THE INGENUITY GAP

I just started reading "The Ingenuity Gap" by Thomas Homer-Dixon. I think I will probably post more from the book in coming days.

As an example of why I like it, Homer-Dixon quotes (page 28) William McNeill (one of my intellectual heroes):

“intelligence and ingenuity…run a race with all the nasty eventualities that interfere with human hopes and purposes; it is far from clear which is winning.”

The author notes in the Prologue that the postmodern capitalist city is a marvel. “We design our cities to block out intrusions and fluctuations in the natural world so that they will work as smoothly and efficiently and with as little discomfort to their residents as possible.” He notes the amount of ingenuity that has gone into the technology and institutions of the city, and that the ingenuity involved in the design is different than that in the operation of the city.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Isabel, this point can be extended. The modern city, Washington at least, can block out intrusions to a certain extent, but fails when confronted with the full force of nature. A hurricane overcomes the cities homeostatic systems. Another extension is that a still different kind of ingenuity is needed to restore the functioning of the city after major damage from a natural event. Clearly the normal maintenance technology and institutions are insufficient to restore order quickly, yet the task is far less intimidating that building a city (which takes generations).

One of Homer-Dixon’s points is that people who are lucky enough live in these cities don’t really understand the half of the world’s people who are very poor, surviving on the basis of subsistence agriculture and other low-productivity work. I think this is an important point. If you can’t relate the experience of others with your own, you can’t empathize with them. I suspect that the lack of understanding of and empathy for people living at the subsistence level is a good part of the reason that the United States seems willing to spend US$168 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq, in order to avoid repetitions of 9/11 and the death of 3,000 people at one stroke, but is not willing to spend more than $2 billion this year on AIDS abroad, which killed 2.2 million people last year in Africa.

I suspect that what Homer-Dixon thinks about under the term “ingenuity” is what I think of as “bringing knowledge and understanding to bear on development” – the topic of this blog.

He makes the point that people who live in modern cities tend to be optimists about civilization’s ability to solve problems, and implies that the half of the world’s population living in poverty may have reason to doubt this ability. In the long run, the doubters may be right! Unfortunately, the most powerful people in the world tend to be drawn from those who are optimistic!

We are doing as well as we are as a result not only because of recent social and technological innovation, but because we are exploiting millennia of accrued social capital. Early critical successes were domestication of plants and animals, agriculture, urbanization, government. Modern success is based on the development of a few key discoveries – steam and internal combustion engines, electricity, the American system of manufacture (interchangeable parts), the production line, materials science, electronics, the research laboratory, markets, democracy, rule of law, etc. How long will it take to fully exploit those discoveries? How many more big discoveries are out there? How fast will they come along?

Homer-Dixon sees ingenuity as a distributed property, as do I. Lots of people are working independently, with limited (local) information to find ways of solving problems and making things better. The modern city frees people from using their ingenuity to solve the myriad of problems of day to day life – supermarkets make it easy to feed the family; cars and public transportation make it easy to move from place to place; ICT makes communication easy; etc., etc. It does so through institutions that have evolved to allow people to apply specialized expertise to specific innovations. So agricultural scientists working in research labs find or make improve crop varieties; biomedical scientists invent and improve drugs and medical processes, engineers find better ways to build things.

I suspect that the key ingenuity in development, underlying all other ingenuity, is involved in developing the institutions that allow people to effectively apply specialized knowledge to specific needs for innovation, and that provide the incentives that they do so. I suspect that modern capitalism is one such institution, that is especially effective for stimulating development of broad classes of technology (but not technologies underlying public goods), and for stimulating ingenuity in the design of new business organizations and processes. I am not sure that civilization has found equally effective institutions underlying other kinds of ingenuity – such as that needed for civil society or government.