"The most important book you’ve never read” made me an anti-capitalist
No, it’s not Das Kapital. I’ve never read Marx and I'm not afraid to admit it!
It was probably about seven years ago, when I was preparing my syllabus for a social entrepreneurship class I taught at Northwestern, that I came across Donella Meadows (aka Dana Meadows). I had lost faith in the premise that a “socially-conscious” business could truly move the needle. I knew these were systemic issues, and I wanted to find a way to help my students look at things from a systems perspective.
Enter Thinking in Systems, a primer on how to understand and make change within complex systems. Written by Meadows and published posthumously (she died suddenly of cerebral meningitis in 2001), it was just what I was looking for.
Meadows’ work blew me away, and would ultimately reshape the way I think about… well, just about everything. It shifted my paradigm. More on that at the end.
Meadows held a PhD in biophysics from Harvard, was a systems scientist at MIT, a MacArthur genius, and a Pulitzer Prize nominee. Thinking in Systems is not actually the book I’m referring to in the title of this piece. The book I’m referring to is the thing that Meadows is most famous for.
She was part of a team of systems scientists at MIT who were funded by a think tank called the Club of Rome. Their task was to come up with a solution to what Italian industrialist and Club of Rome founder, Aurelio Peccei, and several of his early collaborators called the “problematique.” This was the complex set of intertwined, global problems that constituted the “predicament of mankind,” which included things like poverty, inequality, pollution, scarcity, disease, and war.
Peccei believed that, in viewing these things not as distinct problems to be dealt with separately, but as one big web of issues that connect to and influence one another, it would lead to a more complete and effective understanding of how to solve them. In a complex system like our global socioeconomic system, making changes in one area (say, discovering a new source of energy like oil) will often affect another area. If you work to solve a problem in one area without thinking about how it connects to another area, you often get unintended negative consequences.
In searching for a solution to the “problematique,” the Club of Rome commissioned 17 scientists from MIT to do a year-long research project using the most cutting edge computer modeling technology and the latest understanding of systems dynamics to come up with an answer. This team of scientists was led by Dana Meadows and her then husband, Dennis. The culmination of this project was a report, which was eventually published as a book, The Limits to Growth.
Meadows and her team had found, by running many different simulations through their World3 computer model, that the core of the problematique was infinite growth on a finite planet. According to their models, in a “business as usual” scenario, humanity was set to overshoot critical planetary boundaries in the 21st century and would experience the collapse of industrialized civilization by about 2050. In other words, humanity had less than a century to change course or experience civilizational collapse. (They did not mean extinction of our species; just a collapse of modern, industrialized society. Which, you know, is also really bad.) But, they also found that if we reoriented our global economy away from growth and toward meeting human and ecological needs, we could not only avoid collapse, but could flourish.
Unsurprisingly, The Limits to Growth caused quite the stir. Peccei and some members of the Club of Rome loved it. It was elegant, simple, and convincing, grounded in hard science done by the world’s brightest minds of the time. But other members, and academics outside the Club of Rome, criticized it heavily. By far the most aggressive criticisms came from none other than… economists, of course!
I was inspired to write this piece this week because I just finished listening to the latest season of the history podcast, Scene on Radio. The season is “Capitalism,” and I’d argue it’s a must-listen for pretty much anyone, because I’m pretty sure a lot of people don’t really know what capitalism is. One of the episodes is all about The Limits to Growth, and it draws from another podcast called “Tipping Point: The true story of The Limits to Growth.” So, you should also listen to “Tipping Point,” which only has three episodes, and they’re all only about 30 minutes long. Definitely worth your time. In it, The Limits to Growth is described as “the most important book you’ve never read;” hence my title.
Anyway, whenever someone says to me: “oh, so you’re anti-capitalist, but you have a paid subscriber tier on Substack?” I think, hm… you don’t know what capitalism is, do you?
No shade intended. I spent years studying capitalism and its history in academia. Most people have real jobs, so don’t spend all their time thinking about this stuff. Which is why I recommend Scene on Radio’s podcast. It’s pretty crucial knowledge. Because everything about the way we live is organized around capitalism, and as Dana Meadows and her team so elegantly showed, everything about the world’s most dire problems is influenced by capitalism.
What defines capitalism is capital - that is, wealth that is intended to grow. The cult of capitalism is based on the ideology that infinite growth is both good and possible, despite concentrating enormous resources in the hands of a few and depleting the planet of resources faster than it can replenish them. There’s no evidence capitalism is necessary to human well-being; it’s just a faith practiced primarily by those who are on the winning side of the system.
It’s really quite simple; infinite growth is essential to our global socioeconomic system, and infinite growth is impossible on a finite planet. We will hit our limits. In fact, we already are.
Once I learned about The Limits to Growth, that was it. I couldn’t support capitalism at all anymore. Everything fell into place. There’s no such thing as “green growth” or “conscious capitalism,” there’s no way to use capitalism to solve the problems it creates. It’s the whole, Audre Lorde, “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” thing.
I have the added benefit, with an ADHD brain that is already prone to thinking in webs and systems, of seeing the “whole” better than I’m able to parse out the parts. So, when Meadows’ work suddenly illuminated this huge complex web, it felt so intuitive and obvious. Now I can’t look at a t-shirt without seeing the entire socioeconomic web that brought it into being: From the people who grow and harvest the cotton, to the pesticides and fertilizers used to grow it and the manufacturing processes for those, to the machines used to spin the cotton, the raw materials to build the machines that spin the cotton, and the people (including children) who mine those raw materials, the people who sew the garments, the trucks and ships to transport the t-shirts, the equipment and people to extract the fuel to transport the t-shirts, to the worker at the checkout and the little laser she uses to scan the barcode and the printer that printed that barcode and the paper on which it’s printed and the tree it came from and the raw materials used to manufacture that little barcode scanner, and so on and so on.
The complexity on which every single little thing in industrialized society depends is practically infinite. And growing every year.
It’s so obvious that this can’t continue forever. And yet, The Limits to Growth was so maligned by mainstream economists and others who refused to accept those limits, that it was eventually sidelined. It has since been vindicated, of course, time and time again. As recently as 2023, the World3 model updated with most recent inputs still puts the collapse of industrial civilization at about mid-century. And yes, these models account for technological advancements that may help solve some of these problems. These were MIT technologists running these models, after all.
And still, so many people either don’t understand how these systems work, or they refuse to believe collapse is possible, or they’re so deep in the cult of capitalism that they can’t envision a world that operates according to a different paradigm.
And this brings me to the end of this piece. In Thinking in Systems, Meadows writes about how to change systems by identifying leverage points - places to intervene that will have a ripple effect across the whole system. The most important and foundational leverage point is the system’s paradigm.
Meadows writes:
“The shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions, constitute that society’s paradigm, or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works. These beliefs are unstated because it is unnecessary to state them - everyone already knows them. Money measures something real and has real meaning; therefore, people who are paid less are literally worth less. Growth is good. Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes. Evolution stopped with the emergence of Homo sapiens. One can “own” land…
Paradigms are the sources of systems. From them, from shared social agreements about the nature of reality, come system goals and information flows, feedbacks, stocks, flows, and everything else about systems…
You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system… But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter - they resist challenges to their paradigms harder than they resist anything else.
So how do you change paradigms? … You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.
Systems modelers say that we change paradigms by building a model of the system, which takes us outside the system and forces us to see it whole.
I say that because my own paradigms have been changed that way.”
Are you following the work of Nate Hagens and the Great Simplification podcast? I'm struck by his continuing to engage with this stuff in such a varied way. I've been on my collapse journey for a couple of years now and I'm struggling to get to acceptance, but I'm fascinated by the modern ways that this thing is unfolding and how right the club of Rome seems to have been
Gosh I need to read this book. I wonder, have you read Donut Economics by Kate Raworth. She makes a similar argument about growth not being sustainable and suggests a different model. She actually made me want to study economic theory which has never happened before 😂