Abstract
Commissioned by the Club of Rome, the Meadows team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) produced The Limits to Growth in 1972. Using system dynamics modelling, the team found that economic growth will reach physical limits by the middle of the twenty-first century. Economists in particular rejected the notion that human economies have any limits and treated the work with derision. Scientists took a more supportive approach and have written independent reviews and developed the limits ideas. A number of them have tested the modelling against real-world outcomes 30, 40 or 50 years later, and have found that the Limits projections are reliable. While it is often claimed that collapse can be avoided by large technological advances, it is likely that a paradigm shift in human, social and economic expectations is also necessary.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Growth’ or ‘economic growth’ refers throughout to GDP growth.
- 2.
At the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus hypothesised that food production would not keep up with population growth. He pre-dated modern industrial production, so did not deal with issues of the overall sustainability of modern society (Higgs 2014: pp 40–43).
- 3.
They used five basic sectors: population, capital, agriculture, non-renewable resources, and persistent pollution and included variables such as population, capital, pollution, and arable land (Turner 2012).
- 4.
- 5.
‘The comprehensive technology scenario … incorporates levels of resources that are effectively unlimited, 75% of materials are recycled, pollution generation is reduced to 25% of its 1970 value, agricultural land yields are doubled, and birth control is available world-wide’ (Turner 2014).
- 6.
‘For the “stabilized world” scenario, both technological solutions and deliberate social policies are implemented to achieve equilibrium states for key factors including population, material wealth, food and services per capita. Examples of actions implemented in the World3 model include: perfect birth control and desired family size of two children; preference for consumption of services and health facilities and less toward material goods; pollution control technology; maintenance of agricultural land through diversion of capital from industrial use; and increased lifetime of industrial capital’ (Turner 2014).
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Higgs, K. (2022). A Brief History of The Limits to Growth Debate. In: Williams, S.J., Taylor, R. (eds) Sustainability and the New Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78795-0_8
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