“The limits to growth”

No matter how sparse the technology matrices, no matter how tenuous the connections between the various productive processes that make up the global system, an increase in the level of activity of any one subsystem will eventually have repercussions on the environment of that subsystem. The conservation of mass condition ensures both that no one subsystem can expand indefinitely and that the more any subsystem expands, the more the whole system must change.

The meaning of the environmental limits to growth, and the role of technological change in removing those limits, was debated in the extraordinarily heated exchanges over the Club of Rome report (Meadows et al., 1972). The report, using results generated by the so-called “Doomsday Models” developed by Forrester (1971), condemned the allegedly reckless growth orientation of the economics profession. This excited economists to launch a series of more or less damning counterattacks. Vituperative individual indictments of the model, by such as Beckerman (1972), were complemented by the more measured but sustained indictments of various symposia (see Review of Economic Studies, 1974; Weintraub et al., 1973).

The issues were apparently quite simple. The Forrester models showed that in a finite world where, by implicit assumption, the elasticity of substitution in global production was either very low or zero, the exponential growth of any one subsystem inevitably ran it up against the limits imposed by the availability of basic resources.