book · draft
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 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.
- authors
- Jay W. Forrester
- publisher
- Wright-Allen Press
- year
- 1971
- url
- https://openlibrary.org/works/OL4504425W
produced by this organization or person
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American engineer and MIT professor (1918 to 2016) who founded system dynamics and used it to model a firm, a city and the whole world.
Tags: system dynamics, world model, resources, population, history