Looking Back on the Limits of Growth

Date of prediction: 1972

The Limits of Growth predicted in 1972 that the world was headed for disaster. Fast forward to 40 years later, a.k.a. today:

»Recent research supports the conclusions of a controversial environmental study released 40 years ago: The world is on track for disaster. So says Australian physicist Graham Turner, who revisited perhaps the most groundbreaking academic work of the 1970s,The Limits to Growth.

However, the study also noted that unlimited economic growth was possible, if governments forged policies and invested in technologies to regulate the expansion of humanity’s ecological footprint.«

(Smithsonian Magazine: Looking Back on the Limits of Growth)

Meta: A persistent failed prediction

»The highly influential Essay on the Principle of Population, written by Englishman Robert Malthus in 1798, predicted that population would outrun food supply before the end of the nineteenth century. His basic view was that population, if unchecked, increases exponentially, at a geometric rate, whereas the food supply grows in a linear fashion, at an arithmetic rate.
(…)
Nevertheless, there have been other recent well-known works along similar lines to Malthus. These include The Limits of Growth, the world’s best-selling environmental book, published in 1972, which modelled the consequences of rapidly growing world population given finite resource supplies, and The Population Bomb, which predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s and 1980s. At the time there was no shortage of criticism of the books, and both appeared on lists of the century’s worst books made at the turn of the millennium.«

(S. Brisoce & H. Aldersey-Williams: Panicology. Penguin Viking, 2008)