The Ingenuity Gap

Can humanity devise ideas quickly enough to solve the problems that its own technologies and environmental impacts have created? Thomas Homer-Dixon argues that the shortfall between the practical, inventive solutions we need and the ones we actually have is the central problem of our time, and he calls it the ingenuity gap.

Homer-Dixon contends that the world is growing too intricate and too quick for us to govern. Global financial turmoil, climate change, and epidemics such as tuberculosis and AIDS overlap and feed into one another, and they remain largely beyond our understanding. He suspects that many experts do not fully grasp what is happening, and that we have set in motion forces we can neither direct nor contain.

The book moves through vivid, story-driven episodes that illustrate his case. It begins with a harrowing account of the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 on its way from Denver to Chicago, then travels to Las Vegas, a remote beach in British Columbia, and a personal search for a missing girl in Patna, India. Along the way he shows that poorer nations are especially exposed to the gap, but wealthy nations are not safe either. When the gap grows, political collapse and violence can follow, and their effects seep into economies and everyday life in less obvious ways.

Written in clear, engaging prose by a political scientist who has advised the White House, the book makes these dangers concrete and considers how individuals, businesses, and societies might respond.