35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The kind of work society needs, November 28, 2000
The Ingenuity Gap is a book filled with big ideas that originate from numerous fields of research, and the result is quite stunning. There are so many contentious topics in this 400-page book that every now and then readers are bound to disagree with the author. Notwithstanding, disagreement is the result of conversation, and throughout the book this is the impression I had, that I was having a conversation with a man who has traveled all over the world to find a solution (if one there is) to the growing complexities of the world we live in.
The application of chaos and non-linearity to social science is probably not new, but Homer-Dixon presents this principle in such a way that it is impossible for the reader not to see it extending its long fingers around the world we live in, a world that, thanks to us, is growing in complexity.
This book serves as a wake-up call for policy-makers around the world who believe that every problem can be solved by technical means only (such as providing Internet connections to starving African children in countries ravaged by wars, jingoism, disease and scarcity of natural resources). Such positivism is misplaced, or misappropriated, Homer-Dixon argues. The widening gap between the rich and the poor of this world is a problem that is in urgent need of being addressed, and as long as we blind ourselves to the oftentimes hard realities of this world, or refuse to look beyond the gates of our rich Western communities, the world will not become a better place, and it could even turn for the worse.
Is this book nothing more than the musings of an unfettered alarmist? Some Westerners might argue that it is. But that is exactly what we can expect from people who spend their whole lives working in an environment that has distanced itself from the natural world (see, for instance, the Vegas chapter of this book). We Westerners have erected towering protective walls around our lives, and knowingly or not we have built the very screens which make it very difficult to see what lies beyond and consequently make it even more difficult for us to find solutions to problems people in less-fortunate countries are facing. Eventually, Homer-Dixon argues, the problems arising in a small country on the other side of the globe could very well embark on the bandwagon of chaos and surprise us with a bang on arrival.
The Ingenuity Gap is, to use a word E. O. Wilson resurrected a few years ago, an example of consilience, in that it draws on research from different fields - scientific, social, etc - to make a point, hoping in the process that it will initiate rapprochement and a fine-tuned orchestration (instead of competitiveness) of human efforts to solve the many difficulties we face today and undoubtedly shall face in the future.
Filled with to-the-point metaphors, interesting people, and written with exemplary lucidity, The Ingenuity Gap is the perfect wake-up call for a world that, awash in information, is slowly giving up on itself.
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Engrossing, entertaining, and disturbing, November 17, 2001
This is an extraordinary book, and it should be widely read. Not only does it make a compelling case that the problems we're creating for ourselves are rapidly outrunning our cleverness, but it's also packed with fascinating discussions of technical matters -- from global warming to fusion power to the evolution of the human brain. Homer-Dixon brings all these issues together within one conceptual framework by looking at the balance between our requirement for "ingenuity" (basically, practical ideas to solve our problems) and our supply of ingenuity. He is largely successful. Amazingly, despite the difficult subjects he discusses, The Ingenuity Gap is a good read, and some passages are quite moving. It's full of stories and colorful anecdotes, drawn from the author's travels around world. I know of few other books that blend storytelling and technical writing so well.
This book will be contentious. It will even make some people very angry. It challenges received wisdom over and over again: it raises questions about the sustainability of capitalism, about whether we can rely on science and technology to solve our problems, and about the effects of the Internet on democracy. Techno-libertarians will object, as will advocates of unfettered markets. But it's not easy to dismiss this book, because Homer-Dixon has done his research well (the 60-odd pages of endnotes are packed with citations and fascinating tidbits of information).
The Ingenuity Gap's central argument is straightforward, even banal: we may be creating a world that's too complex and unpredictable to manage. However, nowhere else have I seen this idea developed so thoroughly and so convincingly. After I finished this book, I found the world appeared very different, and the future looked considerably less secure.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Key Piece in a Body of Work of Great Import, February 24, 2008
This review is from: The Ingenuity Gap: Facing the Economic, Environmental, and Other Challenges of an Increasingly Complex and Unpredictable Future (Paperback)
I have read and reviewed one earlier book by this author, and bought the two more recent works a week ago after realizing I had seriously under-estimated the relevance of this author's work to my holistic integrative "civilization resilience" intent.
This is a five-star book and I expect Upside of Down will be as well.
I was immediately struck by the grace with which the author credits key other minds in the body of the work rather than just as a footnote.
Here are the highlights from my flyleaf notes, and a few other recommended readings:
+ Complexity soaring, need ideas for better institutions and better social arrangements.
+ Delusion of control over complex systems we barely comprehend
+ Citing Paul Rober: ideas co-equivalent to capital and labor
+ Not enough time to reflect (I am reminded of
The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
+ Full credit to H. G. Wells for anticipating the need for a World Brain to manage the complex of complexes
+ Excellent overview of mistakes by the economists. I recommend as well
Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
+Wealth gaps + migrations = poor global management
+ Losing 25% of our biodiversity
+ Delays in policy understanding, decisions, action, and outcomes compound losses over time
+ Mike Whitfield cited on need for holistic view, keystone species, and radical differences in compressed time scales. I am reminded of everything written by Richard Falk, Ervin Laszlo and others in the 1970's and 1980's.
+ Population factor is profound
+ Corruption is the primary obstacle to reform
+ Garbage overtaking coastlines while nitrogen leeches into water and carbon dioxide goes into the atmosphere
+ Citing David Harvey, "hypercapitalism" compresses time and space while over-producing both wasted production and concentrated wealth
+ Our collective ego is blocking our collective intelligence. See the new book,
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
+ Losing our sense of place, not getting enough signals to understand the tipping point circumstances
+ Complexity goes awry (he cited Perrow, whose book
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies remains a seminal work (simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and fix; complex systems have multiple points of failure that interact in unpredictable and sometimes undiscoverable ways; we live in a constellation of complex systems well beyond our ken)
+ Complex systems characterized by multiplicity; causal feedback; some tightly coupled; interdependence; openness; synergy; and nonlinear behavior.
+ Chaos theory warns us that nature will magnify the smallest perturbation from humans
+ Four stages of human perception of nature: 1) Balancing; 2) Anarchic; 3) Resilient; 4) Evolving.
+ Citing Wally Broeker: "Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks."
+ Social systems are path dependent, delay at any point can be disastrous
+ Lessons of financial crises: governments and the IMF are out of touch with speed and breadth of financial systemic changes; computer-driven changes can accelerate and deepen mistakes
+ Citing Kofi Annan: "imbalance between economic, social, and political realms can never be sustained for long."
+ Author: social system out of synch with natural and technological systems
+ Software code doubling every two years, bugs a real problem, still in pre-industrial era
+ Information glut has a critical bottleneck, lack of a sense-making bridge from data to our cognitive absorption
+ Ingenuity is both technical and social
+ Our biggest problem is the failure of our economic institutions and policies
+ Washington DC bureaucrats, including senior CIA analysts, "largely out of their depth"
+ Pace of change, depth of ignorance, and political resistance all assume scary proportions
+ Self-organizing resilience and adapting systems could be key
+ As ingenuity gap widens "need imagination, metaphor, and empathy more than ever."
+ Afterword: relentless increase in complexity while "world economic system is profoundly dysfunctional."
+ Most interesting to me, as I have committed to publish a book on "Cultural Intelligence" in 2009, is the author's citing of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson, saying culture is "information--skills, attitudes, beliefs, values--capable of affecting individuals' behavior."
There are other notes but Amazon imposes a word limit. This is a great book, and I honor it by listing other great and relevant works below (to my limit of ten):
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The leadership of civilization building: Administrative and civilization theory, symbolic dialogue, and citizen skills for the 21st century
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
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