Can we solve the problems of the future? Thomas Homer-Dixon tackles this question in a groundbreaking study of a world becoming too complex and too fast-paced to manage.

The challenges we face 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 as a species we've released forces that are neither managed nor manageable. This is the ingenuity gap, the critical gap between our need for ideas to solve complex problems and our actual supply of those ideas.

Poor countries are particularly vulnerable to ingenuity gaps, but our own rich countries are no longer immune, and we're all caught dangerously between a soaring requirement for ingenuity and an increasingly uncertain supply. As the gap widens, the result can be political disintegration and violent upheaval.

With riveting anecdotes and lucid argument, Thomas Homer-Dixon uses his ingenuity theory to suggest how we might approach these problems -- in our own lives, our thinking, our businesses, and our societies.

Copyright 2000 Random House, Inc. | Alfred A. Knopf