Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens built a computer model called World3 at MIT and published its results for the Club of Rome in 1972. The book sold millions of copies and provoked a debate that has continued for fifty years.
The model links five variables: population, food production, industrialisation, pollution and consumption of non-renewable resources. Its structure incorporates exponential growth in several of these, physical limits on others, and delays in the feedback between them. The central finding is that under most parameter sets the system overshoots its limits and then declines, and that the delays are what produce the overshoot: by the time the constraint becomes visible, the momentum in the system carries it past the sustainable level. The authors ran scenarios including higher resource availability, better pollution control and improved agricultural yields, and found that these postponed rather than prevented the overshoot unless growth itself was addressed.
The book was widely misrepresented as predicting specific resource exhaustion by specific dates, which it did not do; it presented scenarios rather than forecasts. Economists including Julian Simon attacked the treatment of prices, substitution and technological response, which the model handles crudely, and the failure of resource prices to rise as predicted was treated as a refutation. Later comparisons of the standard run against actual data, including work by Graham Turner, found closer correspondence than the book's critics acknowledge. The methodological point about delay and overshoot in systems with exponential growth is the durable contribution.
Investors and analysts who want the original systems argument about growth and limits rather than the caricature of it in the subsequent debate.
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