---
id: media/world-dynamics
about:
  label: World Dynamics
  description: >-
    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.
  tags:
    - system dynamics
    - world model
    - resources
    - population
    - history
  depiction: cover.jpg
book:
  authors:
    - Jay W. Forrester
  publisher: Wright-Allen Press
  year: 1971
  url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4504425W'
domains:
  - people
  - food
relations:
  - predicate: made_by
    target: people/jay-forrester
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: 'Open Library: World dynamics'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4504425W'
    - title: 'Open Library: World dynamics (Wright-Allen Press, 1973)'
      url: 'https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5435880M'
  created: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed: '2026-10-17'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
After Urban Dynamics, [Forrester](/people/jay-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 and the structure and assumptions of a world model, then 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, the source of the cover shown. The World3 model reported in The Limits to Growth the following year grew from this work.

As the earliest attempt at a whole-system model at the largest scale, it shows what a small model with its assumptions in plain view can and cannot say.

Cover via Open Library.