## Metadata - Author: [[Thomas Homer-Dixon]] - Full Title: The Ingenuity Gap - Category: #books ## Highlights - In rich countries, modern capitalism has created an astonishingly variegated mosaic of overlapping and fragmented realities. These realities have one thing in common: they’re all extensions of our egos; in other words, nearly everything we do and create through capitalism is made to the measure of our human needs and aspirations. The apex of this achievement is the postmodern capitalist city. We design our cities to block out the intrusions and fluctuations of the natural world so that they will work as smoothly and efficiently and with as little discomfort to their residents as possible. We like to be comfortable, after all. But the disturbing result is that many urban residents no longer care about, understand, or recognize the importance of this natural world. Our modern cities are vital engines of ingenuity supply, producing much of what is best and most beautiful, but they also produce self-absorption, introversion, and hubris. ([Location 130](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=130)) - But most of us feel, at least on occasion, that we are losing control; that issues and emergencies, problems and nuisances and information—endless bits of information—are converging on us from every direction; and that our lives are becoming so insanely hectic that we seem always behind, never ahead of events. Unexpected connections among places and people, among macro and micro events, connections that we barely understand in their true dimensions, weave themselves around us. Most of us also sense that, just beyond our view, immense, uncomprehended, and unpredictable forces are operating, such as economic globalization, mass migrations, and changes in Earth’s climate. Sometimes these forces are visible; more often they flit like shadows through our consciousness and then disappear again, behind the haze of our day-to-day concerns. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=267)) - began to think of ingenuity as consisting of sets of instructions that tell us how to arrange the constituent parts of our social and physical worlds in ways that help us achieve our goals. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=371)) - I soon realized that ingenuity comes in two distinct kinds: the kind used to create new technologies, like irrigation systems that conserve scarce water, or custom-engineered grains that grow in eroded soil, and the more crucial kind used to reform old institutions and social arrangements and build new ones, including efficient markets, competent and honest governments, and productive schools and universities. I called these two kinds technical and social ingenuity. ([Location 380](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=380)) - Technical ingenuity helps us solve problems in our physical world—such as requirements for shelter, food, and transportation. Social ingenuity helps us meet the challenges we face in our social world. It helps us arrange our economic, political, and social affairs and design our public and private institutions to achieve the level and kind of well-being we want. ([Location 383](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=383)) - When things happen faster, in greater numbers, and with greater interactive complexity, we need more ingenuity to make the right decisions at the right time. ([Location 437](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=437)) - Only three lifetimes ago—about the year 1800—an average person met no more than a few hundred people in a lifetime. Almost everybody lived in rural areas, personal transport speed was equivalent to the speed of a horse or a sailing ship, and almost all information was communicated directly through speech. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a citizen of a technologically advanced society probably meets hundreds of thousands of people in a lifetime. Most people live in urban areas of extraordinary density by historical standards, they can reach the other side of the planet in less than a day, and they can transmit information instantly by the gigabyte. These changes have multiple effects on ingenuity requirement and supply. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=438)) - Today’s overwhelming volume and variety of information makes it possible—by selecting and connecting data points carefully—to paint practically any picture of the world and make it seem accurate. So the pictures we paint are often more a reflection of our deepest personal orientation, especially of our basic optimism or pessimism, than of empirical evidence. ([Location 581](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=581)) - Mike Whitfield wanted to emphasize a central point. “Fundamentally, humanity’s approach to the ecosystems on which it depends arises out of arrogance. We have a misplaced optimism about our abilities.” Global ecosystems, he noted, cannot be managed consciously, just as we can’t manage our own bodies consciously. “Inside our bodies, a lot of things are ticking over without much thought, and if we had to manage consciously all these things—the beating of our heart, the flows of hormones, the cellular repair processes—we would be utterly overwhelmed. The same is true of global ecosystems. The irony of the situation is that in the end we may actually be condemned to manage these ecosystems because we have perturbed and destabilized them so much. And I am certain that we won’t be any good at it.” ([Location 827](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=827)) - But the most striking fact of all emerges when we look at the entire century and a half between 1900 and 2050. In this period, barely two lifetimes long, our annual impact on the planet’s environment will have increased more than fortyfold, and almost two-thirds of this increase will have occurred in the first five decades of the twenty-first century—that is, in the next fifty years.28 This analysis tells us that we have experienced, so far, only the earliest stages, just the leading edge, of the planet’s environmental crisis. Far, far greater environmental challenges are still to come. ([Location 939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=939)) - Farmers have found that insufficient nitrogen often restricts crop output, and they have developed various methods to add more to their fields. They have used human and animal waste as manure, and they have grown legumes and plowed them back into the soil. But these methods of organic recycling—employed widely by all traditional agricultures, and particularly by those in Europe and East Asia—limit the amount of plant protein that one hectare of land can produce. This limit means that a hectare can feed, for all practical purposes, a maximum of about five people. ([Location 1183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1183)) - Vaclav Smil, a geographer at the University of Manitoba, has calculated that about 40 percent of all protein in humanity’s diet depends on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.52 ([Location 1200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1200)) - The relationships in complex, evolving ecosystems—systems seriously perturbed by human activities—may be too numerous and intricate to be fathomed, much less manipulated, by the human brain.60 Using the brain for such ends, suggests the renowned entomologist Edward O. Wilson, is a bit like trying to unscramble an egg “with a pair of spoons.” ([Location 1252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1252)) - In Canary Wharf and the Isle of Dogs, capitalism has created a bewildering nightmare-scape of contradictions and mixed symbols that seem designed to distract people’s senses and prevent reflection—designed, in other words, to substitute adrenaline, giantism, and raw audacity for subtlety, care, and reflection. ([Location 1408](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1408)) - The U.S. National Research Council reports that “the average visual range in most of the western United States, including national parks and wilderness areas, is 100 to 150 kilometers, or about one-half to two-thirds of the natural visual range that would exist in the absence of air pollution. In most of the East, including parklands, the average visual range is less than thirty kilometers, or about one-fifth the natural visual range.” ([Location 1470](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1470)) - Why am I so concerned about haze? To me, it signifies something more general than just pollution or atmospheric processes. As haze cuts us off from vivid skies and landscapes, it attenuates our ties to the wider, external reality in which we are embedded. It is just one of the many ways we are constructing—inside that wider reality—an artificial and self-referential world. ([Location 1482](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1482)) - Seduced by our extraordinary technological prowess, many of us come to believe that external reality—the reality outside our constructed world—is unimportant and needs little attention because, if we ever have to, we can manage any problem that might arise there. And, in any case, as the pace of our lives accelerates, we have less time to reflect on these broader circumstances. All these trends can push us into narcissism, as they weaken our sense of awe at the universe beyond our human ego; and what is perhaps more important, they also weaken our receptivity to critical signals from the external reality that might awaken us to our deep ignorance of the potential consequences of our actions, and warn us against hubris. ([Location 1487](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1487)) - As we moved from open fires to tallow candles and then to compact fluorescent bulbs, the efficiency of light-making rose steadily. William Nordhaus, an economist at Yale, has studied this trend.16 The model of an enterprising academic, he couldn’t find published information on the lightproduced by open fires and sesame oil lamps, so he built his own fire, obtained his own Roman lamp (similar to a Babylonian lamp), and made his own light measurements with a Minolta illuminance meter. He concluded that the efficiency of light production—measured in terms of light output per unit of energy input—has improved by a factor of thirty thousand from the cave-dwellers’ open fire to today’s compact fluorescent light bulb. Since the time of the Babylonian sesame-oil lamp, efficiency has improved twelve-hundredfold. ([Location 1511](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1511)) - His own experiments with fires and lamps “provide evidence that an hour’s work today will buy about 350 thousand times as much illumination as could be bought in early Babylonia.”18 He continues: “One modern one-hundred-watt incandescent bulb burning for three hours each night would produce 1.5 million lumen-hours of light per year. At the beginning of the [nineteenth] century, obtaining this amount of light would have required burning seventeen thousand candles, and the average worker would have had to toil almost one thousand hours to earn the dollars to buy the candles.” ([Location 1550](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1550)) - Note: William nordhaus - Not so long ago, our existence was strictly governed by the cycles of day and night. Candles and oil for lamps, if available at all, were expensive and carefully rationed. They could perhaps extend the day by an hour or two after sunset, but then economic prudence demanded that the flame be extinguished and everyone go to sleep. Technologies for making cheap and abundant light have therefore been one of history’s great liberators. They have opened up vast numbers of hours for work, family, and leisure activities; for invention and idleness; and for developing one’s full potential as a human being. Indeed, since Roman times, light (lux) has been closely associated with luxury (luxe).20 ([Location 1555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1555)) - This qualitative change in our world—the fact that it is now flooded with light—has multiple effects on ingenuity supply. Since our societies can now work, and think, twenty-four hours a day, we can supply vastly more ingenuity to deal with the challenges around us.23 Those lighted office buildings, construction sites, and factories are full of people—knowledge workers—producing, implementing, and delivering practical ideas. The lighted streets, highways, and airports allow the exchange of ingenuity, and of the products of ingenuity, around the clock. One has to wonder, however, about the quality of some of this ingenuity. Our sleep-deprived and cognitively addled brains may simply be generating and delivering ever larger quantities of stale, mediocre ideas. And the creeping, insidious occultation of the stars is but one more contributor, like the dulling of the sky by atmospheric haze, to that broader and more fundamental qualitative shift in the character of our lives: the loss of reference points beyond the human-created world. ([Location 1580](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1580)) - Our cities are made to human scale—even the huge skyscrapers of Canary Wharf or La Défense in the outskirts of Paris are examples of monumentalism on a purely human scale—and everything is designed for or shaped to our interests. Things that get in the way of our interests, like bad weather, are resolutely shut out of our lives. As a result, as urban dwellers we inhabit an entirely meso-scale world, a world constructed entirely in the middle range of nature’s space and time scales. Because this middle range best suits the physical needs of human beings, the upper and lower ranges—the micro and macro ends of the space and time scales—are lopped off. We no longer experience them. For all intents and purposes, micro and macro phenomena no longer exist, and the meso scale becomes the only real world. This leaves us with an astoundingly impoverished awareness of the small and large systems that intimately affect our lives. ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1606)) - A wall of technology and its products now cuts us off from much of the universe around us. At the same time that we are altering our natural world one increment at a time, we are separating ourselves from this world. As a result, it seems less and less real, and we are less able to pick up the signals from our environment that could warn us of trouble; oblivious, we become yet more arrogant and sure of our powers. Arrogance distorts our ability to see which challenges around us really need our attention; and that, in turn, distorts the amount and kinds of ingenuity we supply. ([Location 1692](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1692)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Since we can all do more, we feel we must do more, because if we don’t we will be left behind by our colleagues, neighbors, and competitors. Thus the technologies that save us time and labor individually—that empower each of us—bind us collectively into a frenetic, mad race in which we often feel more caged by obligations and demands than before. ([Location 1806](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1806)) - Tags: [[blue]] - As the complexity and sophistication of our cars have increased, we can no longer repair them in our backyards or in our garage grease pits. Instead, we increasingly rely on distant expertise and knowledge. In short, the rising complexity of our machines has reduced our independence and self-sufficiency. It’s ironic that as technology does its job better and empowers us in various ways, it leaves us with less control, power, and freedom in other ways. ([Location 1937](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=1937)) - “If there is a unique quality to the modern era,” Winner writes, “it is that the conditions of existence have changed to such a degree that something explicitly recognized as ‘complexity’ now continually forces itself into our awareness.” ([Location 2118](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=2118)) - Biosphere 2 had revealed some sobering truths about the limits of our understanding of complex ecosystems. “Despite the enormous resources invested in the original design and construction . . . and despite a multimillion-dollar operating budget,” the two outside evaluators finally wrote, “it proved impossible to create a materially closed system that could support eight human beings with adequate food, water and air for two years. The management of Biosphere 2 encountered numerous unexpected problems and surprises, even though almost unlimited energy and technology were available to support Biosphere 2 from outside.” They concluded: “At present there is no demonstrated alternative to maintaining the viability of Earth. No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free.” ([Location 2454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=2454)) - The science writer and historian Edward Tenner has a label for such behavior: he calls it the “pathology of intensity,” which is “the single-minded overextension of a good thing,” in this case the single-minded effort to achieve the highest stable output from a resource.4 Time and time again we find that such monomania produces results we don’t expect and ultimately don’t like. ([Location 3111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3111)) - (In 1997, treatment of livestock with antibiotics for purposes of nutrition, therapy, and prophylaxis accounted for half of the world’s antibiotic consumption. ([Location 3117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3117)) - Yet, amazingly, the air-traffic control system has so far remained exceedingly safe. It is an exemplar of what experts call a high-reliability organization. These are organizations that can carry out extraordinarily complex tasks quickly with few errors and almost no catastrophic failures.35 In theory, such organizations shouldn’t be possible. Yet high-reliability organizations maintain failure-free performance by investing a large slice of their resources in preventative planning and careful analysis of their mistakes (non-catastrophic though they may be). They also display certain common behaviors in their day-to-day operations. For example, during periods when the pace and complexity of decision-making are high, as in a control tower during heavy traffic hours, the norms of hierarchy are pushed aside. Authority shifts to front-line equipment operators, because superiors recognize they don’t know enough about rapidly changing events to intervene effectively.36 During these periods, operators perform extraordinary feats of cognition. They construct and maintain in their minds a complex map of the events they are managing. This map, according to Gene Rochlin of Berkeley, “is not easily describable, even by controllers.” A novice arriving in an air-traffic control room is overwhelmed by diverse information and cannot possibly make sense of what is happening. “The novice is totally incapable of forming any visual map of the reality that is represented. That is a very special and highly developed skill possessed only by trained operators. To them, the real airspace is being managed through mental images that reconstruct the three-dimensional sector airspace and all of its aircraft. The consoles are there to update and feed information to the operator, to keep the mental image fresh and accurate; they neither create nor directly represent it.” ([Location 3320](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3320)) - Note: Good vote in favour of Sociocracy - In the combat-operations centers aboard ships of the U.S. Navy, operators say they “have the bubble” when they have successfully created a mental map of the flight paths, aerial tactics, and weapons use of the carrier-based fighters they are managing. The term likely derives from earlier days of fighting ships when weapons were aimed using an air bubble trapped in a tube of fluid, much like the tube in a standard carpenter’s level. Now it indicates that operators have been able to accomplish the amazing feat of constructing and maintaining “the cognitive map that allows them to integrate such diverse inputs as combat status, information flows from sensors and remote observation, and the real-time status and performance of the various weapons and systems into a single picture of the ship’s overall situation and operational status.”38 Operators face a constant risk of “losing the bubble,” of having the comprehensible and predictable suddenly become opaque and bewildering. We’ve all had similar experiences at one time or other. We have found ourselves in a complex situation where we have suddenly “lost it”; one moment the scene makes sense, but the next it is totally unfamiliar. Operators invest great cognitive effort to construct and maintain their complex mental maps, and they often rely on years of accumulated experiential knowledge. Unfortunately, efficiency-driven efforts to automate high-reliability systems, like the Federal Aviation Administration’s AAS Program, tend to reduce the amount of experiential knowledge available. Again, in day-to-day operations, this may not matter much. But what if something unexpected happens? “For the operator in an emergency,” Gene Rochlin contends, “deprived of experience, unsure of context, and pressed into action only when something has already gone wrong, with an overabundance of information and no mechanism for interpreting it, avoiding a mistake may be as much a matter of good luck as good training.”39 This problem is compounded if, as is common, automation is seen as a way of increasing the system’s throughput, which in air-traffic operations means increasing traffic loads and density. ([Location 3334](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3334)) - Note: Losing the bubble is a good metaphor for describing the loss of indigenous knowledge - Such sets of instructions are what I mean by “ingenuity.” More elaborate solutions require longer and more complex sets of instructions. In turn, longer sets of instructions generally (but not always) represent more ingenuity. Simpler solutions require shorter sets of instructions that generally represent less ingenuity. I can therefore define the minimum ingenuity requirement to solve my problem as the amount of ingenuity represented by the shortest set of instructions on my list, which is the problem’s simplest solution. ([Location 3397](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3397)) - Through a sophisticated set of senses, the brain receives a flood of information about the body’s internal state and its external environment. It interprets this information and commands appropriate responses. Although we think of the brain primarily in terms of its role in conscious thought and decision, it also handles a wide array of routine and unconscious tasks, from guiding motor activity to regulating visceral, endocrine, and somatic functions.4 ([Location 3427](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3427)) - Note: Ingenuity is defined narrowly as information processing. The brain is similarly seen narrowly. How woukd an animist, indigenous perspextive challenge this? Could we say that true ingenuity comes from the collective unconscious, from Gaia? Also, is this idea of ingenuity a left brain construct, and is it doomed to always fall behind itself, as it constructs an infinite hall of mirrors that reflects its false distortion of the world? - The transition from life in trees to life on the savanna required us to stand on two feet, possibly to reduce the thermal stress produced by long periods in the sun. ([Location 3488](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3488)) - “Even today,” says archaeologist Brian Hayden, “there are few students of lithic technology that ever achieve a Neanderthal’s level of expertise in producing good Levallois cores or flakes, while the number of contemporary flint knappers that have successfully mastered the technique for producing good Levallois points probably number less than a score.” ([Location 3556](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3556)) - More information plus more conduits plus greater capacity per conduit equals inundation—which is how most of us feel much of the time: inundated, drowning in information. Decisions have to be made faster, because transmission times have been reduced. The result is that we flit from task to task like the Indian minister of the environment, desperately trying to sort and answer incoming messages and scrambling to deal with the issues they raise. On one hand, the requirement for ingenuity steadily climbs: we need a higher quantity and rate of delivery of good problem-solving ideas. On the other hand, our capacity to generate and deliver ingenuity drops. An average person in our modern information economy spends ever more time on basic tasks of managing information, and ever less time producing creative ideas and truly useful knowledge. ([Location 3711](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3711)) - for every contribution to the supply of ingenuity we gain from a new link between people or between ideas, we may lose ingenuity because of the complexity, pressure, and pace of our information-glutted world. In the end, we may be inexorably exchanging the peace and quiet needed to generate high-quality ingenuity for the adrenaline-charged hyperactivity produced by waves of low-quality data. ([Location 3734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3734)) - The more I thought about this problem, however, the more I saw two distinct and somewhat contradictory processes operating in our rich societies. On one hand, the people who succeed at our meritocratic tests are empowered in our social hierarchies, despite the fact that these tests don’t properly measure some key frontal-lobe abilities. Over time these people, through their decisions and actions, tend to reproduce the institutions and procedures, including the testing procedures, that empowered them, thus putting more of exactly the same kind of people into positions of influence. ([Location 3906](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3906)) - Note: This also seems like a left brain / right brain thing - All the material artifacts we take for granted in the modern world, from the cars in our driveways and the furniture we sit on to the food in our refrigerators, are produced or extracted from five material constituents of our natural world: rock, soil, wood, water, and air. Human beings have used ingenuity, energy (mainly in the form of hydrocarbon fuels), and the genetic information in the life around us to manipulate and reconfigure these five constituents into the infinite array of things that serve our needs. ([Location 3950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=3950)) - When we think about the effect of technological change on growth, we tend to imagine that big ideas—like the steam engine, the telephone, or the Internet—are “better” ideas, because they create vast new industries and precipitate major economic revolutions. In modern economies, big ideas for technologies like the transistor and genetic cloning usually emerge from big industrial or government research enterprises. Such ideas and the “general-purpose technologies” they produce are immensely important, but most of our innovation and ingenuity actually comes in the form of countless small ideas—like the square-bottom paper bag, invented in 1870, that revolutionized U.S. retail sales. ([Location 4129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=4129)) - The beliefs in the unlimited substitutability of resources, in the primacy of economic institutions and policies, and in the exceptionalism of human beings and their modern markets often combine to produce what I can only call unbridled hubris. In 1974, Robert Solow, the Nobel economist, famously declared that “If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is in principle ‘no problem.’ The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources.”55 The idea that we can get along without natural resources is now widespread in rich countries. Within the next one hundred years, I believe, it will come to be seen as one of the greatest fallacies of our time. ([Location 4327](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=4327)) - And yet, despite our extraordinary technological and scientific prowess, it’s not at all clear that we really know what we are doing in this new world we’ve created for ourselves. We’re amazingly ingenious, but we may not be ingenious enough to manage our world and prosper within it. We charge forward, packed cheek by jowl on a tiny planet, billions of us, consuming, striving, creating, and jostling each other. We crisscross the sphere in our planes, cars, and ships, subordinating all its places and resources to our needs. We act as if the future is clear, and clearly ours. But the future is murky at best, and it’s not yet ours to claim. The greatest triumphs and tragedies of our story are undoubtedly yet to come. ([Location 5037](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5037)) - Then, one can see how Washington, more than any other city in the Western world, reveals the contrast between humanity’s astonishing ingenuity, on the one hand, and on the other its limited grasp of the events surrounding it. Washington is a center of immense power and authority—from the Federal Reserve and the FBI to the Pentagon—yet this power seems inconsequential beside the brooding, barely recognized forces underneath the surface of our planet’s economy, ecology, and society. ([Location 5064](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5064)) - What are “institutions”? Experts have suggested dozens of definitions, but I have always found the one offered by Douglass North, a Nobel prize–winning economic historian, most useful. Institutions, he says, are “the rules of the game in a society or, more formally, the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.” Countless problems arise in our everyday dealings with others, and we also have endless trouble living in societies and coordinating our actions to produce public goods that benefit everybody. Institutions, consisting of sets of instructions on how we should behave towards each other, help in a number of ways. They specify the range of socially permissible, required, or recommended actions in a given situation; they also make widely available key information about what other people are doing in our social setting. Institutions are socially agreed-on approaches that make it easier for us to decide what course of action we should follow. They help us arrive efficiently at agreements among ourselves, and they encourage and coordinate our collective action to produce benefits for our whole group. ([Location 5107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5107)) - And when it comes to broader questions—questions of how all these components of the planet’s ecology fit together; how they interact to produce Earth’s grand cycles of energy, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur; and how we’re perturbing these components and cycles—we find a deep and pervasive lack of knowledge, with unknown unknowns everywhere. Our ignorance, for all practical purposes, knows no bounds. Buzz Holling practically despairs on this score. “Because we are only now beginning to understand the changing reality,” he writes, “there is consequently no limit to the ability of good scientists to invent compelling lines of causal explanation that inexorably support their particular beliefs. How can even the best-intentioned politician possibly be expected to deal with that? How can even the most reflective of the public?” ([Location 5253](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5253)) - The Luxor Hotel, I decided, brings together pyramids, artificial light, and the night sky—three metaphors that had wound themselves like contrapuntal themes through my investigations. In my mind, our ability to produce, ever more cheaply, copious quantities of light had come to represent our astonishing technological prowess; the night sky, similarly, stood for the mysteries that this prowess can obscure and for the sense of awe about our natural world that our technologies often extinguish; and pyramids represented our need to convince ourselves that we retain authority over an increasingly chaotic, complex, and bewildering world. ([Location 5697](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5697)) - Even if the general trends are not really new, the degree of fragmentation and abbreviation of today’s social relations is certainly new. While the connections among us are more numerous than ever before, the meaningfulness of these connections is decreasing. ([Location 5741](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5741)) - the very technologies of communication, travel, and production that empower us as individuals can, paradoxically, reduce our control of events surrounding us, especially when everybody uses these technologies and, consequently, everybody’s life is busier and more pressured. These technologies are examples of our extraordinary ability to supply ingenuity, but they also drive up our need for ingenuity. ([Location 5750](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5750)) - We experience psychological stress when we face high cognitive or emotional demands that we feel are both unpredictable and uncontrollable. The stress is worse if we can’t release the frustration that results from these high demands, and if we don’t have adequate social support in the form of family and friends.8 A famous study of bureaucrats in the British civil service found that mortality rates were strongly correlated with status in the civil-service hierarchy. Surprisingly, the higher the person’s position in that hierarchy, the lower his or her risk of dying prematurely.9 After accounting for various risk factors, the researchers attributed this result to the higher levels of control and predictability that senior managers had in their work lives. Lower-level employees felt they had less control and, therefore, experienced far more stress and stress-related illness. ([Location 5760](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5760)) - Even in the best of circumstances, reforming institutions, or creating new ones, is hard. Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince in 1513 that “there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new system of things: for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old system as his enemies, and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new system.” ([Location 5885](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5885)) - As Michael Wines writes in The New York Times: “Modern Washington is wired for quadraphonic sound and wide-screen video, lashed by fax, computer, 800 number, overnight poll, FedEx, grassroots mail, air shuttle and CNN to every citizen in every village on the continent and Hawaii, too. Its every twitch is blared to the world, thanks to C-Span, open-meetings laws, financial-disclosure reports and campaign spending rules, and its every misstep is logged in a database for the use of some future office-seeker.” ([Location 5896](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5896)) - All this not only hinders our supply of social ingenuity, it also increases our ingenuity requirement: legislation, for instance, has to be more complex in an effort to strike a balance among all these competing and ever more powerful groups.32 Michael Wines notes that lawmakers must “insert and rewrite clauses to satisfy hundreds of interests that never wrote Capitol Hill or the White House twenty years ago, and probably did not even exist.” The rising complexity of legislation is reflected in the increasing length of key laws: the original Clean Air Act of 1963, for example, was ten pages long; amendments to the Act filled thirty-eight pages in 1970, 117 pages in 1977, and 313 pages in 1990. ([Location 5914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5914)) - We might not have much respect for them, but we should have some sympathy for the leaders of the new world we’ve created. We demand that they solve, or at least manage, a multitude of interconnected problems that can develop into crises without warning; we require them to guide us through an increasingly turbulent reality that is, in key respects, literally incomprehensible to the human mind; we buffet them on every side with bolder and more powerful special interests that challenge every innovative policy idea; we submerge them in information, much of it unhelpful and distracting; and we force them to make decisions in ever shorter time frames and to act at an ever faster pace. Moreover, we expect them to do their job, in the face of all these pressures, with tools provided by political institutions that were designed to meet the challenges of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ([Location 5931](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5931)) - The human brain’s hard-wired cognitive heuristics and shortcuts—essential tools for dealing with large amounts of information—are woefully inappropriate when we’re enmeshed in nonlinear, tightly coupled systems in which small things and small events can matter a lot. Its tendency, under stress, to simplify and dichotomize issues is unsuited to snarled problems that demand subtlety and nuance of thought. And its relentlessly optimistic temperament (what the anthropologist Lionel Tiger has called our “biology of hope”) shortens our time horizons and instills in us a potentially fatal imprudence. ([Location 5956](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5956)) - Perhaps the main job of leaders, however, is not to supply ingenuity but to help our societies resolve their deep conflicts over values, wealth, and power. In fact, some skeptics might argue that there is no shortage of ingenuity—we have more than enough; the real problem is our inability to resolve key political struggles over what we want, where we should go, and who should benefit. If we could settle those questions, the rest would be relatively straightforward and technical. But this argument overlooks the subtle relationship between politics and ingenuity. True, political struggles must be resolved, or at least mitigated, if a society is to achieve social justice and progress. But great ingenuity is usually needed to design, implement, and operate the political institutions—voting systems, parliaments, judicial arrangements, and the like—that enable societies to deal with their political struggles. Moreover, when these political institutions fail, the resulting conflict among social groups diverts the attention and absorbs the energy of leaders, bureaucrats, and decision-makers of all kinds, and the day-to-day management that is vital to the smooth running of society is then neglected. If political processes are intimately entangled with the production and use of ingenuity, values clearly are, too. Moral, economic, and other values affect our choice of lifestyles, technologies, and social arrangements. Some of these things need much more ingenuity to produce and sustain than others, so our values powerfully influence how much ingenuity we need. For example, if we value things like sports utility vehicles and big houses that consume lots of natural resources, then we need more ingenuity to extract and process those resources than we would if we valued a less materially-focused lifestyle. ([Location 5965](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=5965)) - Leading water experts believe that one thousand cubic meters of water per year per person is a useful benchmark of water scarcity. ([Location 6239](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6239)) - In practical terms this means that rural women will have to walk many kilometers from their villages for the day’s water, slum dwellers will have to gather for hours around stand pipes for the few minutes when they run, and irrigated crops will die when wells go dry. ([Location 6242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6242)) - How difficult it is to make sense of the forces behind the violence in this land! As is so often the case in the social sciences, the closer I got to the problem, the more tangled its causes seemed. Some of the experts I had interviewed in Patna emphasized the role of caste, others official corruption, and still others population growth and land scarcity. Clearly, all of these factors played a role, but the trick is to figure out how they actually interact within the complex system of rural Bihar’s economy, politics, and ecology. Amidst this complexity, though, I felt that one fact was indisputable. The people around me in that village still intimately depended on their natural environment for their well-being, especially on renewable resources of fresh water and fertile soil. For these villagers, and for most people in Bihar, a long drought, the salinization of their cropland from over-irrigation, or the fragmentation of their farms by population pressure could mean destitution, even starvation. As I looked across the parched fields, it seemed to me that those of us in rich countries too easily forget that these are basic facts of life for half the people on the planet. ([Location 6796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6796)) - During the previous years, as I put together the pieces of the ingenuity puzzle, I had come to the conclusion that few if any societies are in danger of soon colliding with such limits to growth. Indeed, the entire neo-Malthusian rhetoric of absolute resource limits or, to use the popular phrase, of ecological “carrying capacity,” has come to strike me as deeply misleading, because it implies impending, unbreachable constraints on human development. Human history is a triumphant record of people smashing through such constraints. ([Location 6807](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6807)) - Note: This is a real departure from where I thought he was going. Now he feels like a late-stage modernist, fighting for a last act for rationalikty and ingenuity. - But these theoretical limits are a long way off. In the meantime, the constraints we face are more practical: they are the result, in large part, of our limited ability to supply ingenuity. And because the amount of ingenuity we supply depends on many social and economic factors and can vary widely from society to society, we cannot determine a society’s limits to growth solely by examining its physical context, as neo-Malthusians try to do. Rather than speaking of limits, it is more accurate to say that some societies are locked into a race between a rising requirement for ingenuity and their capacity to supply it. ([Location 6820](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6820)) - Poor countries are more likely to fall behind in this race, because an adequate supply of ingenuity depends on having adequate financial and human capital. Laboratories need money and skilled personnel to generate technologies that can alleviate scarcity’s harsh effects; entrepreneurs need credit to diffuse these technologies through the broader economy; and political leaders need financial capital to buy off special interest groups that obstruct technological and institutional reform. ([Location 6824](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6824)) - Note: Looking at this through a Hospicing Modernity lens, I would say he is someone who thinks modernity is salvageable, we just need to expand its benefits to others. He doesn't see that Western ingenuity is bought at the price of global poverty. - “Few components of the Earth’s crust, including farm land, are so specific as to defy economic replacement,” wrote Harold Barnett and Chandler Morse in their classic early-1960s study of the economics of natural resources.37 The idea that we can always find adequate substitutes for any specific resource (an idea I looked at in the chapter “Ingenuity and Wealth”) is now widely shared by economists in rich countries, but it struck me as meaningless, even ludicrous, in the context of the village. Even if it were technically possible, which I doubted, to find a fully satisfactory substitute for the biochemically complex soils of the Ganges plain around me, Bihar could not possibly come up with the huge investments of capital and labor that would be required, let alone the technical and social ingenuity that would support such a project—especially in the present circumstances. Bihar would remain an agricultural economy for generations to come, and during that time its soils, for all intents and purposes, would be irreplaceable. ([Location 6843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6843)) - Note: you dont just need ingenuity, you also need to exploit materials and labour from other countries, as the book "global magic" has shown - In many poor countries around the world, scarcities of cropland, water, and forest resources don’t engender waves of ingenuity, as many economists predict they should; instead, they actually reduce the supply of ingenuity, because they lead to conflicts among groups that hinder technical and institutional adaptation to scarcity. This outcome is much more likely, it seems, when societies suffer from rising scarcities and highly unequal distributions of wealth and power. In these cases, inequality erodes the social capital around which cooperative solutions to scarcities can be built. ([Location 6864](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6864)) - Note: Inequality is not good in the long run, because it erodes cooperation - When economists analyze an economic crisis like Bihar’s, they usually point to weaknesses in economic institutions, such as markets and property rights, as the fundamental causes. But I felt that the hardships of the villagers I had seen were not, first and foremost, a product of such factors. Instead, their hardships were primarily derived from inequalities of wealth and power among Bihar’s castes and from the corrosive effect of these inequalities, when combined with severe resource scarcities, on the state’s political institutions. And it was the debilitation of the state’s political institutions that, in the end, prevented constructive reform of its economic institutions and policies. Economic institutions and policies are ultimately subordinate to politics. And in Bihar, as in much of the developing world, politics is powerfully influenced by scarcities of natural resources. ([Location 6878](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=6878)) - So an issue that seemed particularly pertinent to me that day, as we wound our way through Patna’s crowded streets to find a specific child, was the cognitive development of India’s children. Would they be ready, intellectually, for the next century’s knowledge-intensive, hyperdynamic, and high-pressured global economy? Would they be sufficiently adept to participate in that economy, to sell their products, services, and skills for an adequate return? These questions applied not just to India, but to developing countries in general. ([Location 7009](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7009)) - Note: Again, this assumes that modernity's version of cognitive development is something to be desired - I remembered Nicholas Negroponte’s assertion that a satellite providing Internet access stationed over Africa would immediately revolutionize the continent’s economic and political prospects. Only people totally entranced by the technological cornucopia of rich countries, I thought, and largely unfamiliar with what is happening in much of Africa, or in much of the developing world for that matter, could say such a thing. Outside the fantasy worlds of these technological and economic optimists, children in poor countries need peaceful societies, good diets, clean air and water, and adequate shoes before they need, or can even use, Internet access. ([Location 7050](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7050)) - I had come all this way in my travels and my learning and exploration. Now was the moment of truth: what did it all mean? Looking out across the Ganges, with a group of Indian children around me, their eyes scanning me in curiosity and silence, I understood that contradictions were at the heart of the story. These contradictions played themselves out on many levels and in many ways. Some were intriguing, and some were productive. Others were frightening. But whatever way these contradictions played out, they rendered the past, present, and future fundamentally ambiguous. I realized that there was no single right or correct interpretation of the world around us, no one answer to my quest, and no single, definitive arrangement of the pieces of the ingenuity puzzle. ([Location 7101](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7101)) - The vicissitudes of the ancient environment in Africa helped endow us with extraordinarily versatile brains. To use the paleoanthropologist Rick Potts’s delightful phrase, our brains are “mirrors of nature’s quicksilver.” ([Location 7177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7177)) - I’d traveled to the other side of the planet to find one face among billions. I could do this because our brains give us a truly uncanny ability to remember faces, to identify one in a vast crowd. And this ability, and that child’s face in particular, came to represent for me our vital capacity to use recognition and empathy to link ourselves together into larger communities. If I could just imagine the faces of the people in Kabul, down on the ground below me—if I could hold in my mind’s eye, just for a moment, an image of what they might look like—maybe I could overcome my pernicious tendency to adjust and forget. Faces turn people into individuals, and by recognizing, remembering, and imagining faces, we can make bridges between our separate selves and turn individuals into communities. ([Location 7200](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7200)) - As ingenuity gaps widen the gulfs of wealth and power among us, we need imagination, metaphor and empathy more than ever, to help us remember each other’s essential humanity. I believe this will be the central challenge of the coming century—one that will shape everything else about who we are and what we become. Anatol Rapoport, a pioneering mathematical psychologist and one of the wisest people I have ever known, once told me: “The moral development of a civilization is measured by the breadth of its sense of community.” Have we paid enough attention to the moral development of the global civilization we are creating today? ([Location 7206](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7206)) - The factors that Al Haynes identified take on their greatest importance in times of crisis, when we have to supply ingenuity in response to sudden, nonlinear events, like the explosion of a plane’s engine, a panic in financial markets, or a sharp, unfavorable change in climate. While we can’t do much about luck in such circumstances (we can only hope that it generally works in our favor), we can do a lot about communications, preparation, and cooperation. For instance, we can ensure in advance that there are good communication links between the key people and groups who will need to talk to each other, and we can practice over and over again our responses to a wide range of possible emergencies. Most important, we can develop procedures for cooperative decision-making to make sure that people’s experiential knowledge—the wisdom that comes from years of working with a complex system like a plane or a financial market—is available and used when it’s needed most. ([Location 7228](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7228)) - Note: Sociocracy! - Partly because of our larger populations, rising wealth per capita, and more powerful technologies, and partly because of our hypercompetitive economic and social systems, we seem to be doing more of everything, over larger areas, faster than ever before. It’s as if we’ve got our collective foot slammed down on the world’s accelerator pedal. We need to think creatively about how we might slow things down, how we might ease up a bit on that pedal. I’m convinced that if we don’t—if we allow the complexity and turbulence of the systems we’ve created to go on increasing, unchecked—these systems will sometimes fail catastrophically. In other words, nonlinearities will, at some point, slow down and simplify things for us, whether we like it or not. ([Location 7251](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7251)) - What we value as wealth and as the “good life” has an enormous effect on our need for ingenuity. People in poor countries quite reasonably want more material things—things that those of us in rich countries think are essential and take for granted, like refrigerators, electricity, and good clothes. But are sports utility vehicles, five-bedroom houses, year-round air-conditioning, private summer cottages, and vacations in the Caribbean also essential elements of the good life? Do they really make us that much happier? Probably not, yet most of us in rich countries aspire to these things, and when we get them we greatly increase our environmental burden, especially, for instance, our output of carbon dioxide. A shift to less material values in rich societies would help reduce our overall need for ingenuity to manage our relationship with our environment. ([Location 7262](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7262)) - Our seemingly limitless ingenuity has convinced many of us that we can have everything we want, that all things are within our grasp, and that we can separate ourselves from the essential foundations of life on the planet. But we really need to think less about what we want, and to remember instead our place in the broader scheme of things; to feel occasionally some awe before nature; and to reintroduce some real humility and prudence into our collective consciousness. ([Location 7268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7268)) - Our modern approach to solving our problems tends to be rational and analytic—and thus starkly impoverished. I believe that reason by itself is not—cannot be—our ultimate salvation, and that we must instead call on our uniquely human capacity to integrate emotion and reason: to mobilize our moral sensibilities, create within ourselves a sense of the ineffable, and achieve a measured awareness of our place in the universe. These moral abilities are also innate human strengths, and if we can use them to root out some of our arrogance about our capacity to understand and control the complex systems around us, maybe we’ll be more inclined—to paraphrase Mike Whitfield—to tread softly in their presence. ([Location 7275](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000FC1ISG&location=7275)) - Note: Hospicing modernity and iain mcgilchrist