I've read this J W Forrester's seminal 1970's paper several times now. It was in 1998 when I found it for the first time but it sounded all too vitiating at the time. The economy was just recovering from the wrath of the 1990's recession and I was just about to embark on the biggest mental journey of my life thus far. So I didn't pay much attention, after all the paper was written almost 30 years ago at the time and global warming wasn't making the headlines yet. I've read it several times since and every time the picture becomes bleaker yet more lucid in the wrap of the current circumstances.
What Forrester managed to reveal with the use of a computer simulation is just how perniciously wrong the world order we live in is. Ramifications are hardly comprehensible let alone describable yet his Figures 1-7 show very neatly what follows if the world as a unified entity does not react in one voice. The whole story Forrester is telling wouldn't really make much sense would this paper not be almost 40 years old by now. It is only a computer simulation many would smirk but it is a simulation that predicts pretty accurately what has been happening ever since Forrester decided to show the results to the US government in the 1970. Industrialization, quality of life, depletion of resources, pollution and most importantly the population growth are all there and the predictions are all pretty spot on. What follows in the next few decades is really scary to say the least. It might not be such a good idea to live in an industrialized nation after all. Where has all the knowledge gone, I wonder? Do policymakers know all that and are playing it stupid or are they really just losing the touch with reality? Or as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman would say "We're living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics".
