Pub. (2014) Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche, Roma, Italy

pub. (2014) Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Roma, Italy

PROCEEDINGS

IMACS/ISGG 2012 CONFERENCE (MASCOT 12)

Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain,

the future of the world : learning from simulation

Robert Vichnevetsky

IMACS Honorary President,

the beginning of a new era

Often illustrated by Watt’s proverbial steam engine, the industrial revolution we live started in the 18th century in that part of the world that is now referred to as “the West” (Europe, North America). But its significant impact, its extension in size and global coverage really came one and a half century later, prompted by World War II. A large amount of technological knowhow, of industrial manufacturing capacity had been developed for the military, later converted to the civilian sector, leading to a multifaceted industrialization of the world that changed forever the way we live. Much of this took place initially in the US where, by the luck of its geographical location, many of the manufacturing and research facilities had been established, most left undamaged after the war. Significant to note is that this post war conversion of industry from military to civilian came to be pretty much the doing of the private sector, including the role of the often quoted multinational corporations (those who have the power of money) with some, but not much participation of governmental institutions. It was and still is pretty much a Darwinian evolution process within the international industrial, economics world, an evolution with winners and losers more so than an organized process planned from the top[1].

What came at first were golden years for science and technology, the development of a large international industrial and trade establishment producing and selling all kinds of goods, leading to an increase in the material standard of living, mostly in those countries that had been the protagonists of the war. These were also golden years for a community of scientists and engineers that had to put all those elements together, a community that I had the privilege of being part of. We were few at first, whence led to being pretty much in contact with what others were doing almost anywhere in the world. Everything was new and interesting.

But what had been lauded as a good thing for mankind did not come alone. Inseparable of industrialization came an unprecedented increase of the world’s population that, after a few decades, began to bring problems affecting the quality of life on Earth. Gloomy predictions of the past became visible realities. What Malthus and other philosophers of the early 19th century had predicted was simply not enough food for too large a population. But while, a somewhat somber future is with us today, it is not in the form that was predicted. Coming with population size food may indeed be a problem in some places, but definitely more important are other problems that have emerged, also related to growth but of an entirely different nature.

More importantly than food came material problems. With population and industrialization came urbanization, and an increased consumption of not only food, but also of a variety of new products going from clothing to electronics, cars , sophisticated house wares, toys and gadgets that have to be manufactured, consuming energy and leading to an increasing demand on the natural resources of a finite world. This results not only in depleting those resources (such as deforestation, water shortage), but more visibly is atmospheric pollution, global warming, climate change, things we are becoming all too familiar with.

What has possibly been most important, in fact a sine qua non factor that enabled these changes to take place is the transportation network, the transportation capacity that emerged as a leftover of the war. It allowed for moving all kinds of goods, including food over large distances, leading to an increased population not only in developed countries (not much) but also unintentionally and more in other places on Earth, something that was not possible when most had to live off reasonably local, nearby food production and material resources to survive.

We now have numbers of megacities, then also less developed overpopulated places in the world where survival now depends on food traveling from faraway places, subject to politics, international and local administrations, to logistics and the good will of distant countries. Which does not always works very well.

Other than for material problems came human, social problems, some of them illustrated by the multitude of regional conflicts, local wars coming from a degree of proximity and communication, competition for resources and living space between human groups that belong to different cultural, religious, ethnic, tribal communities that had lived reasonably separated from each other for centuries, for millennia, but are no more. This is something we humans, as a living species on Earth, were not prepared for. That the availability of transportation is indeed contributing to this may be illustrated, among many other examples, by the ubiquity of those white Toyota and other pickup trucks we see in television’s reports of mini-wars in Africa and the Middle East, pickup trucks carrying anything from possibly food, to hordes of armed men and heavy machine guns. Eliminate those (and other) means of motorized transportation, and much of the belligerence, in fact also of the population growth would disappear.

warnings of things to come

It did not take long before these new developments began to draw the attention of learned communities. The depletion of natural resources, the rise in environmental pollution and their consequences on life on Earth were analyzed, attempts to predict their future came to be elaborated in particular in a body of research abundantly described in reports, articles and books, all published by no coincidence in the same 1970-73 time period, based on new data that had been obtained with computers whose power had become high enough to deliver meaningful results for this kind of investigation (remember Moore’s law). The inspiration, unrelated to computers, had come from an international group of intellectuals calling themselves the Club of Rome, founded in 1968 under the leadership of the Italian scholar and industrialist Aurelio Peccei, and engaged in a project on “The Predicament of Mankind”. The encounter of their ideas with the emergence of computers must be credited to Jay Forrester[2], a professor at the MIT and a leader in computers development who in 1969 went to Bern, Switzerland to meet with members of the Club. He brought their ideas back to Cambridge Mass. where he had initiated a methodology for the study, with computers, of the dynamics of certain social systems. Computers were new and everything had to be invented. I remember meeting with him in 1968, he was working at the time on an urban planning problem having been asked, he said, by J.F. Collins, retired mayor of Boston to find an explanation for an upsurge of slums in parts of the town.

Most quoted of the new research on the world’s problems at the MIT is the Meadows et al. book appropriately entitled “the Limits to Growth”[3] . There were other additions to this research, such as contributions by the University of Sussex, published in a book entitled “Models of Doom”[4] that, while criticizing details, confirmed the essence of what had been done. And in the same vein, the contribution of similar work in Japan.

Also to be mentioned were publications by researchers who did not understand what was really happening and believed, naively, that better mathematical models and theory of dynamical systems (that some of them liked to call multi loop nonlinear feedback systems) would solve the problems of the world[5] (something Meadows et al did not – though Forrester seems to have been inclined to believe so). They did not bring anything new, other than adding to the list of publications of their curriculum vitae.

Too much population and industry had just become too much, and it had taken computers to confirm the fact with numbers and mathematics. The simple bottom line that said in the 1970’s :

“stop the growth of human population and of industry on Earth, or else !!”

has remained essentially unchanged to this day, little talked about, one of the taboos I mentioned before : nobody wants to hear about problems that cannot be solved. What we hear instead is about addressing the symptoms, dealing with the visible results of the problem while population and industry size continues to grow.

The publication of those Club of Rome results generated a lot of interest at the time, enhanced in the public’s eye by the fact that they had been obtained with computers - something new. It was the first time that this public was told, credibly supported with numbers instead of philosophical declarations, that we were approaching the limits of the ability of the Earth to sustain the ongoing growth. And that bad times were to come soon, in a few decades.

That those predictions came to be generally confirmed today, some forty years later, is a feat of the scientific establishment that politicians and economists were unable to achieve, something worth thinking about!

This had been made possible by the fact that computers, or more precisely the tool of computer simulation had been brought in. This may need some explanation for the uninitiated: it is not simply computer versus human brain power that makes the difference, it is that the disciplinary approach is entirely different. Computer simulation demands that mathematical models be formulated that describe the relationship between measurable, observable quantities, their interactions expressed with equations, not opinions or verbal declarations as is the case in politics, economics, media debates. Pretty much like replacing Aristotle’s philosophy of physics with Galileo-Newton’s mathematics as had been the case in the 17th century. That the validity of the Club of Rome approach was confirmed by the coming, on cue, of today’s very troubled world is as had been the case when Newton explained with his laws of mechanics why the orbit of planets were elliptical. Galileo and Newton had been lucky in that the solution of the equations of mechanics they had formulated could be obtained analytically thanks to an important body of mathematics known as “conic sections” that had been developed some fifteen centuries earlier by the Greek. One of them, Appolonius (ca 200 bc.) is quoted specifically by Galileo. Bringing mathematics to the social sciences was not that easy. It had to wait for sufficiently powerful computers to appear before anything of substance could be achieved. Which came in the late 1960’s, early 70’s.

But other than for using them as tools, what took place had not much to do with computers. The new research was elsewhere, in gathering data, formulating mathematical models describing the dynamics of and interaction between population, capital in industry and agriculture, the generation of pollution, the depletion of natural resources, measurable quantities whose change with time effectively describes what is happening to the world. This was by its very nature a very multidisciplinary whole, very different from how questions are addressed by the disciplines of classical economics and politics, out of which descriptions of the world had traditionally been coming from. Why it had not been done before is simply that solving these new mathematics with pencil and paper was completely unfeasible, because of complexity.

today’s global picture

The publication of those 1970’s results was abundantly commented upon, mostly by the western media. Even Playboy magazine had an article on the subject. The New York Times Review of Books devoted the front page and leading articles of one of its issues to the question (April 2, 1972).

But little took place in response to the warnings. The reason was simply that there is little that could have been done. Governments (at least those of the free world) have little power outside of politics and legislating, not practicing economics. Industry and population growth is where things are taking place. But industry is not, was not interested in what would have been only costly propositions. And as for population growth in the US and Europe that had a leading position in world affairs at the time, the public at large would not have agreed, had it been possible, with imposing restrictive measures anyway (including birth control). Even restrictive measures imposed by the Chinese government (not the free world) did not prevent its population to increase by more than 60 percent, from about 800 million in 1970 to close to 1.4 billion in 2014, and still growing. So, after a couple of years the media ceased talking about the subject altogether (it was not “news” any more), and the general public’s interest (in the West) was lost. The former CBS correspondent Tom Fenton referred to this as the “nothing can be done about it” syndrome in a notable 2005 book whose subtitle reads, prophetically “The Decline of the Business of News and the Danger to Us All”[6].

Change also came to what was the undeveloped (now called developing) world, including colonies that were not paid much attention up to not so long ago. Quoting in that respect from J. Stiglitz[7] :

“The proper name of the World Bank – the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development – reflects its original mission ; the last part, “Development,” was added almost as an afterthought. At the time [the 1940’s] most of the countries in the developing world were still colonies, and what meager economic development efforts could or would be undertaken were considered the responsibility of their European masters”.

In fact, those countries were not even taken into account in the 1970’s studies. But this is that part of the world where development and population growth is now taking place, an unplanned consequence of western industrialization. It is the West that, without giving it a second thought, provided the world with means of massive transportation, including transport of subsistence coming from a combination of regional and distant sources, with consequences whose possible coming was not even debated[8]. So, we have such situations as Africa becoming the largest importer of food per capita while having a population that has reached one billion, more than the combined population of the US and Europe, five times what it was in the 1940’s and still growing. Other than for being completely inconsistent with western values and public opinion (that governments have to follow), the possibility of limiting transportation to slow down that process is something over which governmental authorities, other than by possibly imposing tariffs, would have had little control anyway. Moreover, the sale of cars and trucks to (or manufacturing them in) the developing world has become a welcome part of the economy of the international industrial establishment, pretty much in the hands of the private sector - but welcome by the governments that host the production factories, in spite of the fact that this contributes to population growth, to atmospheric pollution, the very things that, as prescribed since the 1970’s, should be halted to save the planet[9].