The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future

by Thomas Homer-Dixon

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"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," show more the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, renowned political scientist and sometime adviser 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. 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."--Jacket. show less

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3 reviews
Great book with a stellar thesis and with a detailed (and credible) navigation of multiple fields. As you read this book you have nonstop ideas thrown at you and the majority are framed differently and connected more fluidly than usual. I found that he brought a refreshingly complex (rather than the simplitistic rich-Americans-heading-back-to-the-homestead) view to both environmental problems (especially the implication for the third world) and potential "solutions". I had one stylistic gripe - the author is successful academic and much of the book has an academic feel - in that context I was a little annoyed by the sections in the book where he felt it necessary to reduce the issue to a single person for the sake of having a story. show more Another Canadian book that should be more broadly available the US (great gift Mom!) show less
½
I really enjoyed The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer-Dixon. It's a book I wish I could have written. It surveys a diverse landscape of topics related to the complex systems of the modern world, covering economics, politics, the environment, the human brain, and many other threads and linkages, all to develop the central idea of the increasing need for ingenuity in our increasingly complex world. Very interesting reading.

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Author Information

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10 Works 841 Members
Thomas Homer-Dixon is author of Environment, Scarcity, and Violence and The Ingenuity Gap, winner of Canada's prestigious Governor-General's Award of Non-Fiction

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Canonical title
The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future

Classifications

Genres
Sociology, Nonfiction, Science & Nature, General Nonfiction, Technology, History
DDC/MDS
362Society, Government, and CultureSocial problems and social servicesSocial Welfare
LCC
HM846 .H663Social sciencesSociology (General)SociologySocial change
BISAC

Statistics

Members
340
Popularity
92,753
Reviews
3
Rating
½ (3.55)
Languages
English
Media
Paper, Ebook
ISBNs
8
ASINs
7