Cassandra’s Curse: 50 Years of Being Right and Ridiculed
They heard my words, and they listened, but they did not believe.
— Christa Wolf, “Cassandra”
Back in 1972, a little more than 50 years ago, a young and hitherto unknown think tank headquartered in Rome, Italy, published a study that momentarily shook the chattering classes and made it to that illustrious list of books that everybody cites and nobody reads. Its methods are simple, its message is clear, and the reaction spectrum of those few who actually pondered both was incredibly narrow: “This is bogus” was the default reply of people not yet accustomed to systems thinking or in love with wishful macroeconomics. “Surely they’ll come up with something” was heard often from the shy and huddled masses. “We’ll be fine (for a little longer)” was the response of business-as-usual proponents and disappointed environmentalists alike, although the intended and even explicitly hoped-for reaction was something different altogether, namely, a bone-deep shock in the face of the illustrated future and political carte blanche for complex systems experts to repair what was obviously damaged—a classic elitist move so transparent that not even the global urban middle class has been fooled, and they’re most easily fooled.
I’m talking, of course, about the “Limits to Growth” published by the Club of Rome, its main authors being MIT researchers Dennis Meadows, Donella Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William Behrens III.
If you already know your way around the concept of stocks and flows and feedback loops, you’ll have an easy time understanding LTG, as it’s affectionately called in some circles. Otherwise, think of vessels filled with a certain quantity of an abstract liquid, interconnected by pipes with adjustable throughput and controlling mechanisms influencing them, and you have the nucleus of systems dynamics in your hands. The beauty of the stocks-and-flows concept is its generality—you can model a fish population, an oil field, and the combined capital of the industrial world civilization by a stock, and any kind of transformation between stocks, no matter how complicated, is simply a flow where the unimaginable depth of the accompanying transformations is conveniently hidden.
A fixed combination of stocks, flows, and feedback loops is called a “model,” and a simulation of a model with certain initial values is called a “run.” Now, LTG’s final model has been dubbed World3 and maps just five stocks to picture the destiny of our civilization: Population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources (global debt and energy availability are conspicuously missing). Back in 1972, believe it or not, many people thoughtlessly assumed that these five variables would just grow, and grow, and grow. But that’s nonsense, of course. No such thing as infinite growth on a finite planet. But before the popularization of systems dynamics, people had a hard time figuring out the patterns of resource usage, capital accumulation, overshoot, and decline in a numerically robust way. Systems dynamics helped, and computers made it easy. Here’s the famously titled “standard run” of World3, where no significant policy intervention happens:
Strangely and despite the mass of global accumulated legislation, the standard run has been found to be approximately on track whenever someone cared to look, which was not often. Policymakers around the world have not realized that the only way out of the “standard run” is putting deliberate limits on resource extraction and industrial output, a realization totally at odds with the ubiquitous demand for economic growth. I can already hear anxious commentators discussing the liveliness of this year’s Christmas business as if LTG never existed.
It has been aptly said that perfection is reached not when you can’t add more but rather when you can’t subtract more without destroying the essence. In the context of LTG, this task of perfection has been admirably realized by the Italian systems thinker Ugo Bardi with a model he called “Seneca’s Cliff,” following a famous Seneca quote about slow ascension and fast decline:
Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.
Bardi uses just three stocks: Resources, capital, and pollution. By fiddling with the initial parameters, he ended up with a capital curve eerily similar to the World3 standard run:
Now, you could rightly argue that the model is synthetic and arbitrary, but you should know that, back in the day, the author of this post used a genetic algorithm to determine optimally fitting initial values so that the Seneca Cliff model produces a minimum sum of squared errors (SSE) using proxy data for the stocks of resources, capital, and pollution, namely, conventional oil reserves, industrial infrastructure, and CO2 levels. The result, unsurprisingly, was rather similar to the Seneca Cliff published by Bardi. I leave the corroboration of this statement as an exercise for the reader.
I don’t know whether LTG piqued our collective pride, fell pray to wishful thinking and denial in the face of insurmountable problems, or was simply another victim of our inability to grasp complex systems, but LTG, while still being an evergreen darling among intellectual environmentalists, has been ridiculed with a degree of acidity that betrays more heat than light; a classical Jungian shadow projection at work.
The New York Times Book Review dismissed [LTG] as “an empty and misleading work . . . garbage in, garbage out.” Newsweek (a far more influential publication then than now) called it “a piece of irresponsible nonsense.”
— Richard Heinberg on Resilience.org
Although Milton Friedman’s classic remark that “the government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem” surely hits home, the standard run is not what many of us would want if there were better alternatives. The LTG team, consequently, simulated many different scenarios—more available resources, investment caps, better global birth control, etc., but all those “tinkered” scenarios are less good fits to current data than the despised standard run. So, get used to it. I’ve painted the important point in the standard run with a helpful pink circle; that’s when things go down, i.e., very soon. This doesn’t mean doom and destruction. It only means that year on year, in total, there will be less stuff, less energy, and less stimulation. There will be places with placid constancy, even burgeoning businesses, but the global bottom line will go down. The pie will shrink.
Where does all this lead to? The societal consequences have been well-examined by several historians of ideas, that other group of underestimated fringe intellectuals; let's just murmur for now that you might have noticed examples of renewed religiosity in various shapes, neo-traditionalism brought forth with desperate shrillness, nearsighted and overenthusiastic techno-optimism, and even neo-Cesarianism somewhere near you; a comparative study of the nature of dark ages in the aftermath of collapsed civilizations might come in handy in the coming decades and centuries.
What can we do about it? As a visibly frustrated Donella Meadows remarked repeatedly in her useful introductory textbook, “Thinking in Systems,” we’re extremely good at finding the right levers—and then pushing them in the wrong direction. All the things to do are in the original report from 1972. Some heard, a few believed, and almost nobody went through with it: Stabilize the population [1], implement inefficient resource extraction (you heard that right) but efficient resource usage [2], stop encouraging consumption and favor human development instead [3], reduce pollution [4], prioritize sustainable agriculture [5], create global food equality [6], increase the lifetime of industrial capital [7], and generally be nice to each other when bad things happen. We’re in this together.
And no, I’m not particularly expecting to be believed—Cassandra’s curse is apparently infectious. Nevertheless, I’m content.
We have art lest we perish of the truth.
— Nietzsche
Footnotes
[1] The best contraceptives known to humankind? Education and reasonable prospects for women, of course.
[2] I’ve argued elsewhere in circumspect ways that efficiency leads to fragility. For instance, the efficiency of a fishing fleet is the single largest determinant of whether a fishing stock recovers after overshoot—or not. On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to throw away what has been caught, bought, or even prepared for a meal. That’s efficient resource usage for you. To give another example, it pays for future generations if we don’t mine the maximum obtainable lithium with the highest possible speed, but we benefit greatly if we use what we get to the fullest, followed by optimal reuse and recycling.
[3] But what about Christmas sales? If you haven’t got it by now, you never will. For the others, you’ve realized that economic growth is a temporary, ephemeral accident of human culture. Soon, the patterns of economic activity will return to baseline sustainability, a level much lower than today, and it’s always less painful to go there voluntarily than to be dragged kicking and screaming, but go we will. The EU’s new “right to repair” is one of the few steps in the right direction. Making things repairable now spares us a lot of trouble later.
[4] Pollution is not just nasty in and by itself, it also drains capital—think of the billions spent each year for coping with the cost of climate change. Note that while carbon capturing and filtering and trash mining might sound alluring (after all, you don’t need to change your favorite lifestyle), pollution is best coped with at the source: Reduce consumption of goods and services.
[5] The thing about “unsustainable” is just this: At one point, it can’t be sustained any longer. And arguably, we can’t do without agriculture.
[6] It’s been known for decades that we don’t have a food problem but a distribution problem. Hence, wars, dictatorships, a migration problem, and many other predicaments.
[7] This is a very simple trick often overlooked: In terms of the whole world economy, if we double the average capital lifetime, we get the same effect as if we doubled the available resource stock. Crazy, right? Yes, we’d get to switch phones, factory machinery, and highway tarmac less frequently, so the resistance is understandable, if a bit childish.
