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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Limits to Growth | 3/6 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T08:56:47.468680+00:00 | kb-cron |
LTG provoked a wide range of responses, including immediate criticisms almost as soon as it was published. Peter Passell and two co-authors published a 2 April 1972 article in the New York Times describing LTG as "an empty and misleading work ... best summarized ... as a rediscovery of the oldest maxim of computer science: Garbage In, Garbage Out." Passell considered the study's simulation simplistic and that it assigned little value to the role of technological progress in solving the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and food production. They charged that all LTG simulations ended in collapse, predicting the imminent end of irreplaceable resources. Passell also charged that the entire endeavour was motivated by a hidden agenda: to halt growth in its tracks. In 1973, a group of researchers at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex concluded that simulations in Limits to Growth were very sensitive to a few key assumptions and suggested that the MIT assumptions were unduly pessimistic and the MIT methodology, data, and projections were faulty. However, the LTG team, in a paper entitled "A Response to Sussex," described and analyzed five major areas of disagreement between themselves and the Sussex authors. The team asserted that the Sussex critics applied "micro reasoning to macro problems" and suggested that their own arguments had been either misunderstood or wilfully misrepresented. They pointed out that the critics had failed to suggest any alternative model for the interaction of growth processes and resource availability, and "nor had they described in precise terms the sort of social change and technological advances that they believe would accommodate current growth processes." During that period, the very idea of any worldwide constraint, as indicated in the study, was met with scepticism and opposition by both businesses and the majority of economists. Critics declared that history proved the projections to be incorrect, such as the predicted resource depletion and associated economic collapse by the end of the 20th century. The methodology, the computer, the conclusions, the rhetoric, and the people behind the project were criticised. Yale economist Henry C. Wallich agreed that growth could not continue indefinitely; however, he believed that a natural end to growth was preferable to intervention. Wallich stated that technology could solve all the problems the report was concerned about, but only if growth continued apace. According to Wallich's cautionary statement, prematurely halting progress would result in the perpetual impoverishment of billions. Julian Simon, a professor at the Universities of Illinois and, later, Maryland, argued that the fundamental underlying concepts of the LTG scenarios were faulty because the very idea of what constitutes a "resource" varies over time. For instance, wood was the primary shipbuilding resource until the 1800s, and there were concerns about prospective wood shortages from the 1500s on. But then boats began to be made of iron, later steel, and the shortage issue disappeared. Simon argued in his book The Ultimate Resource that human ingenuity creates new resources as required from the raw materials of the universe. For instance, copper will never "run out." History demonstrates that as it becomes scarcer, its price will rise, more will be found, more will be recycled, new techniques will use less of it, and at some point a better substitute will be found for it altogether. His book was revised and reissued in 1996 as The Ultimate Resource 2. To the US Congress in 1973, Allen V. Kneese and Ronald Riker of Resources for the Future (RFF) testified that in their view, "The authors load their case by letting some things grow exponentially and others not. Population, capital, and pollution grow exponentially in all models, but technologies for expanding resources and controlling pollution are permitted to grow, if at all, only in discrete increments." However, their testimony also noted the possibility of "relatively firm long-term limits" associated with carbon dioxide emissions, that humanity might "loose upon itself, or the ecosystem services on which it depends, a disastrously virulent substance," and (implying that population growth in "developing countries" is problematic) that "we don't know what to do about it." In 1997, the Italian economist Giorgio Nebbia observed that the negative reaction to the LTG study came from at least four sources: those who saw the book as a threat to their business or industry; professional economists, who saw LTG as an uncredentialed encroachment on their professional perquisites; the Catholic Church, which bridled at the suggestion that overpopulation was one of mankind's major problems; and finally, the political left, which saw the LTG study as a scam by the elites designed to trick workers into believing that a proletarian paradise was a pipe dream. A UK government report found that "In the 1990s, criticism tended to focus on the misconception that Limits to Growth predicted global resource depletion and social collapse by the end of the year 2000." Peter Taylor and Frederick Buttle’s interpretation of the LTG study and the associated system dynamics (SD) models found that the original SD was created for firms and set the pattern for urban, global, and other SD models. These firm-based SDs relied on superintending managers to prevent undesirable cycling and feedback loops caused by separate common-sense decisions made by individual sectors. However, the later global model lacked superintending managers to enforce interrelated world-level changes, resulting in undesirable cycles that led to exponential growth and collapse in nearly all models, regardless of the parameter settings. There was no way for a few individuals in the model to override the structure of the system, even if they understood it as a whole. This meant there were only two solutions: convincing everyone in the system to change the basic structure of population growth and collapse (moral response) and having a superintending agency analyzing the system as a whole and directing changes (technocratic response). The LTG report combined these two approaches multiple times. System dynamists constructed interventions into the world model to demonstrate how their proposed interventions improved the system to prevent collapse. The SD model also aggregated the world’s population and resources, which meant that it demonstrated crises emerging with a strictly global logic or form at similar times and in similar ways less effectively because of the unequal distributions of populations and resources. These issues indicate that the local, national, and regional differentiation in politics and economics surrounding socioenvironmental change was excluded from the SD used by LTG, making it unable to accurately demonstrate real-world dynamics.