Derailing the Growth Debate

The paper analyses the critics of the pioneering and best selling report "The Limits to Growth" from 1972 by D. Meadows et.al., which outlined future global development options, with respect to population, resource depletion, food production, pollution, etc. In the paper is observed that nothing that we know today implies that the report was in any sense fundamentally wrong.

A cohort of critics at the time, it can be said, was seriously in error when they managed to derail the debate by rejecting the report’s conclusions, and a lot of the critique was not related to the content of the report. Actually the report seems to be surprisingly right in its agregated analyses of future options, and in the present recognition of climtate change it would be wise to learn from the report and its updating version.