Epistemology of a Dying Empire: How do Our Leaders Make Choices?
Recently, Michael Liebreich published an article titled “The Secret of Eternal Growth.” I have been mulling over in my head if it is appropriate to spend time discussing one more mishmash of legends, including the one that’s by now a classic, the “errors” that the Club of Rome is said to have made with the 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth.” Eventually, I decided that it was worth a post, not so much because the post by Liebreich is especially wrongheaded or silly, but because it illustrates one basic point of our civilization: who, and how, takes decisions? On which basis?
In the end, I think we have a problem of epistemology, the question of the nature of knowledge. In order to make decisions, you have to know what you are doing — at least in principle. In other words, you need some kind of “model” of reality in order to be able to act on it. It was Jay Forrester, the father of system dynamics and the originator of the “Limits to Growth” report who pointed out that, (World Dynamics, 1971, p. 14)
Everyone uses models all the time. Every person in his private life and in his community life uses models for decision making. The mental image of the world around one, carried in each individual’s head, is a model. One does not have a family, a business, a city, a government, or a country in his head. He has only selected concepts and relationships that he uses to represent the real system.
And the big question is where these “selected concepts” come from. My impression is that the mind of our leaders is a jumble of ideas and concepts grafted from haphazard messages that come from the media.
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