An End To All This

With the careful disregard of their respective governments, two dozen eminent men were gathered last June in one of the great old grande luxe Swiss hotels. They strode familiarly down wide, carpeted halls--an Italian industrialist, a Belgian banker, two university presidents, a professor at MIT, the director of a major Swiss research institute, a Japanese nuclear physicist, a science advisor to an international economics organization, several economists whose pessimism, if quoted in the press, could cause a stock market crash.

They moved purposefully toward a conference room. They did not drift, though side conversations delayed several members of the executive committee. Their one common characteristic was a certain firmness about the lips and jaw indicating an intention to get things done. They were activists in the most responsible meaning of the term. Each had been invited to join the group, called the Club of Rome, by its founder, Aurelio Peccei, himself a member of the management committee of Fiat, vice-president of Olivetti and managing director of Italconsult. Each served quietly, without compensation nor even paid expenses, as a full-fledged member.

They represented the best analytical minds of the world, with considerable influence to make funds available if a promising approach could be found to stop the suicidal roller coaster man now rides. Their concern during the two days in Bern was formidably titled A Project on the Predicament of Mankind. The predicament is simply stated: World population is growing by 70,000,000 people every year. This is the fastest growth in man's history, and the rate is still accelerating. We will number four billion in 1975 and, if current trends continue, we can expect to reach eight billion well before the year 2000. This population is making more and more demands on its environment. We are taking fresh water out of the ground roughly twice as fast as natural processes replace it. The demand for electric power in the U. S. is doubling every ten years, and most power comes from the heavily polluting combustion of coal. We are building 10,000,000 cars a year--twice as many as we made only 17 years ago, and cars burn gasoline, grind rubber tires to dust, wear asbestos brakes into an acrid powder.

Until 1970, these figures were considered proud evidence of progress. After all, it was reasoned, if power demands, automobile production and water consumption are increasing even faster than population, then the standard of living of each individual must be improving; and for the advanced countries, this is certainly true. Edward C. Banfield, professor of urban government at Harvard, wrote a few years ago: "The plain fact is that the overwhelming majority of city dwellers live more comfortably and more conveniently than ever before. They have more and better housing, more and better schools, more and better transportation, and so on. By any conceivable measure of material welfare, the present generation of urban Americans is, on the whole, better off than any other large group of people has ever been anywhere."

It's not surprising, then, that the industrialized nations consider progress synonymous with economic growth and that the underdeveloped nations share that article of faith. The world wants and expects more people, more and faster jet planes, more television sets, more dishwashers. If one car in the garage is good, two must be better.

But consider the price of this plenty: Death due to lung cancer and bronchitis is doubling every ten years. The U. S. incidence of emphysema has doubled in the past five years. Crime in large cities has also doubled in the past five years.

Population biologist Paul Ehrlich describes an experiment in which a pair of fruit flies is put into a milk bottle with a small amount of food. In a matter of days, the population of fruit flies has multiplied to the point where the bottle is black with them. Then the limited food and their own effluvia raise the death rate, and the population drops suddenly down to zero. After 10,000 years of uninhibited propagation, mankind is beginning to sense the confines of its bottle. Man is beginning to realize that he's going to have to stop multiplying his numbers and gobbling up his world--and do it soon--because if the decision isn't made by him, it will be made for him by the laws of mathematics and nature.

The trouble is that man has never been very successful in controlling the destruction of community property. We have laws that keep a man from raping his neighbor's daughter, but we have few that keep him from despoiling his air. We have tried governmental action to remedy social ills before, but, as Banfield writes, "Insofar as they have any effect on the serious problems, it is, on the whole, to aggravate them."

This was the "predicament" facing the Club of Rome that June day. MIT professor Jay W. Forrester was a relatively new member of the club. He was lean, graying and spoke with the dry, didactic factuality of the trained lecturer. His theory was startling in its directness--that governmental inadequacy is an example of predictable and consistently self-defeating human behavior. His studies had suggested that the human mind is not adapted to interpreting the behavior of social systems, that human judgment and intuition were created, trained and naturally selected to look only in the immediate past for the cause of a problem. The hot stove burns the finger, not the curiosity that made one reach out to touch it.

All human solutions tend to be that simplistic. We see thousands of people in rat-infested, leaky-roofed tenements. Our traditional answer has been to tear down the tenements and put up large, low-income housing projects. The Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis was built to solve this problem and now 26 11-story glass-and-concrete apartment buildings are being boarded up a scant 15 years after they were built--and long before they were paid for. Vandalism, physical deterioration and an impossible job of maintaining essential services made the project a social, architectural and financial disaster. Elevators stalled, windows were broken faster than they could be replaced, residents were assaulted in the halls, apartments were broken into and doors never repaired. The poorest of the poor refused to live there and vacancies climbed even as surrounding housing became more scarce. The buildings now stand vacant as monuments to governmental waste.

Our streets and highways are bumper to bumper with cars, so our answer has been wider and longer highways. But more highways attract more traffic, until the density is the same as--if not worse than--before. No highway system has ever caught up with the traffic it carries. When a rapid-transit system is in financial trouble, fares are raised to produce more income. But this only persuades more people to use cars, which clog the roads even more and provide less net income to the transit system. And it takes longer to drive through a modern city in a 300-horsepower automobile than it did in a one-horsepower buggy 100 years ago.

Forrester had his first hint of this social nearsightedness while analyzing corporate problems. "Time after time, we have gone into a corporation which is having severe and well-known difficulties--such as a falling market share, low profitability or instability of employment," he says. "We find that people perceive correctly what they are trying to accomplish. People can give rational reasons for their actions. They are usually trying in good conscience to solve the major difficulties. Policies are being followed on the presumption that they will alleviate the difficulties. In many instances, it then emerges that the known policies describe a system which actually causes the troubles. The known and intended practices of the organization are fully sufficient to create the difficulty, regardless of what happens outside the company. A downward spiral develops in which the presumed solution makes the difficulty worse and thereby causes redoubling of the presumed solution."

The same destructive behavior appeared when Forrester studied the solutions to urban problems. Actions taken to improve conditions in a city actually make matters worse. The construction of low-cost housing such as the Pruitt-Igoe project eventually produces more depressed areas and tenements, because it permits higher population densities and accommodates more low-income population than can find jobs. A social trap is created in which excess low-cost housing attracts low-income people to places where even their low incomes cannot be maintained. "If we were malicious and wanted to create urban slums, trap low-income people in ghetto areas and increase the number of people on welfare, we could do little better than follow the present policies," says Forrester. And, further, "The belief that more money will solve urban problems has taken attention away from correcting the underlying causes and has instead allowed the problems to grow to the limit of the available money, whatever that amount might be."

Forrester's approach differs from that of ecologists, economists or demographers, because he does not narrow his attention to a single, specific cause-and-effect relationship. In his study, he was trying to make an all-encompassing, quantitative measure of the city as a social and biological system. It is a macro cosmic view that weaves the statistics of birth and death with the economics of mass production, variations in the job market with the realities of real-estate-investment returns. It is a complex, highly interrelated system of analysis that recognizes that you cannot break a city down into its component parts without distortion so extreme as to make the effort useless.

He had never tried to analyze the entire world, but his studies of the dynamics of corporations and of cities showed why programs begun in good faith worked out as badly as they often did. Why shouldn't the method be expanded to deal with the dynamics of the whole world system?

When men of action agree, obstacles disappear. A European foundation was happy to make a sizable grant to support the project. Two months later, under the direction of Professor Dennis Meadows, a team of nine researchers at MIT was being recruited to examine Forrester's theories in detail, expand the analysis and see what mankind could do to avoid the seemingly inevitable. As this article is written, almost a year into the project, it is confirming everything Forrester predicted.

Starting with cause-and-effect relationships he was sure of, Meadows went to the specialists for evaluations of exact, (continued on page 206)An end(continued from page 114) quantitative influences. We know that the death rate is directly affected by food availability, pollution levels and crowding. Experts can even reach consensus on how the material standard of living--meaning health services and housing, as well as the other fruits of technology--sharply reduces the death rate as it climbs above some minimum level necessary to sustain life. But further improvement in the standard of living doesn't do much to reduce the death rate, no matter how high it goes. Similarly, deaths caused by 1970 pollution levels are almost negligible when compared with the effects of the other factors. But if pollution levels climb ten or a hundred times higher than they have reached already--and pollution will reach such levels if current trends continue--we can anticipate a death rate high enough to make the worst plagues in history seem like mild outbreaks of flu.

Crowding also has its effect on the death rate. In the extreme case, people will kill one another for room to stand, but long before that limit is reached, the psychological effects and social stresses of crime, war and disease will do their damage. Garrett Hardin of the University of California writes of a more subtle effect of crowding. The cyclone that struck East Pakistan in November 1970 was reported to have killed 500,000 people. The newspapers said it was the cyclone that killed them. Hardin says crowding was the cause. "The Gangetic delta is barely above sea level," he says. "Every year, several thousand people are killed in quite ordinary storms. If Pakistan were not overcrowded, no sane man would bring his family to such a place.... A delta belongs to the river and the sea; man obtrudes there at his peril."

Birth rate is calculated in a similar way. Food production, pollution levels, crowding and material standard of living have their separate and predictable influences on the rate of growth. The difference between births and deaths establishes net population gain; and, given the current figures for standards of living, food availability, pollution and crowding, total population can be recalculated at annual intervals as far into the future as you like.

It isn't necessary to go into all the details of Forrester's method: The analysis includes all the effects mentioned here, plus such factors as natural-resource usage (dependent on population and capital investment) and capital investment (dependent on population, material standard of living, and discard or wear-out time of capital equipment). Forrester also calculates something he calls quality of life. This goes up when there are adequate food, medical service, housing and consumer goods, and low levels of crowding and pollution.

The amount of calculation necessary overloads the human brain. It would take 1000 men at 1000 calculators to work out the numbers year by year, following the labyrinthine relationships of the system. But it takes only a few seconds to run the projection on a computer. With the relationships agreed to up front by agricultural and industrial experts, census takers and financial and economic advisors, Forrester pushes the start button and lets the computer plot out curves that start with the year 1900 and go to 2100. The results offer some object lessons in how close man is to committing suicide.

The first thing we learn is that the enemy is our love of growth. Enormous pressures are now appearing on all sides that will act to suppress growth. Natural resources are being depleted; pollution levels, crowding and inadequate food supplies, either separately or in concert, are going to arrest and reverse population growth forcibly and disastrously. Exactly which will deliver the coup de grace is unclear, but the curves show the possible alternatives. It is for man to decide which he prefers.

In this first projection (above), Forrester showed mankind running out of natural resources. He assumed that irreplaceable coal, oil, gas and metal ores will require more and more effort to tear out of the earth and that technology will not find quick substitutes for them. Compared with some of the others, these curves look almost tolerable. This projection shows population rising steadily until about 2020, when natural resources start falling sharply. The world is already running out of easily mined ores and fuel for power that drives mass-production machinery and raises agricultural yields. But a growing population needs more resources--at first just for the amenities of life, later for survival. The industrialized nations are growing rapidly and are placing ever-increasing demands on the resources that often come from underdeveloped countries. What will happen when the resource-supplying nations start to hold back because they see the day when their own demands will require available supplies?

In this projection, the material standard of living (not graphed) will climb until about the year 2000; capital investment per person will continue to increase until then--before the depletion of natural resources has had a chance to make itself felt. Then, in about 2050, industrialization will turn down as resource shortages become grave. Pollution will rise to approximately six times 1970 levels, but this won't be high enough to create a runaway pollution catastrophe. There will, however, be widespread dissatisfaction because the quality of life will drop slowly as pollution grows and as crowding adds its irritations.

For his second projection, Forrester assumed we wouldn't be so lucky as to run out of natural resources. Suppose science finds plastic or glass substitutes for metals, and new power sources make it possible for us to reduce demands on coal, gas and oil reserves. He went back to the computer with the natural-resources-depletion rate after 1970 reduced to 25 percent of its former value (above).

In this case, capital investment and population grow until pollution levels get so high that death rate, birth rate and food production are drastically and dangerously affected. Population goes to almost six billion by 2030 and then, in a scant 30 years, drops to one billion. This is a world-wide catastrophe of mind-boggling proportions. War, pestilence, starvation and infant mortality turn the world into a morgue. The highly industrialized countries probably suffer most, because they are least able to survive the disruption to the environment and to the food supply.

Some writers have suggested that before we experience a catastrophe of this magnitude, mankind will stop the pollution-generating process by legislation or even revolution; but this is not very likely. The most important generator of pollutants is industrialization, which is also the major contributor to a higher standard of living. It is difficult to imagine underdeveloped nations agreeing to a curtailment of their industrial growth. The rich nations cannot say to the poor ones, "OK, we've gone as far as we can go. Let's hold still right here." It is just as impossible to say to the poor of our own country, "We've really got to stop. Sorry, you can't have shoes for the children, an indoor toilet, a gas stove, a hearing aid for grandma." Yet, if the poor of all nations were to move up to the standard of living now enjoyed by a majority of Americans, we would have a pollution load on the environment ten times today's level.

The conclusion is inescapable. If the world is to achieve equilibrium at a material standard of living at or close to the level now enjoyed by the developed nations, world population and industrialization must be considerably lower than the current averages. And that is political dynamite.

This projection demonstrates a vitally important characteristic of the world system: It is going to reach equilibrium one way or another. We are entering a turbulent time, a time when the dedication to growth in the advanced nations will have to give way. It is impossible for every citizen of the world alive today to enjoy the standard of living that has been taken for granted in the West. The goals of our civilization will have to change, and when goals change, traditions no longer serve. We can predict a period of great unrest and uncertainty, with a frighteningly greater possibility of world war, unless enough people see that the true enemy is the system, not one another.

A second discouraging characteristic of the system is that major scientific achievement in the form of reduced depletion of natural resources has the effect only of postponing the date of catastrophe. It permits greater overshoot of industrialization and population and will actually magnify the catastrophe when it finally comes.

With this firmly in mind, it is relatively easy to predict what will happen if the next solution is attempted. Suppose we agree with the underdeveloped nations that their material needs should be met, and they agree to join us in trying to curb population growth. That means we increase capital investment (to give them a better standard of living) but apply extreme moral and economic pressure to hold down the birth rate. In this projection (at right), Forrester assumed we cut the birth rate in half in 1970 and increase capital investment by 20 percent. For the first few years, things look good. Food per person increases, material standard of living rises and crowding is held close to present levels. But the more affluent world population ends up using natural resources too fast. Capital investment zooms and the pollution load on the environment reaches the critical level even earlier than it did in the previous run.

The reduction in birth rate temporarily slows population growth, but lower death rate, greater food production and eased crowding conditions soon encourage the population to start up again, and it is now a richer and more polluting population. This shows the curious interrelationships of what systems analysts call negative feedback. By starting a promising birth-control program, we simultaneously release other natural pressures that help defeat the program. Here is the core of the nature of systems. When one pressure or combination of pressures is lightened, the result is likely to be the substitution of a new problem for the old. Often the new problem is more difficult to solve or less tolerable to live with than the old one. Advanced societies have come to expect technology to solve their problems. Technology works well when there are unlimited natural resources and geographical space to expand into; but in the real world, we reach limits. Ehrlich's milk bottle is close around us.

The projections also demonstrate the trade-off between short-term and long-term consequences of a decision. The developed nations all achieved their higher material standard of living by devoting a generation or two to building up a store of capital equipment. They used the productive capacity of labor to make machines and factories rather than food and other consumable goods. Robber barons did it for England during the Industrial Revolution and for the U. S. during the early expansion phase of its growth. The Soviet Union achieved the same result by arbitrarily denying its citizens the immediate fruits of their labor.

But there are few social mechanisms in the underdeveloped nations to defer short-run benefit for long-term return. The scarcity of such mechanisms may turn out to be a good thing, because it has the desirable effect of keeping average world capital investment under control. If we can simultaneously reduce capital investment, agree to hold the material standard of living at present levels, reduce the birth rate to half its current level, reduce pollution generation to half its current level (by a cutback in industrialization and by application of science to the problem), perhaps hold back on food production somewhat (if population is stabilized at or below the current level, we won't be needing much more food than is now produced), then, for the first time, we see the possibility of reaching equilibrium without catastrophic overshoot and population decline (left).

On the surface, it seems anti-humanitarian to reduce capital investment and stop the effort to raise food production. Such drastic measures couldn't possibly be accepted without years of study and discussion. But the alternatives are dire and inescapable. The population explosion and pollution are direct descendants of old gods--industrialization and science. Without drastically changing its priorities, world population will collapse in less than a century from the effects of pollution, food shortage, disease and war.

Forrester emphasizes that his analyses are not intended as literal year-by-year predictions; but he does insist that man's viewpoint must become world-wide and centuries deep if the species is to survive. Dennis Meadows and nine clean-cut young researchers, meanwhile, study dull books of statistics, scribble numbers on lined pads and occasionally push a few buttons on a computer console in what surely must be the least dramatic attempt ever made to save the world.