by Noel Johnson
July 03, 2026
from Medium Website
Article also HERE
Fifty years ago,
a computer model predicted
our current era of stagnation.
We treated it as a cautionary tale,
but the data suggests
we’re living through the realization
of its most haunting scenario…
Recently, I found myself gazing at a line graph that felt more like a mirror than a piece of data.
It wasn’t a graph of last year’s inflation rate.
It was a 1972 forecast of the future, shown on a computer model known as World3.
This model was created by a group of MIT researchers working for the Club of Rome and was used in the authored book,The Limits to Growth.
When the World3 model was first introduced, the entire scientific community basically laughed at it. Most economists dismissed it as “Malthusian,” and politicians ignored it.
We had entered into a period of unprecedented economic expansion and the concept that there would be an end to this type of expansion seemed like a total buzzkill from another era.
Yesterday, I viewed the recent update to this information.
What was interesting to see was how well the chaos of the 2020s supply chain fragility, along with the increasing costs of raw materials and the overall sense that our global economy is beginning to sputter, was nothing short of predictable.
In fact, if you look at it now, a decade ago we mapped out exactly where we’d be today.
We aren’t drifting wildly through history.
We’re tracking a decades old systems model with alarming accuracy.
Image by Noel Johnson.
Data source: MIT World3 ‘Business as Usual’ model
(Meadows et al., 1972).
For decades we treated “The Limits to Growth” as a failed prophecy because we thought that the world would come to an end in 1990.
This is a mistake we are now beginning to realize.
The World3 model was never a fixed prediction.
It was about what happens when a limitless growth based system hits up against the finite nature of a planet. According to several new academic studies validating the World3 model, we are no longer outside of this model looking in.
We’re currently operating within it and running right on pace.
What the Model Predicted
Six years ago, Gaya Herrington, who at one time worked for KPMG as a research analyst and later became a Fellow for the Club of Rome, decided to perform an action that should have occurred every single year since the late 1960s.
She took the original World3 models and compared them against over four decades worth of empirical data. Her intention was to determine which of the five 1972 models best fit our actual physical world.
The first three models included the following:
- A baseline scenario showing what would happen without doing anything.
- A business as usual (BAU) model assuming that all countries would adopt Western levels of consumption.
- A comprehensive technology model that assumed that technological advancements would continue to drive productivity improvements at an exponential rate.
Herrington also examined industrial output, food production, population growth and resource depletion as part of her analysis.
Herrington published her study in 2020 in the Journal of Industrial Ecology and it was a wake up call for those believing in technologically driven utopias…
Not only did Herrington find that her data supported each of World3’s original scenarios, she discovered that our current state of affairs has become eerily aligned with both Business as usual model and the comprehensive technology model.
Each of these original scenarios indicates that we are reaching a maximum level of industrial activity after which a slowdown will occur due to internal mechanisms.
When we talk about ‘collapse’ in a systems setting, our thoughts often wander to Hollywood movies with cities on fire, gangs and the sudden loss of electricity.
But systems do not typically collapse in such unusual ways.
Instead, they slow down…
They become increasingly difficult to manage.
They begin to lose their ability to absorb shocks.
The “collapse” envisioned by the World3 model is more akin to a prolonged plateau that represents the transition from a world where things were improving and becoming less expensive to one where things are increasingly more challenging and fragile.
The Structural Slowing Down
We can observe this progression in the recent data generated by many of the most conservative institutional organizations.
In fact,
recently the World Bank issued a warning that the 2020s could very well turn out to be a “lost decade.”
According to their report, there is currently the lowest level of global economic growth since the 1960s.
Looking at this issue as an ordinary citizen would likely lead them to conclude that this is simply a string of unfortunate events.
There was a ‘pandemic’, a few wars and an increase in interest rates.
But through the framework provided by the World3 model, none of these issues are merely “shocks.”
These are signs of a system experiencing boundary limitations.
Growth does not cease due to lack of creative solutions.
Growth ceases due to increased resistance within the system.
As we deplete resources with increasing ease of access, we are forced to expend greater amounts of both energy and capital to obtain each subsequent unit of production.
This phenomenon is referred to as diminishing returns on investment.
An analogy for this would be an individual mining for gold.
The initial extraction was relatively simple.
You could easily obtain your first few ounces of gold by picking up rocks from the top layer of soil.
To extract the next hundred pounds of gold, you had to dig a significant hole.
To extract the next thousand pounds of gold, you needed a substantial industrial operation involving thousands of employees and numerous chemicals.
At some point, you were spending more money extracting additional gold than what the gold itself was worth.
The same is occurring throughout our global infrastructure.
Resource prices are rising, global debt levels are near saturation and our global infrastructure is under excessive strain.
We are investing trillions simply to preserve existing standards of living rather than developing new surpluses.
Global deceleration cannot be resolved through superior tax codes and lower interest rates.
It is the behavior of a system that has moved beyond its phase of rapid expansion and entered into an area of resistance.
The Innovation Trap
One of the most commonly cited arguments against the 1972 model is based upon the idea that,
technological advancements can serve as an endless source of creative problem solving.
We believe that no matter how dire our situation appears to be, if we run low on oil, we will find alternative sources of fuel like solar power.
Likewise, when we run low on land, we will develop new means of growing food, like lab grown produce.
We view invention as a means of escape.
But the World3 model also anticipated this type of thinking.
One of the primary scenarios presented by the World3 model was Comprehensive Technology which assumed an exponential pace of innovation in all areas from carbon sequestration and extreme efficiencies to resource replacement.
And what happened…?
The model shows that comprehensive technology allowed us to gain some time. It did not modify the fundamental curvature described in the World3 model.
This is the Innovation Trap…
Technology is a means of directing energy and materials, not a miraculous source of energy.
Advanced technology often requires more complexity, not less.
Rarer minerals, more accurate production and a highly specialized international supply chain are all necessary.
Each ‘solution’ we design adds a new layer of upkeep and a new set of dependencies.
Technology is quicker and more effective, it is also far more prone to malfunction when the surroundings change. The Word3 model indicates that we still reach a plateau in the comprehensive technology model scenario because the expense of maintaining all that sophisticated equipment eventually outweighs all of our progress.
Instead of producing surplus, technology starts to devour it.
The 2040 Horizon
The World3 model shows early to mid 2020’s, which is where we are today, mark the time frame where the lines begin to plateau. At this point, the bend in the curve begins.
The model projects a visible structural contraction occurring during the decades leading into the 2040 horizon…
Again, we must fight the temptation to consider 2040 to be the “apocalypse” year.
It is more accurately described as a time of transition, for the generation currently entering the labor force.
They will be the first generation in millennia to navigate a world of limitation rather than expansion during their most productive years.
How do we know what daily life will resemble if this scenario occurs?
Daily life will resemble failure to maintain complexity.
We will see unrepaired bridges, rationed health care and decreasing purchasing power per hour of human labor.
In this world, the “standard of living,” as we currently define it, starts to decline.
Conclusion
2040 is a year that should be on everyone’s calendar, according to the World3 model.
It indicates the time when the effects of decades of overshoot become more difficult to ignore.
The years between now and 2040 won’t be remembered for a single pivotal disaster if the model’s trend continues.
They will be remembered as the period when the signals were impossible to reject.
Global supply chain vulnerability was made clear by the ‘pandemic‘.
Trade, food, and energy were all affected by the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.
While slowing growth and growing debt showed how much work is now needed to maintain the world we constructed.
None of these events were foreseen independently in 1972.
Yet collectively they follow the same pattern the World3 model identified more than fifty years ago, which is a civilization meeting the mounting costs of complexity, resource restrictions and declining rewards.
We have spent half a century asking whether the World3 model would ever align with reality. Perhaps that answer is no longer waiting in the future.
If the trajectory continues, the 2020s may be remembered as the moment people stopped viewing the model as speculation and started recognizing it as a description of the world around them…
