ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, a group of leading system analysts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) built the world’s first simulation model, which used a set of parameters 1 to evaluate global development over the course of the next 130 years. The model was commissioned by the Club of Rome (founded by Italian industrialist and scholar Aurelio Peccei), which had taken upon itself the task of examining key issues affecting the long-term survival of humanity. The result of the MIT simulation was the book Limits to Growth (1972), which upon its publication rocked the industrial world. (Meadows, 1972)