wise and talking with the marginalized as he strives to come to grips with the scope of the challenges that he investigates. As a result of his investigations that he undertook on the verge of the twenty-first century, he concludes that
In the twenty-first century, the growing disparities between those who adapt well and those who don’t will hinder our progress towards a shared sense of human community and erode our new global society’s stability and prosperity. The next century is likely, for this reason, to be a time of fragmentation and turmoil, of divisions and rivalry between winners and losers, and of humanity’s patent failure to manage its affairs in critical domains. Id., pp. 1-2.
Homer-Dixon explains his central concept--ingenuity--in the following summary:
Ingenuity, as I define it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computers or drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements, like efficient markets and competent governments. Id., pp.2-3.
Homer-Dixon charts a course that will avoid readers branding him as simply a Cassandra or as a Polyanna. He notes and appreciates the advances and advantages of technology, the market, and Western modernity in general, but he declines to accept the rather naive optimism of technological optimists, such as Julian Simon (still perhaps the most prominent technological-economic optimist of the time). Homer-Dixon states his conclusion succinctly:
But—and this is the critical “but”—we should not jump to the conclusion that the supply of ingenuity always increases in lockstep with our ingenuity requirement: while it’s true that necessity is often the mother of invention, we can’t always rely on the right kind of ingenuity appearing when and where we need it. In many cases, the complexity and speed of operation of today’s vital economic, social, and ecological systems exceed the human brain’s grasp. Very few of us have more than a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work. They remain fraught with countless “unknown unknowns,” which makes it hard to supply the ingenuity we need to solve problems associated with these systems.
In this book, I explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply the ingenuity required in the coming century. For example, many people believe that new communication technologies strengthen democracy and will make it easier to find solutions to our societies’ collective problems, but the story is less clear than it seems. The crush of information in our everyday lives is shortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on critical matters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial. Id., pp. 4-5.
Perhaps you can see in the above-quote why I find Homer-Dixon's book still quite relevant and useful: he anticipates Donald Rumsfeld's description of the problems arising from the ill-considered Iraq War, the "unknown unknowns" (and they certainly exist in abundance). And Homer-Dixon's remarks about technology and democracy could have been written today as we struggle with political developments in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and "Parler."
I'll conclude this initial part of my review with Homer-Dixon's description of what the remainder of the book entails and how he structures it:
These pages also tell the story of a journey of discovery—a quest—that took me around the world and to the farthest reaches of our knowledge. This journey was a search for the pieces of a puzzle—pieces that when fitted together would give me a picture of how we use our practical knowledge—ingenuity in all its variety—to adapt to rapid and complex change. . . .
Because it’s a puzzle, each piece plays an important part, and I must describe them in detail. They include recent theories of turbulent systems, of Earth’s ecology and atmosphere, of the evolution of the human brain, of how we produce wealth, of the factors that shape and reshape our technologies, and of the forces behind war and terrorism. I tell a story about the many forms of complexity around us and about our biological capacity to grasp, manage, and benefit from this complexity. I also tell a story about how we are altering our planet’s most fundamental rhythms and processes. Six metaphors are woven through this story—metaphors of flight, faces, light, the night sky, pyramids, and water. For me, these metaphors have enormous emotional and spiritual power, and I hope they can aid us in answering one of the most basic questions humanity faces: How can we solve the problems of the future? Id., p. 7.
(Homer-Dixon's lucid explanations and summaries make quotation--perhaps excessive quotation--a constant temptation.) I'll limit my further discussion of the contents of this book to a couple of tales in the book that especially resonated with me out from among the many stories he shares, the many interviews and discussions he held, and the many ideas that he develops.
The first tale in the book that I'll relate is his account of UA flight 232 on 19 July 1989 (my mother's birthday). On that day, with 296 people aboard, while flying over northwest Iowa, what can only (and rightfully) be described as a freak accident occurred. Homer-Dixon describes the scene:
Twelve thousand meters above the U.S. Midwest, shards of the [tail] engine’s fan rotor cut through the rear of the aircraft, shredding its hydraulic systems. As fluid bled from hydraulic tubing, the pilots in the front of the plane lost command of the rudder, elevators, and ailerons essential to stabilizing and guiding the craft. Immediately, the plane twisted into a downward right turn . . . [and] was out of control. Id., p. 11.
I will spare a further account of the incident except to say that to get that plane on the ground without a spiraling crash was an example of extraordinary ingenuity and professional deportment. Lives were lost, but enough were saved to label the result a miracle of sorts. But Homer-Dixon's point has nothing to do with divine intervention and everything to do with the benefits and limits of human ingenuity. It's an enthralling (and frightening) tale that sets the scene for other of his (less harrowing) accounts of ingenuity realized, or conversely, the failure of ingenuity to manifest a solution.
The other portion of the book that struck me on a personal note was his account of his time in India. Homer-Dixon, an MIT-trained political scientist, began his career specializing in the relationship between resource scarcity and political violence and went to India to conduct research. His description about dealing with the Indian bureaucracy to access records is spot-on. My wife and I lived in India for nearly two years, and while I worked privately, she worked with government institutions. So while I had only limited (but more than enough) contact with the bureaucracy, my visits to her workplace and her after work tales provided me vivid accounts and lasting memories about her encounters and observations. Hearing Homer-Dixon's tales of his struggles sparked a joy of recognition.)
And during this early sojourn to India he had photographed a young girl in Patna, and upon returning, he wanted to see if he could find her to update her situation.
So he traveled again to Patna after visiting Las Vegas --what a contrast! Here's what Homer-Dixon writes about his arrival in Patna:
Heat. Everywhere there was heat. It surrounded and penetrated me. It defined the world around me. Sweat gushed out of my body, running in rivulets down my chest and the small of my back, gluing my shirt to my skin. Everything was tangibly hot: tables, chairs, and pens were weirdly warm to the touch, because everything outside my body was hotter than my body. The water in my bottle felt like soup on my tongue. Any movement of the air—a draft, a slight breeze—was a relief; while any movement of my body or mind was an effort. Physical action, thought, even consciousness itself seemed to take place in slow motion, weighed down and dulled by the relentless, inescapable heat. I had finally arrived in Patna. Unfortunately, it was early June, and my visit had coincided with one of the worst heat waves in India’s history. Every day, the temperature soared above 45 degrees Celsius, sometimes hitting 50 degrees, while hundreds of people across the country died of heat stroke, dehydration, and heart failure. Id. p. 365.
I never visited Patna, but we lived in Jaipur and spent time in Dehli, so when Homer-Dixon talks about oppressive heat, I know whereof he speaks. And, in addition, I can't help noticing how his account of his experience in India in the late 1990s with extreme heat anticipates the opening pages of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020), which is set in Uttar Pradesh (which lies between Bihar, where Patna is located, and Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located). Homer-Dixon continues his account of India, and he describes the political situation in India at the time of his visit. His description seems no different than what I perceived when we were there (2012-2014) and it's probably no different today, the rise of Modi and the BJP notwithstanding. He also continues to provide commentary about his latest visit to Patna and goes on to contrast that experience with his perceptions about Las Vegas. And while I've never been to Vegas (the desire is nearly nil), his frustration with Patna rang true, although, to be fair, overall, we greatly enjoyed our time in India; it's just that sometimes there were--as one friend put it--"heavy India days." Homer-Dixon writes:
A wave of bitterness about India swept over me—it was a feeling I had experienced many times before, but Patna, at this particular moment, seemed to distill its essence. From the point of view of a rich, pampered Westerner, the people of Patna seemed to have capitulated to ugliness, wretchedness, and inhumanity towards each other. They didn’t do even the small things, like fix that front door, that would significantly improve their lives. The place was a technological, social, and moral calamity. It was a disgrace.
He then goes on to discuss the contrast between Patna and Las Vegas:
If Las Vegas is one vision of the future of urbanized humanity, I felt, Patna is another. Both are extreme and disturbing visions, but both highlight distinct and very real aspects of humanity’s potential. Las Vegas is a vision of the future as a hedonistic, postmodernist fantasy sustained by the heroic application of ingenuity—a lobotomized world of distraction and diversion. Patna, on the other hand, is a vision of despair, cruelty, and vulnerability, where even rudimentary solutions to the technological and social challenges of everyday life are not provided. It is a place of the most grotesque differences in wealth between the rich and the poor where, paradoxically, even the richest aren’t able to enjoy things that members of the middle class in Western societies take for granted. True, they can hire lots of servants, because labor is cheap. But they can’t drink the water running from their taps, if their taps run at all. They can’t rely on a steady supply of electricity. They can’t escape the dust, filth, and pollution that constantly infiltrate their houses, making everything dirty and sometimes making them sick. And they live with a constant, subliminal sense of insecurity, because they are surrounded on all sides by the dispossessed. Most important, whereas in Vegas natural and social realities are usually kept at bay, in Patna they penetrate into the deepest recesses of people’s lives. Even for the richest residents, the heat, bad water, disgusting air, noise, and appalling disparities of the place cannot be avoided. And for the poorest, these things intimately define their lives and who they are. Id., pp. 368-369.
But, as Homer-Dixon notes, India isn't without ingenuity and innovation, to be sure. But, unfortunately, it's built upon swiss-cheese sets of systems, social and technological.
[Goodreads cuts me off here. To read the entire review, go to my blog @ https://sngthoughts.blogspot.com/2020...]
Of course, my "current read" doesn't scowl at me or chastise me when I set it aside to "take a look" into another book. Oh, no! An uncompleted book just looks at me hauntingly, like a hungry puppy begging at the dining table, as it sits silently on my bookshelf or (more often these days) when it occasionally pops up on my Kindle as a specter from among the uncompleted books of my reading past.
Anyway, I got a copy of The Ingenuity Gap and decided to dig in, expecting that I'd still enjoy it, and this time I'll read it to completion! But then I paused. I looked at the publication date: 2000. Twenty years ago! A generation ago! It was published before 9/11, before the Crash of 2008, and before the rise of authoritarianism and the attendant decline of democracy and the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere. Would it still prove relevant, or would I find it dated by fast-changing events? Well, there's good news and there's bad news. First, the good news: this book is still timely and more than relevant. And the bad news? This book is still timely and more than relevant. And why is this "bad news"? Because Homer-Dixon catalogs examples of, and future prospects for, problems from which we can't extricate ourselves. We create problems so perplexing and entangling that our ingenuity won't be able to tame them. Homer-Dixon describes his thesis:
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. But societies, whether rich or poor, can’t always supply the ingenuity they need at the right times and places. As a result, some face an ingenuity gap: a shortfall between their rapidly rising need for ingenuity and their inadequate supply.
Homer-Dixon, Thomas. The Ingenuity Gap (p. 1). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Homer-Dixon explores his thesis via both arm-chair theorizing and field exploration, interviewing the wise and talking with the marginalized as he strives to come to grips with the scope of the challenges that he investigates. As a result of his investigations that he undertook on the verge of the twenty-first century, he concludes that
In the twenty-first century, the growing disparities between those who adapt well and those who don’t will hinder our progress towards a shared sense of human community and erode our new global society’s stability and prosperity. The next century is likely, for this reason, to be a time of fragmentation and turmoil, of divisions and rivalry between winners and losers, and of humanity’s patent failure to manage its affairs in critical domains. Id., pp. 1-2.
Homer-Dixon explains his central concept--ingenuity--in the following summary:
Ingenuity, as I define it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computers or drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements, like efficient markets and competent governments. Id., pp.2-3.
Homer-Dixon charts a course that will avoid readers branding him as simply a Cassandra or as a Polyanna. He notes and appreciates the advances and advantages of technology, the market, and Western modernity in general, but he declines to accept the rather naive optimism of technological optimists, such as Julian Simon (still perhaps the most prominent technological-economic optimist of the time). Homer-Dixon states his conclusion succinctly:
But—and this is the critical “but”—we should not jump to the conclusion that the supply of ingenuity always increases in lockstep with our ingenuity requirement: while it’s true that necessity is often the mother of invention, we can’t always rely on the right kind of ingenuity appearing when and where we need it. In many cases, the complexity and speed of operation of today’s vital economic, social, and ecological systems exceed the human brain’s grasp. Very few of us have more than a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work. They remain fraught with countless “unknown unknowns,” which makes it hard to supply the ingenuity we need to solve problems associated with these systems.
In this book, I explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply the ingenuity required in the coming century. For example, many people believe that new communication technologies strengthen democracy and will make it easier to find solutions to our societies’ collective problems, but the story is less clear than it seems. The crush of information in our everyday lives is shortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on critical matters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial. Id., pp. 4-5.
Perhaps you can see in the above-quote why I find Homer-Dixon's book still quite relevant and useful: he anticipates Donald Rumsfeld's description of the problems arising from the ill-considered Iraq War, the "unknown unknowns" (and they certainly exist in abundance). And Homer-Dixon's remarks about technology and democracy could have been written today as we struggle with political developments in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and "Parler."
I'll conclude this initial part of my review with Homer-Dixon's description of what the remainder of the book entails and how he structures it:
These pages also tell the story of a journey of discovery—a quest—that took me around the world and to the farthest reaches of our knowledge. This journey was a search for the pieces of a puzzle—pieces that when fitted together would give me a picture of how we use our practical knowledge—ingenuity in all its variety—to adapt to rapid and complex change. . . .
Because it’s a puzzle, each piece plays an important part, and I must describe them in detail. They include recent theories of turbulent systems, of Earth’s ecology and atmosphere, of the evolution of the human brain, of how we produce wealth, of the factors that shape and reshape our technologies, and of the forces behind war and terrorism. I tell a story about the many forms of complexity around us and about our biological capacity to grasp, manage, and benefit from this complexity. I also tell a story about how we are altering our planet’s most fundamental rhythms and processes. Six metaphors are woven through this story—metaphors of flight, faces, light, the night sky, pyramids, and water. For me, these metaphors have enormous emotional and spiritual power, and I hope they can aid us in answering one of the most basic questions humanity faces: How can we solve the problems of the future? Id., p. 7.
(Homer-Dixon's lucid explanations and summaries make quotation--perhaps excessive quotation--a constant temptation.) I'll limit my further discussion of the contents of this book to a couple of tales in the book that especially resonated with me out from among the many stories he shares, the many interviews and discussions he held, and the many ideas that he develops.
The first tale in the book that I'll relate is his account of UA flight 232 on 19 July 1989 (my mother's birthday). On that day, with 296 people aboard, while flying over northwest Iowa, what can only (and rightfully) be described as a freak accident occurred. Homer-Dixon describes the scene:
Twelve thousand meters above the U.S. Midwest, shards of the [tail] engine’s fan rotor cut through the rear of the aircraft, shredding its hydraulic systems. As fluid bled from hydraulic tubing, the pilots in the front of the plane lost command of the rudder, elevators, and ailerons essential to stabilizing and guiding the craft. Immediately, the plane twisted into a downward right turn . . . [and] was out of control. Id., p. 11.
I will spare a further account of the incident except to say that to get that plane on the ground without a spiraling crash was an example of extraordinary ingenuity and professional deportment. Lives were lost, but enough were saved to label the result a miracle of sorts. But Homer-Dixon's point has nothing to do with divine intervention and everything to do with the benefits and limits of human ingenuity. It's an enthralling (and frightening) tale that sets the scene for other of his (less harrowing) accounts of ingenuity realized, or conversely, the failure of ingenuity to manifest a solution.
The other portion of the book that struck me on a personal note was his account of his time in India. Homer-Dixon, an MIT-trained political scientist, began his career specializing in the relationship between resource scarcity and political violence and went to India to conduct research. His description about dealing with the Indian bureaucracy to access records is spot-on. My wife and I lived in India for nearly two years, and while I worked privately, she worked with government institutions. So while I had only limited (but more than enough) contact with the bureaucracy, my visits to her workplace and her after work tales provided me vivid accounts and lasting memories about her encounters and observations. Hearing Homer-Dixon's tales of his struggles sparked a joy of recognition.)
And during this early sojourn to India he had photographed a young girl in Patna, and upon returning, he wanted to see if he could find her to update her situation.
So he traveled again to Patna after visiting Las Vegas --what a contrast! Here's what Homer-Dixon writes about his arrival in Patna:
Heat. Everywhere there was heat. It surrounded and penetrated me. It defined the world around me. Sweat gushed out of my body, running in rivulets down my chest and the small of my back, gluing my shirt to my skin. Everything was tangibly hot: tables, chairs, and pens were weirdly warm to the touch, because everything outside my body was hotter than my body. The water in my bottle felt like soup on my tongue. Any movement of the air—a draft, a slight breeze—was a relief; while any movement of my body or mind was an effort. Physical action, thought, even consciousness itself seemed to take place in slow motion, weighed down and dulled by the relentless, inescapable heat. I had finally arrived in Patna. Unfortunately, it was early June, and my visit had coincided with one of the worst heat waves in India’s history. Every day, the temperature soared above 45 degrees Celsius, sometimes hitting 50 degrees, while hundreds of people across the country died of heat stroke, dehydration, and heart failure. Id. p. 365.
I never visited Patna, but we lived in Jaipur and spent time in Dehli, so when Homer-Dixon talks about oppressive heat, I know whereof he speaks. And, in addition, I can't help noticing how his account of his experience in India in the late 1990s with extreme heat anticipates the opening pages of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future (2020), which is set in Uttar Pradesh (which lies between Bihar, where Patna is located, and Rajasthan, where Jaipur is located). Homer-Dixon continues his account of India, and he describes the political situation in India at the time of his visit. His description seems no different than what I perceived when we were there (2012-2014) and it's probably no different today, the rise of Modi and the BJP notwithstanding. He also continues to provide commentary about his latest visit to Patna and goes on to contrast that experience with his perceptions about Las Vegas. And while I've never been to Vegas (the desire is nearly nil), his frustration with Patna rang true, although, to be fair, overall, we greatly enjoyed our time in India; it's just that sometimes there were--as one friend put it--"heavy India days." Homer-Dixon writes:
A wave of bitterness about India swept over me—it was a feeling I had experienced many times before, but Patna, at this particular moment, seemed to distill its essence. From the point of view of a rich, pampered Westerner, the people of Patna seemed to have capitulated to ugliness, wretchedness, and inhumanity towards each other. They didn’t do even the small things, like fix that front door, that would significantly improve their lives. The place was a technological, social, and moral calamity. It was a disgrace.
He then goes on to discuss the contrast between Patna and Las Vegas:
If Las Vegas is one vision of the future of urbanized humanity, I felt, Patna is another. Both are extreme and disturbing visions, but both highlight distinct and very real aspects of humanity’s potential. Las Vegas is a vision of the future as a hedonistic, postmodernist fantasy sustained by the heroic application of ingenuity—a lobotomized world of distraction and diversion. Patna, on the other hand, is a vision of despair, cruelty, and vulnerability, where even rudimentary solutions to the technological and social challenges of everyday life are not provided. It is a place of the most grotesque differences in wealth between the rich and the poor where, paradoxically, even the richest aren’t able to enjoy things that members of the middle class in Western societies take for granted. True, they can hire lots of servants, because labor is cheap. But they can’t drink the water running from their taps, if their taps run at all. They can’t rely on a steady supply of electricity. They can’t escape the dust, filth, and pollution that constantly infiltrate their houses, making everything dirty and sometimes making them sick. And they live with a constant, subliminal sense of insecurity, because they are surrounded on all sides by the dispossessed. Most important, whereas in Vegas natural and social realities are usually kept at bay, in Patna they penetrate into the deepest recesses of people’s lives. Even for the richest residents, the heat, bad water, disgusting air, noise, and appalling disparities of the place cannot be avoided. And for the poorest, these things intimately define their lives and who they are. Id., pp. 368-369.
But, as Homer-Dixon notes, India isn't without ingenuity and innovation, to be sure. But, unfortunately, it's built upon swiss-cheese sets of systems, social and technological.
[Goodreads cuts me off here. To read the entire review, go to my blog @ https://sngthoughts.blogspot.com/2020...]
August 30, 2017
Un extraordinaire tour de force. Homer-Dixon nous entraîne dans une explication d'une érudition sans borne dans le cycle de complexification de nos vies et dans la distance de plus en plus grande entre notre capacité de comprendre et de réparer les choses qui nous entourent.
Il le fait en entrelaçant ses récits d'une métaphore avec la chute de l'empire romain qui laisse pantois.
Un des meilleurs essais que j'aie lu, point final.
Il le fait en entrelaçant ses récits d'une métaphore avec la chute de l'empire romain qui laisse pantois.
Un des meilleurs essais que j'aie lu, point final.
July 13, 2008
A very important book about the complexity of human socio-environmental-technological systems and the possibility of system collapse where we have a shortage of ingenuity to manage the increasingly complex systems we've created and impacted. This book strongly impacted my way of thinking about the world and the direction of my life since reading it.
Read
June 5, 2014It has been a few years now since I read this book. That said it is one that I think of often, and one of the few non-fiction books that I have read more than once. The information is this book was fabulous, the presentation was engaging, and the content was thought provoking.
September 18, 2014
A long, deep look at how mankind may not be quite intelligent enough to deal with the world's problems, The Ingenuity Gap puts forward strong arguments for us not being able to overcome hyper-complexity, unknown unknowns, environmental disaster and other difficulties, particularly considering most of the world does not have the technological sophistication and political stability of 'the West.' Dixon makes strong arguments against economic optimists who assume that man will conquer all, and although the book is a bit dated now, much of what he brought forth still stands. The Ingenuity Gap does not destroy opposing arguments -- opposing Dixon's somewhat ambiguous centre-leftish stance on things that is -- nor does it arrive at stone-solid and unassailable conclusions, but it does sew strong seeds of doubt and reflection regarding mankind's present and future.
The book is quite densely packed with insights, facts an opinions, to the point where it can be tiring to get through, even considering that much of the length is taken up by side stories and metaphors which are often incredibly fascinating. I had to take breaks and frequently found myself switching to lighter fare before finally finishing it. Moreover, Dixon sometimes sounds smug and aloof, like Michael Moore. He will patronizingly speak of the 'posh hotel' he's stayed at, and occasionally criticize the wealthy, while also flying first class and living on a fat professor salary. Also, strangely, he reverts to the voice of a Victorian Englishman while in India, indicating he probably did a lot of reading in that area prior to writing this section, as well as further indicating his tendency toward smug superiority. He is a flawed champion of the left, like all of them are, nevertheless, he still fights a good fight and writes a good book.
Below are some highlights of notes I took in the book, including some of the aforementioned insights, facts and opinions:
- pg 5
- Markets and science are critically important to ingenuity generation, but markets often do not reflect environmental and other costs and reward only with the short-term in mind, while scientific research and advance can be incredibly slow to come.
- pg 6
- Modern capitalist cities and lifestyles are modelled on our egos and provide us with comfort in exchange for a connection with the natural world (no great insight but well-put in-text).
- pg 22
- Social ingenuity leads to technical ingenuity. Social ingenuity is needed to set-up markets, to bargain, plan, and build.
- pg 23
- Many problems come not from ingenuity generation -- the world being full of ideas -- but from implementation, often represented by competing political groups which stall or prevent reform.
- pgs 31-32
- Economic optimists tend to make the following mistakes: 1) "they project the incredible improvements in human well-being over the last 200 years linearly into the future without questioning or reflection," 2) they tend to present highly aggregated statistics as all-encompassing fact, 3) problems such as climate change are down-played or ignored, 4) they assume markets, science, and democracy will solve everything, without question (and that markets are not the incredibly complex-to-set up things they truly are).
- pg 33
- There is so much data available today that it's easy to selectively choose large amounts which suit your view while ignoring the vast quantities of opposing data.
- pg 49
- Human being are like frogs in cooking pots: we do not notice change so much if it is made in small increments, and so today we have found various quantitative changes over our lifetime have produced enormous qualitative change, which is now simply accepted as 'normal.'
- pg 54
- By some measurements, our impact on the environment will increase 40 times between 1900 and 2050 and most of that increase is, or was, expected to take place in the 21st century
- pg 67
- "nearly 2.5 billion people were alive in 1999 because they ate food grown with factory-produced nitrogen
- pg 69
- "High output of reactive nitrogen. Soaring levels of carbon dioxide. Relentless tropical deforestation. Distant beaches covered with plastic bottles. These are all aspects of the new world we have created for ourselves, one step -- one more baby, one new car, one additional paper factory, one extra Coke bottle -- at a time...These small, almost imperceptible changes, when taken together, fundamentally alter key relationships in the complex ecological and physical systems surrounding us. Cumulatively, our demands on our environment have never been so great, and they are escalating fast."
- pg 76
-- great summary of post-modernism
- pg 77
- On Capitalism by Marxist David Harvey:
"First, he argues, contemporary capitalism's hyperflexible methods of producing wealth have sharply compressed our conceptions of time and space: we expect things to happen faster, and we perceive our reach across geographic space as greatly extended. Second, capitalism is simultaneously caught in a recurring crisis of overaccumulation: it generates wealth so successfully that it tends to produce too much stuff for the economy's level of demand.
But, Harvey goes on, the first of these processes can help solve the problems created by the second. As time is compressed, the turnover rate of capital rises, and new tastes and consumption patterns arise and disappear more quickly, which boosts demand. Similarly, as space is compressed, new markets become available, and excess capital can be spread across larger regions. Capitalism thus solves the problem of overaccumulation by creating an ever more quickly shifting kaleidoscope of wants and needs across an ever wider geographical space. But this hyperactivity produces fragments and ephemera. Time compression rams together the past, present, and future; and it chops our temporal reality into small segments, as one orchestrated consumer fad follows another in ever more rapid succession. Space compression jumbles together the world's diverse cultures; they bump against and overlap one another in bewildering confusion. Since many of these cultures can't easily coexist in the world marketplace, capitalism tends to strip away their essential characteristics, leaving only the faintest and most innocuous cultural afterimages. The result can easily be an endlessly changing postmodernist collage of production and consumption, of rootless images and motifs."
- pg 86
- Light, lux in Latin, is the root of 'luxury.'
- pg 92
- Outdoor adventurers can become aware of their micro and macro surroundings, and can have space and time scales temporarily restored to their full dimensions
- pg 96
- A full migratory cycle of monarch butterflies involves 3 to 5 generations, each one knowing what to do and where to go, and no one really knows how or why.
- pg 102
- New communication technologies both empower and imprison us. We are capable of doing many more things, and thus we are expected to do so, and are trapped in a web of obligations and competition.
- pg 105
- Evolving systems feature occasional bursts of simplicity cutting through webs of complexity, which then establish a base for further complexity to build on.
- pg 109
- Dixon notes how cars are too complex to fix at home anymore, and how even mechanics typically replace rather than repair now.
- pg 124
- Chaos breeds the need for complexity to deal with it.
- pg 126
- "...the dimples on a flying golf ball produce turbulence around its skin, which shrinks the volume of low-pressure air behind the ball. A dimpled ball travels more than twice as far as a smooth ball of the same size and weight."
- pg 134
- 'Biosphere 2' -- amazing experiment!
- pg 140
-- an explanation of why global warming could chill Europe
- pg 156 - 164
- Economists and advisers are frequently wrong about economic forecasts, and markets fail (using the 'Asian Tigers' as an example)
- pg 164 Mexico
- pg 165 Indonesia
- pg 193
- On measuring ingenuity requirements
- pg 198
- On the evolution of man's brain
- pg 204
- On the appearance of consciousness
- pg 209
- We have a growing need for ingenuity but are bombarded with so much information we spend most of our time managing it instead. "...we simply can't shove information into our brains fast enough and process it fast enough to keep up with the speed of delivery."
- pg 210
- ..."In the end, we may be inexorably exchanging the peace and quiet needed to generate high-quality ingenuity for the adrenaline-charged hyperactivity produced by waves of low-quality data."
-- All kinds of stuff between pages 210 and 220, including IQ scores do not reflect creative ability.
- pg 223
- Mined silica sand becomes crystal, becomes computer chips.
- pg 228
- Ideas are generated by human capital the benefits derived from useful ideas do not decline over time.
- pg 233
- Dixon argues you need social ingenuity before you can have technical ingenuity
***pgs 233 - 246
- Dixon compares and contrasts the Economic Optimist and Neo-Malthusian viewpoints on the limits of growth, taking positive and negative points from each. Along the way he posits his own views, including the massive importance of resources.***
- pg 248
- Looks at the rapid technological progress of the last 200 years through 4 lenses: Military explosives, long-distance communication, personal transport, and agriculture.
- pg 253
- "If we had relied on vacuum tubes, the computing power of a pentium chip would require a machine as big as The Pentagon."
- pg 256
-- All about how science generates knowledge
- pg 281
- The brightest minds in Washington don't even know what they're doing, and they are 'them.'
- pgs 282-283
- On the complexity of our institutions
- pg 288
- On Cap and Trade schemes
- pgs 292-293
- Posits that social science research lags behind other disciplines and Political Science is a virtually useless discipline. Pg 294, criticism of Economics.
- pg 303
- Adopting a laissez-faire approach with complex problems
- pgs 304-305
- Adaptive Systems and the Fitness Landscape
- pgs 318-319
- More on social ingenuity and our lack of it. Also a cool excerpt of a 1970 criticism of urbanization:
"In a famous 1970 study of the pressures of urbanization, for example, the renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram observed that city life is a 'continuous set of encounters with overload, and of resultant adaptations.' People adapt by allocating less time to each input, disregarding low-priority inputs, shifting the burden of social transactions to other parties, and blocking reception of information through strategies like delisting their telephone numbers and using unfriendly facial expressions. In general, as people become overloaded with inputs from their environment, their receptivity and benevolence towards strangers declines."
- pgs 320-321
- shrinking memories and news article lengths...
- pg 326
- Machiavelli quote on the creation or reform of institutions: "There is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system."
- pg 328
- The gap in governance
- pg 335
- Acid-free paper can last 500 years. Compare that to modern forms of information storage...
- pgs 340-342
- Nice info on income disparity and a view of Vegas
- pg 357
- The Tamil Tigers were an incredibly sophisticated organization
- pgs 374-375
--** Various key points about the main arguments
- pg 377
- "In many poor countries around the world, scarcities of cropland, water, and forest resources don't engender waves of ingenuity, as many economists predict they should; instead, they actually reduce the supply of ingenuity, because they lead to conflicts among groups that hinder technical and institutional adaptation to scarcity."
- pg 383
- Notes how the government wants (or wanted) the general populace to generally be healthy, if for no other reason than the increased workforce and idea creation that leads to.
- pgs 385-386
- Damage to the developing brains of children in developing countries explored
- pg 398
- Brief argument against materialistic need
True Rating:3.8 Stars
The book is quite densely packed with insights, facts an opinions, to the point where it can be tiring to get through, even considering that much of the length is taken up by side stories and metaphors which are often incredibly fascinating. I had to take breaks and frequently found myself switching to lighter fare before finally finishing it. Moreover, Dixon sometimes sounds smug and aloof, like Michael Moore. He will patronizingly speak of the 'posh hotel' he's stayed at, and occasionally criticize the wealthy, while also flying first class and living on a fat professor salary. Also, strangely, he reverts to the voice of a Victorian Englishman while in India, indicating he probably did a lot of reading in that area prior to writing this section, as well as further indicating his tendency toward smug superiority. He is a flawed champion of the left, like all of them are, nevertheless, he still fights a good fight and writes a good book.
Below are some highlights of notes I took in the book, including some of the aforementioned insights, facts and opinions:
- pg 5
- Markets and science are critically important to ingenuity generation, but markets often do not reflect environmental and other costs and reward only with the short-term in mind, while scientific research and advance can be incredibly slow to come.
- pg 6
- Modern capitalist cities and lifestyles are modelled on our egos and provide us with comfort in exchange for a connection with the natural world (no great insight but well-put in-text).
- pg 22
- Social ingenuity leads to technical ingenuity. Social ingenuity is needed to set-up markets, to bargain, plan, and build.
- pg 23
- Many problems come not from ingenuity generation -- the world being full of ideas -- but from implementation, often represented by competing political groups which stall or prevent reform.
- pgs 31-32
- Economic optimists tend to make the following mistakes: 1) "they project the incredible improvements in human well-being over the last 200 years linearly into the future without questioning or reflection," 2) they tend to present highly aggregated statistics as all-encompassing fact, 3) problems such as climate change are down-played or ignored, 4) they assume markets, science, and democracy will solve everything, without question (and that markets are not the incredibly complex-to-set up things they truly are).
- pg 33
- There is so much data available today that it's easy to selectively choose large amounts which suit your view while ignoring the vast quantities of opposing data.
- pg 49
- Human being are like frogs in cooking pots: we do not notice change so much if it is made in small increments, and so today we have found various quantitative changes over our lifetime have produced enormous qualitative change, which is now simply accepted as 'normal.'
- pg 54
- By some measurements, our impact on the environment will increase 40 times between 1900 and 2050 and most of that increase is, or was, expected to take place in the 21st century
- pg 67
- "nearly 2.5 billion people were alive in 1999 because they ate food grown with factory-produced nitrogen
- pg 69
- "High output of reactive nitrogen. Soaring levels of carbon dioxide. Relentless tropical deforestation. Distant beaches covered with plastic bottles. These are all aspects of the new world we have created for ourselves, one step -- one more baby, one new car, one additional paper factory, one extra Coke bottle -- at a time...These small, almost imperceptible changes, when taken together, fundamentally alter key relationships in the complex ecological and physical systems surrounding us. Cumulatively, our demands on our environment have never been so great, and they are escalating fast."
- pg 76
-- great summary of post-modernism
- pg 77
- On Capitalism by Marxist David Harvey:
"First, he argues, contemporary capitalism's hyperflexible methods of producing wealth have sharply compressed our conceptions of time and space: we expect things to happen faster, and we perceive our reach across geographic space as greatly extended. Second, capitalism is simultaneously caught in a recurring crisis of overaccumulation: it generates wealth so successfully that it tends to produce too much stuff for the economy's level of demand.
But, Harvey goes on, the first of these processes can help solve the problems created by the second. As time is compressed, the turnover rate of capital rises, and new tastes and consumption patterns arise and disappear more quickly, which boosts demand. Similarly, as space is compressed, new markets become available, and excess capital can be spread across larger regions. Capitalism thus solves the problem of overaccumulation by creating an ever more quickly shifting kaleidoscope of wants and needs across an ever wider geographical space. But this hyperactivity produces fragments and ephemera. Time compression rams together the past, present, and future; and it chops our temporal reality into small segments, as one orchestrated consumer fad follows another in ever more rapid succession. Space compression jumbles together the world's diverse cultures; they bump against and overlap one another in bewildering confusion. Since many of these cultures can't easily coexist in the world marketplace, capitalism tends to strip away their essential characteristics, leaving only the faintest and most innocuous cultural afterimages. The result can easily be an endlessly changing postmodernist collage of production and consumption, of rootless images and motifs."
- pg 86
- Light, lux in Latin, is the root of 'luxury.'
- pg 92
- Outdoor adventurers can become aware of their micro and macro surroundings, and can have space and time scales temporarily restored to their full dimensions
- pg 96
- A full migratory cycle of monarch butterflies involves 3 to 5 generations, each one knowing what to do and where to go, and no one really knows how or why.
- pg 102
- New communication technologies both empower and imprison us. We are capable of doing many more things, and thus we are expected to do so, and are trapped in a web of obligations and competition.
- pg 105
- Evolving systems feature occasional bursts of simplicity cutting through webs of complexity, which then establish a base for further complexity to build on.
- pg 109
- Dixon notes how cars are too complex to fix at home anymore, and how even mechanics typically replace rather than repair now.
- pg 124
- Chaos breeds the need for complexity to deal with it.
- pg 126
- "...the dimples on a flying golf ball produce turbulence around its skin, which shrinks the volume of low-pressure air behind the ball. A dimpled ball travels more than twice as far as a smooth ball of the same size and weight."
- pg 134
- 'Biosphere 2' -- amazing experiment!
- pg 140
-- an explanation of why global warming could chill Europe
- pg 156 - 164
- Economists and advisers are frequently wrong about economic forecasts, and markets fail (using the 'Asian Tigers' as an example)
- pg 164 Mexico
- pg 165 Indonesia
- pg 193
- On measuring ingenuity requirements
- pg 198
- On the evolution of man's brain
- pg 204
- On the appearance of consciousness
- pg 209
- We have a growing need for ingenuity but are bombarded with so much information we spend most of our time managing it instead. "...we simply can't shove information into our brains fast enough and process it fast enough to keep up with the speed of delivery."
- pg 210
- ..."In the end, we may be inexorably exchanging the peace and quiet needed to generate high-quality ingenuity for the adrenaline-charged hyperactivity produced by waves of low-quality data."
-- All kinds of stuff between pages 210 and 220, including IQ scores do not reflect creative ability.
- pg 223
- Mined silica sand becomes crystal, becomes computer chips.
- pg 228
- Ideas are generated by human capital the benefits derived from useful ideas do not decline over time.
- pg 233
- Dixon argues you need social ingenuity before you can have technical ingenuity
***pgs 233 - 246
- Dixon compares and contrasts the Economic Optimist and Neo-Malthusian viewpoints on the limits of growth, taking positive and negative points from each. Along the way he posits his own views, including the massive importance of resources.***
- pg 248
- Looks at the rapid technological progress of the last 200 years through 4 lenses: Military explosives, long-distance communication, personal transport, and agriculture.
- pg 253
- "If we had relied on vacuum tubes, the computing power of a pentium chip would require a machine as big as The Pentagon."
- pg 256
-- All about how science generates knowledge
- pg 281
- The brightest minds in Washington don't even know what they're doing, and they are 'them.'
- pgs 282-283
- On the complexity of our institutions
- pg 288
- On Cap and Trade schemes
- pgs 292-293
- Posits that social science research lags behind other disciplines and Political Science is a virtually useless discipline. Pg 294, criticism of Economics.
- pg 303
- Adopting a laissez-faire approach with complex problems
- pgs 304-305
- Adaptive Systems and the Fitness Landscape
- pgs 318-319
- More on social ingenuity and our lack of it. Also a cool excerpt of a 1970 criticism of urbanization:
"In a famous 1970 study of the pressures of urbanization, for example, the renowned social psychologist Stanley Milgram observed that city life is a 'continuous set of encounters with overload, and of resultant adaptations.' People adapt by allocating less time to each input, disregarding low-priority inputs, shifting the burden of social transactions to other parties, and blocking reception of information through strategies like delisting their telephone numbers and using unfriendly facial expressions. In general, as people become overloaded with inputs from their environment, their receptivity and benevolence towards strangers declines."
- pgs 320-321
- shrinking memories and news article lengths...
- pg 326
- Machiavelli quote on the creation or reform of institutions: "There is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system."
- pg 328
- The gap in governance
- pg 335
- Acid-free paper can last 500 years. Compare that to modern forms of information storage...
- pgs 340-342
- Nice info on income disparity and a view of Vegas
- pg 357
- The Tamil Tigers were an incredibly sophisticated organization
- pgs 374-375
--** Various key points about the main arguments
- pg 377
- "In many poor countries around the world, scarcities of cropland, water, and forest resources don't engender waves of ingenuity, as many economists predict they should; instead, they actually reduce the supply of ingenuity, because they lead to conflicts among groups that hinder technical and institutional adaptation to scarcity."
- pg 383
- Notes how the government wants (or wanted) the general populace to generally be healthy, if for no other reason than the increased workforce and idea creation that leads to.
- pgs 385-386
- Damage to the developing brains of children in developing countries explored
- pg 398
- Brief argument against materialistic need
True Rating:3.8 Stars
July 7, 2023
An outdates book now. The first half of the book is much better then the second. Here are some of my favorite quotes
"Because meat has a higher density of nutrition and energy than vegetable matter and is more easily digested (which is why some plant-eaters, like cows, have multiple stomachs), hominoids were able to evolve a smaller gut and reduce the energy they needed for digestion. This metabolic energy was then available to support an enlarged and energy-hungry brain."
" Experts have proposed several ways that large-brained generalists could evolve despite a relatively stable savanna environment. Perhaps savanna life produced an "evolutionary arms race" between hominoids and competing species that encouraged brain growth. Maybe selection pressure arose from the complex interpersonal challenges of hominoid social life - such as negotiating divisions of resources, creating alliances, and manipulating potential enemies."
"The idea that we can get along without natural resources is now widespread in rich countries. Within the next one hundred years, I believe, it will come to be seen as one of the greatest fallacies of our time."
"But two centuries isn't really very long, after all - it's easily within the span of three lifetimes. And during those three lifetimes, technological change has rocketed ahead."
"Because we adjust to technological change almost as quickly as it occurs, we often lose perspective on how different our current world is from that of generations not far in the past."
"There is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system."
"Rather than speaking of limits, it is more accurate to say that some societies are locked into a race between a rising requirement for ingenuity and their capacity to supply it. Poor countries are more likely to fall behind in this race, because an adequate supply of ingenuity depends on having adequate financial and human capital"
"I realize that there was no single right of correct interpretation of the world around us, no one answer to me quest, and no single, definitive arrangement of the pieces of the ingenuity puzzle. Our world is a highly complex system, and complexity itself is full contradictions. Complex systems are intricate tangles of shifting and often opposing - contradicting - forces that unfold in unpredictable and frequently totally surprising ways."
"Because meat has a higher density of nutrition and energy than vegetable matter and is more easily digested (which is why some plant-eaters, like cows, have multiple stomachs), hominoids were able to evolve a smaller gut and reduce the energy they needed for digestion. This metabolic energy was then available to support an enlarged and energy-hungry brain."
" Experts have proposed several ways that large-brained generalists could evolve despite a relatively stable savanna environment. Perhaps savanna life produced an "evolutionary arms race" between hominoids and competing species that encouraged brain growth. Maybe selection pressure arose from the complex interpersonal challenges of hominoid social life - such as negotiating divisions of resources, creating alliances, and manipulating potential enemies."
"The idea that we can get along without natural resources is now widespread in rich countries. Within the next one hundred years, I believe, it will come to be seen as one of the greatest fallacies of our time."
"But two centuries isn't really very long, after all - it's easily within the span of three lifetimes. And during those three lifetimes, technological change has rocketed ahead."
"Because we adjust to technological change almost as quickly as it occurs, we often lose perspective on how different our current world is from that of generations not far in the past."
"There is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system."
"Rather than speaking of limits, it is more accurate to say that some societies are locked into a race between a rising requirement for ingenuity and their capacity to supply it. Poor countries are more likely to fall behind in this race, because an adequate supply of ingenuity depends on having adequate financial and human capital"
"I realize that there was no single right of correct interpretation of the world around us, no one answer to me quest, and no single, definitive arrangement of the pieces of the ingenuity puzzle. Our world is a highly complex system, and complexity itself is full contradictions. Complex systems are intricate tangles of shifting and often opposing - contradicting - forces that unfold in unpredictable and frequently totally surprising ways."
Read
June 17, 2020The Ingenuity Gap is about the growing disparity between human brain power and the ever increasingly complex problems that plague the modern world. Dixon posits that there is not enough human ingenuity, or overall thinking ability, to solve the world’s environmental, social, economic, and technical problems. And things change so rapidly in unimaginable ways that we don’t even know what we don’t know. World problems are so vast and complex that no one person knows all the parts and we try to break the problems down into specialties. The book is basically a large anthology of events that the human population didn’t have enough ingenuity either to prevent or to resolve quickly and ends with Dixon’s plea to work toward increasing overall ingenuity. If nothing else, this book can be used as a support for an argument to improve and increase education for the masses. Dixon’s argument was that not only do we need more ingenuity from the people who already hold prominent positions in their fields, but we need a larger volume of it; more people with more knowledge. I didn’t find this book very interesting, because it was mostly a long winded explanation of things I’m already aware of, but it was a worthwhile read in that it strengthened my commitment to improving education and giving opportunities to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It made me see my work at the Science Museum not just as being important, but imperative.
July 31, 2018
This book is about proving that we face an ingenuity gap and that we will need more ingenuity, in the future, than we will be able to supply.
I think the most valuable aspect of this book is not the idea that we have insufficient ingenuity but the frameworks/insights he provides to us to understand the complex world around us. The most significant of these being the idea of non-linearity,where events sometimes radical divergence from what happened in the past which helped me explain some things I was trying to make sense of.
I will say that it will definitely lead you with some insights at the end but it is feels longer than it needs to be.
I think the most valuable aspect of this book is not the idea that we have insufficient ingenuity but the frameworks/insights he provides to us to understand the complex world around us. The most significant of these being the idea of non-linearity,where events sometimes radical divergence from what happened in the past which helped me explain some things I was trying to make sense of.
I will say that it will definitely lead you with some insights at the end but it is feels longer than it needs to be.
May 22, 2025
Great at what it is, I just wasn’t that into what it is. I picked this up at this beautiful book store because I had this thought that I should stop reading so much fiction and read content more related to my degree. But it’s actually sort of boring and feels a bit like a chore.
The question raised through this book is can we implement solutions faster than we create problems in the realms of: ecology, technology and environmental matters. The answer is no, well sort of, it depends, can do. There was quite a big focus on environmental issues which admittedly is not something I’ve read many books on so that was interesting
The question raised through this book is can we implement solutions faster than we create problems in the realms of: ecology, technology and environmental matters. The answer is no, well sort of, it depends, can do. There was quite a big focus on environmental issues which admittedly is not something I’ve read many books on so that was interesting
March 6, 2018
Thomas Homer-Dixon’s thesis was compelling, but I found that it often got lost within his other narratives. He shared and elaborated upon some really good ideas, but unfortunately, the book didn’t age as well as it could have. He spent a lot of time quoting statistics that would have been outdated only a few years after publishing. Some aspects of the book stand the test of time and are still relevant today, while some do not.
March 10, 2024
Read in Bolton, but the most memorable thing about this is that a friend of Jas’s had the author as a professor and ranted about him on Philosopher’s Walk while we ate ice cream just before I left for Scotland.
July 6, 2019
Great thesis but hits the same notes again and again.
September 26, 2015
Thomas Homer-Dixon is one of the smartest people I've ever heard or read, grasping key concerns from every discipline and arraying them together in a systematic whole. Here, he presents this work in a stunning array, bringing together complex systems theory with every global problem and potential promise in a stunning array.
However, in all of these fireworks of cleverness, there seems to be a kind of basic neglect of some more basic knowledge about current issues. The clear challenge of potential failures caused by moving too quickly with complex dependencies seems to neglect the obvious solutions of slowing down, simplifying, localizing, and becoming more resilient. In this volume, there is a tremendous amount of traveling to learn from world experts and attend conferences, but the fact that this is no apparent beginning of a solution to a problem like global warming, but instead a continuation and exacerbation, doesn't immediately seem to cross the author's mind. I suspect there is a kind of divorce between the procedural or instructional parts of innovations, and the practices and communities necessary to implement and maintain them, as though instructions to a good process is sufficient.
Eventually, I didn't see any profit in reading further. I imagine anyone can learn quite a bit by beginning this book, but I encourage anyone to stop if their own way seems clearer.
However, in all of these fireworks of cleverness, there seems to be a kind of basic neglect of some more basic knowledge about current issues. The clear challenge of potential failures caused by moving too quickly with complex dependencies seems to neglect the obvious solutions of slowing down, simplifying, localizing, and becoming more resilient. In this volume, there is a tremendous amount of traveling to learn from world experts and attend conferences, but the fact that this is no apparent beginning of a solution to a problem like global warming, but instead a continuation and exacerbation, doesn't immediately seem to cross the author's mind. I suspect there is a kind of divorce between the procedural or instructional parts of innovations, and the practices and communities necessary to implement and maintain them, as though instructions to a good process is sufficient.
Eventually, I didn't see any profit in reading further. I imagine anyone can learn quite a bit by beginning this book, but I encourage anyone to stop if their own way seems clearer.
December 10, 2011
A very interesting book I read after the recommendation of my wife's prof. Far reaching in it's implications I found myself looking at the implications of his ideas in my own fields of interest.
Homer Dixon's central premise is that we have reached a time in history where the gap between the complexity of the problems we have and our ability to produce the possible solutions is now at its widest. Human's ingenuity is our ability to solve the problems but we have reached a period where we cannot simply educate people for anticipated problems. We fail to see our problems are in fact linked and ingenuity as the adaptive capacity and contributor to the resilience of societies is an intriguing idea.
Homer Dixon's central premise is that we have reached a time in history where the gap between the complexity of the problems we have and our ability to produce the possible solutions is now at its widest. Human's ingenuity is our ability to solve the problems but we have reached a period where we cannot simply educate people for anticipated problems. We fail to see our problems are in fact linked and ingenuity as the adaptive capacity and contributor to the resilience of societies is an intriguing idea.
November 28, 2009
i dont't know what to say about this book. it spelled out too many things. too much for my head to hold, even in its simplified form. it tried to be hopeful, without misleading. it did not succeed.
think about that. we alll thought people would pay attention to this book becuase he was a reocgnised scholar. it was not the case.
in the beginning, i might have wondered why so many cities were planning on their own, without and support from on higher up. bit i dont any longer.
but right then in 2001, i just felt afraid, wondering who would actually listen
think about that. we alll thought people would pay attention to this book becuase he was a reocgnised scholar. it was not the case.
in the beginning, i might have wondered why so many cities were planning on their own, without and support from on higher up. bit i dont any longer.
but right then in 2001, i just felt afraid, wondering who would actually listen
July 18, 2013
I enjoyed reading Homer-Dixon's other manuscripts, not much this one. The title itself is insulting and Homer-Dixon has not convinced me of humanity's lack of ingenuity in getting out of his "current" complex problems. The world has always been complex to humanity at all time and all "space" (not new) and has dealt with it with "ingenuity". We will get out of the "global warming" problems, not doubt. Does the author knows what "Complex Adaptive System" means...? Ask the tiny ant and its colony...! Condescending book.
October 17, 2012
The concepts introduced in this book equipped me to think critically about the most pressing problems facing our society. We like to think that competitive pressure somehow spurs ingenuity. History does not provide evidence for that kind of causal relationship. Ingenuity is something essentially human. It is not possible to force someone to "be ingenious". The seeds of that process are much more subtle than we want to admit.
September 25, 2014
Very interesting book that attempts to deal with a very complex set of issues. Homer-Dixon treats it as a voyage of discovery, which I am sure it was for him and which it can be for us, as we read his book. He develops his ideas of ingenuity and an "ingenuity gap" in regards to world scale problems, whole societies, etc., but the concepts are just as applicable at the smaller scale of our own lives or of the work that we do.
June 24, 2007
Homer-Dixon's book places both the blame and the responsibility for resource scarcity on the developing world, basing his ideas on a faulty premise of "natural human ingenuity" as a solution for the strain on the environment that he characterizes as exacerbated by poor countries. His tone is condescending, his thinking narrow, and his conclusion insulting.
April 19, 2009
Similar to Malcolm Gladwell books, in challenging common assumptions about how things do work, compared to how people think they work. A clear statement of why we are doing more multi-disciplinary work, why it is difficult, but also why it is important.
Difficult in areas where the tone gets a bit too dry, in between the exciting anecdotes and stories.
Difficult in areas where the tone gets a bit too dry, in between the exciting anecdotes and stories.
December 25, 2010
The author roams the world and asserts that it has become too complex for anybody to understand, environmentally, technologically, economically and politically. He has no substantial evidence for this assertion; the world is obviously complex now, but was it less complex 100 years ago? Look at the official title of Franz Joseph I.
February 6, 2019
I read this book many years ago, but it was one of my most thought provoking reads, and I have come back to the author's examples and frameworks again and again. It changed the way I think about my job, my role in society, and how society works. I still recommend this book to people nearly 20 years after I read it.
December 21, 2015
This book has stood out in mind ever since I read it. I started it while on a plane readying for take off for a long flight. Those who have read the opening chapter will understand the irony. I have been meaning to come back and read this book over again. But every time I buy a copy I wind up giving it away. I came away from the book optimistic myself.
January 26, 2008
How can we solve the problems of the future?????
Is our Wold becoming to complex, and too fast-paced????
This book basically answerers the above questions in details.
If your into Global-Warming and want to make a change.
READ IT
Is our Wold becoming to complex, and too fast-paced????
This book basically answerers the above questions in details.
If your into Global-Warming and want to make a change.
READ IT
December 25, 2010
The Ingenuity Gap is the metaphorical distance between the number of societal problems we face and the number of solutions humanity develops to deal with said problems. Which will grow faster, the number of problems or the number of solutions?
June 9, 2016
Some really interesting ideas here, but the thesis gets lost (repeatedly) inside a meandering travelogue. (I understand that he's attempting to use the cities as metaphors for his arguments, but he's not a good enough writer to pull it off.) This was kind of a chore to get through.
Read
September 4, 2007An excellent introduction to Chaos theory applied in an interdisciplinary study of the effect of man on the environment and himself.
January 3, 2009
A good introduction to complexity science.
Want to read
January 12, 2009This looks intriguing ...
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