Homer-Dixon begins by presenting his personal and academic background that led to the drafting of this book. He establishes that the nature of problems are becoming overly burdensome, including providing resources for exponentially growing populations, managing international environmental impacts, and creating a secure global economic market. Modern problems often contain numerous factors that interact to create hidden complexities and non-linear results. The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis is used to illustrate a system in which professed experts had confidence in but internal and external factors compounded upon each other to create a sudden, unexpected drop. The delusion of control, or the assumption that experts were in control, led to overconfidence in an economic system that was not well understood. Homer-Dixon finds that the experts are just as susceptible to groupthink as non-experts and that they have boundless capacity for hindsight rationalization of unexpected movements.