My Take on The Study From MIT That Predicts “Societal Collapse”

In the past couple of days, I have seen a bunch of headlines claiming things like MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.¹ or New study confirms we’re right on time for a complete societal collapse.² As someone who likes to look beneath the surface on pop science articles, I have found that it is possible to learn a lot by looking past the sensationalism and reading the original paper.

It turns out that these headlines aren’t in response to the original 1972 report, which became a bestselling book called Limits to Growth³, but they deal with a paper published last year by Gaya Herrington, entitled Update to limits to growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data⁴. Herrington is Sustainability and System Dynamics Analysis Lead at KPMG, and made the paper available on KPMG’s website in addition to publishing it in a scientific journal.

Vice published a fairly in-depth article discussing this paper, which was then picked up and summarized by a bunch of somewhat lazy publications. So I downloaded the paper and took a look. Are we headed for certain doom and disaster in just a few years? Well, the reality is a lot more complex than that.

The 1972 paper dealt with a system dynamics computer model named World3, which was generated to study interactions between a number of factors that influence population growth and industrial output. The original study and subsequent research was funded by…