World Dynamics

Jay Forrester's 1971 system-dynamics model of the world as one system of population, capital, food, resources and pollution; the model behind The Limits to Growth.

After Urban Dynamics, Forrester scaled the same method up to the planet. World Dynamics applies the system dynamics approach developed at MIT to the world as a single system: it sets out the structure of that system, then the structure and assumptions of a world model, and runs the model to show the kinds of behaviour the whole can fall into. The book is short, 144 pages in the second edition of 1973, from which the cover shown is taken. The World3 model reported in The Limits to Growth the following year grew from this work.

The book matters to a twin builder as the earliest attempt at a whole-system model at the largest scale, and as a lesson in what a small model with its assumptions in plain view can and cannot say.

Cover via Open Library.