ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Modeling the World in the 1970s: Historical and Political Struggles in the Genesis of the World3 and Bariloche Models

• In Event: At the Fringes of Earth Science Models

English Abstract

My intervention examines the debate that emerged after the publication of the Club of Rome’s first report, The Limits to Growth (1972), and the world model on which it was based—World3—developed by MIT engineer Jay Forrester and his team at the System Dynamics Group. World3 was the first systems-dynamic model to integrate global variables—population, industrial output, resources, pollution, and food production—into a single simulation of long-term socio-ecological trajectories. Its projections of planetary overshoot and collapse sparked immediate methodological and political controversy among economists, policymakers, and scholars. By 1976, a multidisciplinary collective of Latin American researchers led by geologist Amílcar Herrera formulated a response: the Bariloche Model, developed at the Fundación Bariloche in Argentina. This model explicitly rejected the technocratic universalism embedded in World3, arguing that global modeling must account for the structural inequalities shaping development in the globe. Rather than treating resource scarcity as the primary limit, the Bariloche group identified poverty, dependency, and power asymmetries as the fundamental barriers to sustainable futures. Their normative reference point was the “Basic Needs” approach—modeling a just future grounded in social rights and equitable distribution.The presentation will proceed in three parts: a historical overview of the controversy; a comparison of the technical architectures and political-epistemological assumptions of the two models; and finally, an assessment of the confrontation’s legacy. I argue that although World3 initiated global-scale ecological modeling, subsequent dominance of mainstream economic models has marginalized alternative visions like Bariloche.

Author

• Giovanni Fava, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia