"Looking back from the year 2100, we'll see a period when our creations--technological, social, ecological--outstripped our understanding and we lost control of our destiny. And we will think: if only--if only we'd had the ingenuity and will to prevent some of that. I am convinced that there is still time to muster that ingenuity--but the hour is late." --Thomas Homer-Dixon In The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon asks: Is our world becoming too complex and fast-paced to manage? The challenges facing human societies--from international financial crises and global climate change to pandemics of tuberculosis and AIDS--converge, intertwine, and often remain largely beyond our understanding. Most of us suspect that the "experts" don't really know what's going on, and that we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is the "ingenuity gap," the term coined by Thomas Homer-Dixon, renowned political scientist and sometime 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. In compelling and lucid prose, he makes real the problems we face and suggests how we might overcome them--in our own lives, our thinking, our businesses, and our societies. As the world becomes more complex, so do its problems--and the solutions to these problems become tougher to grasp, writes University of Toronto professor Thomas Homer-Dixon in The Ingenuity Gap . "As we strive to maintain or increase our prosperity and improve the quality of our lives, we must make far more sophisticated decisions, and in less time, than ever before," he writes. Is the day coming in which our ingenuity can't keep up? Homer-Dixon fears that it is: "the hour is late," and we're blindly "careening into the future." What we face, he says, is a "very real chasm that sometimes looms between our ever more difficult problems and our lagging ability to solve them." There are moments when Homer-Dixon comes close to sounding like a modern-day Malthus, with his never-ending worries about population growth, the environment, the strength of international financial institutions, civil wars, and so on. Yet parts of this book are downright fascinating; at its best, The Ingenuity Gap reads like one of Malcolm Gladwell's stories for The New Yorker (or his book The Tipping Point ). Homer-Dixon is very good when he tackles particular problems, and his interests are wide-ranging, moving from the psychology of an airplane cockpit during a crisis to the depletion of the world's fisheries to differences between the minds of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. He also dredges up fine details. Did you know that "the largest human-made structure on the planet is not an Egyptian pyramid or a hydroelectric dam but the Staten Island Fresh Kills landfill near New York City, which has a depth of one hundred meters and an area of nine square kilometers"? There's plenty to argue with on these pages, and some readers will find Homer-Dixon's tendency to write in the first person a bit self-indulgent. Yet fans of big-think books like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel , David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations , and Robert Wright's The Moral Animal will find The Ingenuity Gap riveting. --John J. Miller "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." Homer-Dixon, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program there, cites markets and science as sources of the needed ideas. Markets provide an incentive to produce knowledge, he says, but the incentive is often skewed or too weak and produces wrong or inadequate solutions. In science, "there is often a critical time lag between the recognition of a problem and the delivery of sufficient ingenuity" to solve it. Acknowledging the astonishing adaptability and ingenuity that many societies and individuals have shown, Homer-Dixon nonetheless warns that the hour is late for coping with the world's problems. "When we look back from the year 2100, I fear we will see a period when our creations--technological, social, and ecological--outstripped our understanding, and we lost control of our destiny." EDITORS OF SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN T