book · draft
The Limits to Growth
The 1972 Club of Rome report by Meadows, Meadows, Randers and Behrens that used the World3 system-dynamics model to ask whether exponential growth in population and industry could continue on a finite planet.
World3 was built by a team at MIT. System dynamics models a system as quantities that build up or drain away, linked by feedback. In World3, population, industrial output, food, non-renewable resources and pollution act on one another through feedback loops. The team ran it under a range of assumptions.
The report presented the runs for a general reader. In most of them growth continues past the planet's limits and is followed by collapse within a century. A stable equilibrium is reachable only with deliberate changes. The Club of Rome commissioned the report. It sold in the millions in many languages and started an argument that has not finished. The authors revisited the model in 1992 and again in a 30-year update in 2004.
The report is the best known case of a whole-system model shaping public debate. The history shows how results get read as predictions, how a model's limits get lost in transmission, and how much a small, clearly documented model can carry.
- authors
- Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William W. Behrens III
- publisher
- Universe Books
- year
- 1972
- url
- https://openlibrary.org/works/OL3737039W
produced by this organization or person
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American environmental scientist (1941 to 2001), lead author of The Limits to Growth and of Thinking in Systems, known for her list of leverage points.
cited by
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Two words for the world's crises taken together: what each means, who uses them, and the few places they touch the modelling of places.
Tags: system dynamics, world model, club of rome, resources, history