World3 Revisited
The Limits to Growth, the report ignored with enthusiasm
I was so sure that I had already written about this that I had to do a search of all my previous articles. Apparently not. I suppose that it has been part of my subconscious for so long that I assumed I must have said something. It’s not like me to keep my mouth shut; and I do love tilting at windmills.
If you have never heard of the World3 model, don’t beat yourself up. It is not something that schools introduce for study and debate. It provides an unflattering view of us as a civilization. We have always preferred rose-colored glasses to a magnifying glass, and only look in a mirror to admire ourselves.
1972.
I was turning 15 years old that year. Like all my peers I had one eye on the War in Vietnam which was relentlessly grinding on to its ignominious end, and just as relentlessly, grinding up young people of both ideologies. Nixon went to China, then returned to fumble Watergate. Terrorism made its Olympic debut in Munich. NASA sent Apollo 17 to the moon and America promptly lost interest in space.
And the MIT report, The Limits to Growth was published. Almost no one noticed.
I honestly can’t recall exactly when I became aware of the report. Maybe in a high school science class, maybe not. I have few academic memories from my last two years of high school. Whenever it was that I first saw the original World3 plot, I found it shocking in a science fiction sort of way. I was young however, and the 2020s seemed impossibly distant.
What is World3 and what did the Limits to Growth report show?
The authors, Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, William Behrens III, taking advantage of computing power which at the time existed only in places like MIT, used complex system modeling to look at the future of human civilization based on key inputs that were either measurable or could be estimated. These vital parameters of civilization were organized into Population, Resources, Industrial Output per person, Food per person, and Pollution. The goal was to model our growth-based industrial system within the finite environment (Earth) in which we live. The ability to do this was new at the time. Before computing was available, understanding a system as large as Earth was not really practical. The model, World3, made this possible and was run for the period of years 1900–2100.
The results were not popular.
The model was run again with (overly) optimistic estimates.
The results were not popular.
I love to read, but I am also a very visual person. So, it was this summary plot for the Business As Usual (BAU) base case that made the impression on me. You can see why it would be unpopular, and why it is rarely discussed publicly…
…never been taught in schools, mentioned in the news, or acknowledged by politicians. The time axis scale from the original report has no fine divisions, but the polycrisis (coined by Heinberg and Miller, 2023) happens between 2024 and 2030 in this model. I have added the cartoon arrow.
Get Andrei Moore’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Polycrisis. If that is not a wonderfully apt word for everyday life today, I just don’t know what is.
The original authors were forthright in describing these results as a model, not a prediction. One of the obvious weakenesses is that the BAU model assumes human behavior does not change even beyond the tipping points.
Clearly, civilization would change during collapse, but not in a good way.
There is a case that was run where collapse does not occur, pointing a path toward a stabile and durable civilization. It involved everything you might expect, a stabilized population, curtailed pollution, resources and industrial activity in equilibrium.
I am going to just leave that for you to sit with. Draw your own conclusions.
Although World3 has never been a part of public discussion or grass-roots protests, and certainly not political platforms, there has always been spirited debate and discussion among the scientific community. The model has be updated, tested, and revisited over the intervening years.
The theme of the result has never changed.
The most recent update comes from four authors in Germany, Arjuna Nebel, Alexander Kling, RubenWillamowski, and Tim Schell. Published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, their paper Recalibration of limits to growth, an update of the World3 model does exactly as the title suggests. Their work brings the last fifty years of empirical data together to recalibrate and refine the model.
The new result comparing the original BAU case and the new Recalibration23 case shows the same story with only limited differences.
Being a comparison of the two model results, it is a busy plot. If you spend some time with it, I think you too will wonder if this shouldn’t have more open discussion. That won’t happen, as I am sure you can predict as well as I. The people who would have to be in the forefront of changing the status quo are also the very people who are grasping and scraping for everything they can get while they still can.
These folks have compounds and bunkers already prepared and waiting for them and their security forces. They will have enough, much much more than enough, to live out their lives in relative comfort and convenience.
It has now been fifty years or so. Honestly, except for the occasional twinge, it has been pretty easy for me to live my life, business as usual. Now we are living those “impossibly distant” times. I find that I have been subconsciously tracking this. The everyday decline in quality and availability of, well almost everything that matters, is obvious to me.
This is not a Boomer yelling get off my grass. This is not “everything was better in my day”. This just me observing that everything I have experienced in the last fifty years can be explained by a plot I saw in the 1970s.
I thought I would share with you.
Thanks for reading. See you next time.
