The ingenuity gap: Facing the economic, environmental, and other challenges of an increasingly complex and unpredictable future

538 Pages·2002·3.44 MB·English

by  Thomas Homer-Dixon

To my students
and the future they will make their own
CONTENTS
Prologue
How Are We Changing Our Relationship to the World?
ONE
1 Careening into the Future
2 Our New World
3 The Big I
Do We Need More Ingenuity to Solve the Problems of the Future?
TWO
4 Complexities
5 An Angry Beast
6 Glimpsing the Abyss
7 Unknown Unknowns
Can We Supply the Ingenuity We Need?
THREE
8 Brains and Ingenuity
9 Ingenuity and Wealth
10 Techno-Hubris
11 White-Hot Landscapes
What Does the Ingenuity Gap Mean for Our Future?
FOUR
12 Vegas
13 Patna
Epilogue
Afterword
Notes
Illustration Credits
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
occasionally suspect that the world we’ve created is too
M OST OF US
complex and too fast-paced for us to understand, let alone
control. Most of us sometimes guess that even the “experts”
don’t really know what’s going on, and that as individuals and as a
species we’ve unleashed forces that we cannot manage. The challenges
facing our societies range from international financial crises and global
climate change to pandemics of tuberculosis and ; they cross the
AIDS
spectrum of politics, economics, technology, and ecological affairs. They
converge, intertwine, and often seem to be largely beyond our ken—
incomprehensible even to our leaders and specialists.
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.
Ingenuity gaps tend to widen the already yawning gulfs of wealth and
opportunity within and between our societies. Many societies, groups,
and people adapt reasonably well to our swiftly changing world, but
others have fallen behind and risk being overwhelmed by converging
pressures. 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.
This picture does not correspond to today’s received wisdom—at least,
not the wisdom espoused by many members of the economic, political,
and journalistic elites of Western societies. The opinion and commentary
heard from these circles has lately had a distinctly triumphalist tone. A
glorious future for all is predicted, thanks to the leadership of the West.
The success of the United States, in particular, has revealed the path to
universal well-being; all that remains is for other societies to follow its
lead.
The West certainly has every reason to be proud of its successes; its
capitalism, science, and liberal democracy are marvelous institutions
that have made extraordinary contributions to human prosperity and
freedom. And certainly Western societies, and again the United States in
particular, have seen a remarkable string of economic and political
achievements in recent years. But Western triumphalism is partly based
on a selective reading of the evidence. Problems and issues that don’t fit
into this optimistic worldview tend to be downplayed or ignored.
Moreover, a significant part of the West’s current success is the result of
a confluence of events and processes that its elites neither controlled nor
really understand. Western triumphalism is dangerously self-indulgent,
and even delusional; it assumes agency where there may be mainly good
luck.
This book does not present a fully developed theory, because I have
not tried to address all relevant issues or tie off all loose ends. Instead, I
have tried to elaborate an intuition or feeling about our future. The
ingenuity gap, as I call it, is a way of thinking about the very real chasm
that sometimes looms between our ever more difficult problems and our
lagging ability to solve them. The ingenuity gap is also a metaphor for
the human predicament, a metaphor that can be explored and
understood in a multitude of ways—analytically, empirically,
emotionally, and spiritually. As a new millennium unfolds before us, it is
my hope that this book, in a small way, will give us better tools for
understanding who we are and where we are going.
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. How much and what
kinds of ingenuity a society requires depends on a range of factors,
including the society’s goals and the circumstances within which it must
achieve those goals—whether it has a young population or an aging one,
an abundance of natural resources or a scarcity of them, an easy climate
or a punishing one, whatever the case may be. How much and what
kinds of ingenuity a society supplies also depends on many factors, such
as the nature of human inventiveness and understanding, the rewards an
economy gives to the producers of useful knowledge, and the strength of
political opposition to social and institutional reforms.
A good supply of the right kinds of ingenuity is essential, but it isn’t,
of course, enough by itself. We know that the creation of wealth, for
example, depends not only on an adequate supply of useful ideas but
also on the availability of other, more conventional factors of
production, like capital and labor. Similarly, prosperity, stability, and
justice usually depend on the resolution, or at least the containment, of
major political struggles over wealth and power. Yet within our
economies ingenuity often supplants labor, and growth in the stock of
physical plant is usually accompanied by growth in the stock of
ingenuity. And in our political systems, we need great ingenuity to set
up institutions that successfully manage struggles over wealth and
power. Clearly, our economic and political processes are intimately
entangled with the production and use of ingenuity.
The past century’s countless incremental changes in our societies
around the planet, in our technologies and our interactions with our
surrounding natural environments, have accumulated to create a
qualitatively new world. Because these changes have accumulated
slowly, it’s often hard for us to recognize how profound and sweeping
they’ve been. They include far larger and denser human populations;
much higher per capita consumption of natural resources; and far better
and more widely available technologies for the movement of people,
materials, and especially information. In combination, these changes
have sharply increased the density, intensity, and pace of our
interactions with each other; they have greatly increased the burden we
place on our natural environment; and they have helped shift power
from national and international institutions to individuals and
subgroups, such as political special interests and ethnic factions. As a
result, people in all walks of life—from our political and business leaders
to all of us in our day-to-day lives—must cope with much more complex,
urgent, and often unpredictable circumstances. The management of our
relationship with this new world requires immense and ever-increasing
amounts of social and technical ingenuity. 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.
When we enhance the performance of any system, from our cars to the
planet’s network of financial institutions, we tend to make it more
complex. Many of the natural systems critical to our well-being, like the
global climate and the oceans, are extraordinarily complex to begin
with. We often can’t predict or manage the behavior of complex systems
with much precision, because they are often very sensitive to the
smallest of changes and perturbations, and their behavior can flip from
one mode to another suddenly and dramatically. In general, as the
human-made and natural systems we depend upon become more
complex, and as our demands on them increase, the institutions and
technologies we use to manage them must become more complex too,
which further boosts our need for ingenuity.
The good news, though, is that the last century’s stunning changes in
our societies and technologies have not just increased our need for
ingenuity; they have also produced a huge increase in its supply. The
growth and urbanization of human populations have combined with
astonishing new communication and transportation technologies to
expand interactions among people and produce larger, more integrated,
and more efficient markets. These changes have, in turn, vastly
accelerated the generation and delivery of useful ideas.
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. New
communication technologies are also shifting power away from
governments, which boosts the ability of subgroups and individuals to
block useful institutional reform. In many poor countries, the spread of
lighter and more lethal weapons has contributed to a similar shift of
power away from governments towards violent insurgents and
secessionists. As it becomes easier for small numbers of people to inflict
massive trauma—often in the form of massacres of civilians and terrorist
bombings—more poor societies are likely to become locked in
downward spirals of violence that make democratic reform virtually
impossible.
Modern markets and science are an important part of the story of how
we supply ingenuity. Markets are critically important, because they give
entrepreneurs an incentive to produce knowledge. But this incentive is
often skewed or too weak—our energy prices, for instance, don’t begin
to reflect the potential cost of climate change to future generations—
which means we often get the wrong kind of solutions to our problems.
As for science, although it seems to face no theoretical limits, at least in
the foreseeable future, practical constraints often slow its progress. The
cost of scientific research tends to increase as it delves deeper into
nature. And science’s rate of advance depends on the characteristics of
the natural phenomena it investigates, simply because some phenomena
are intrinsically harder to understand than others, so the production of
useful new knowledge in these areas can be very slow. Consequently,
there is often a critical time lag between the recognition of a problem
and the delivery of sufficient ingenuity, in the form of technologies, to