Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016): His Contribution to the Concept of Overshoot in Socioeconomic Systems

Abstract

The recent death of Jay Wright Forrester has generated several obituaries in the press describing his many achievements. However, often his involvement in the somewhat controversial issue of «World Modeling» and of «The Limits to Growth» has gone unmentioned or only barely mentioned [see, e.g., the article that appeared in The New York Times (Hafner in Jay W. Forrester dies at 98; a pioneer in computer models, 2016)]. In this commentary, I aim at providing a brief discussion of one of Forrester's main scientific achievements: the introduction of the concept of overshoot and collapse as applied to socioeconomic systems.

'Food Scarcity. Unavoidable by 2100? Impact of Demography & Climate Change' by Raoul Weiler and Kris Demuynck

“…Still today, Malthus is often dismissed as a doomsday prophet whose apocalyptic predictions turned out to be wrong. But Malthus lacked the modern concept of "overshoot and collapse" and he never predicted the kind of population crashes that we associate with modern famines (Kolb, 1972;Bardi, 2016). Another study often accused of having been overly alarmist in terms of the future of the human population is the Club of Rome's The Limits to Growth, first published in 1972.…”

Seneca Collapse for the World’s Human Population?

“…But the problem is for how long. The concept of "overshoot" was applied by Forrester in 1971 (Bardi 2016) to social systems. The innovative aspect of this concept is that it takes the future into consideration: if there is enough food for 7.5 billion people today, that doesn't mean that will be true in the future.…”