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5.4) Limits To Growth: Criticism


Despite its complexity, the World 3 model has some fairly clear drawbacks:

  • Geographical areas are not considered in World 3
  • Rich and poor are not represented separately
  • Only two aggregate pollutants are considered
  • Violence, military, corruption, natural disasters and diseases are omitted

As a result of this, and for less well founded reasons, the Limits to Growth report was heavily criticized. For example:

“Lumping together (to cite just a few scores of possible examples) highly substitutable but relatively limited resources of liquid oil with unsubstitutable but immense deposits of sedimentary phosphate rocks, or short-lived atmospheric gases with long-lived radioactive wastes, struck me as extraordinarily meaningless.”

Vaclav Smil, 2005