The ingenuity-gap and Homer-Dixon

I wholeheartedly disagree with Homer-Dixon’s final pessimistic anti-cornucopian rationale. He states: “The most important of the seven factors above is the last: growing population, consumption, and environmental stresses will increase social friction. This will reduce the capacity of policymakers in developing countries to intervene as good social engineers in order to chart a sustainable development path and prevent further social disruption.” While I do believe humans across the globe are faced today with ever-mounting environmental pressures and adverse circumstances created by depletion and degradation, this simply underestimates human ingenuity just as much as the neo-Malthusians do.

Homer-Dixon, in his analysis, feels that humans cannot overcome conflict, which I feel is unrealistic. What would be the purpose of diplomats if human conflict was unable to be tackled? Scientists, economists, farmers, statisticians, and environmentalists need to work tirelessly to address these future concerns of population, consumption, and environmental stresses. Diplomats and politicians will need to address the mediation of conflicts created by scarcity, changing weather patterns, and other environmental shifts. Domestic and international cooperation can be used to overcome these challenges, albeit expecting some violent outburst in the process.

While the abovementioned issues are nowhere near mitigated, I believe that Homer-Dixon’s analysis has been proven false since the time of writing in 1991. Just as Malthus predicted doom much too soon, I do not believe that we are at the point of no-return regarding environmental conflict and its mitigation. Today more than ever, public and private institutions in the developing world are working to find solutions for agriculture that meet modern demands. High-level dialogue has become the norm for environmental conferences (with few concrete solutions, but still significant symbolically). Diplomats around the world seek solutions to environmental challenges with their counterparts every day.

Homer-Dixon presents his “ingenuity-gap” as a reason for the likelihood of future conflict. While yes, this gap can create grievances and lead to violence in the long run, more has been done to further information-sharing and capacity-building trainings in the last decade and a half since Homer-Dixon wrote his article (1999). In general, again, diplomats are the ones to promote this information sharing between countries. Mistakes made in western Africa can lead to suggestions on how to improve practices in Argentina, for example. Public institutions should be the leaders in trying to bridge this “ingenuity-gap” through widespread dissemination of research findings. In this way, the developing world is less likely to be left behind technologically, because these ideas should not cost them. In the past, research-sharing and development activities were conducted by private corporations for the benefit of their products, which would later return a profit for this investment. We are at a critical juncture now where this cannot be the only source of innovation in our world, and this is where social innovators come in as the saviors.

In conclusion, public funding for research must increase and be targeted toward mitigating Homer-Dixon’s key problems of population, consumption, and environmental stresses so that people globally can reap its benefits. This would be the best method to hopefully prevent Homer-Dixon’s pessimistic view of human failure by diminishing the “ingenuity-gap” in the face of these adversities.