44 Quotes by Donella H. Meadows

If you define the goal of a society as GNP, that society will do its best to produce GNP. It will not produce welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency unless you define a goal and regularly measure and report the state of welfare, equity, justice, or efficiency.

The behavior of a system cannot be known just by knowing the elements of which the system is made.

The model is constructed in such a way that the global population will eventually level off and start declining, if industrial output per capita rises high enough. But we see little “real world” evidence that the richest people or nations ever lose interest in getting richer. Therefore, policies built into World3 represent the assumption that capital owners will continue to seek gains in their wealth indefinitely and that consumers will always want to increase their consumption.

A system generally goes on being itself, changing only slowly if at all, even with complete substitutions of its elements-as long as its interconnections and purposes remain intact.

A system just can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long term delays. That’s why a massive central-planning system, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily functions poorly.

We can’t impose our will on a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.

We know a tremendous amount about how the world works, but not nearly enough. Our knowledge is amazing; our ignorance even more so. We can improve our understanding, but we can’t make it perfect.

You can drive a system crazy by muddying its information streams.

Nonlinearities are important not only because they confound our expectations about the relationship between action and response. They are even more important because they change the relative strengths of feedback loops. They can flip a system from one mode of behavior to another.