Quotes from Donella H. Meadows

self-organization is often sacrificed for purposes of short-term productivity and stability. Productivity and stability are the usual excuses for turning creative human beings into mechanical adjuncts to production processes. Or for narrowing the genetic variability of crop plants. Or for establishing bureaucracies and theories of knowledge that treat people as if they were only numbers.

Stocks usually change slowly. They can act as delays, lags, buffers, ballast, and sources of momentum in a system.

We see no reason why a sustainable world needs to leave anyone living in poverty. Quite the contrary, we think such a world would have to provide material security to all its people.

Designing a system for intrinsic responsibility could mean, for example, requiring all towns or companies that emit wastewater into a stream to place their intake pipes downstream from their outflow pipe.

I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.

The world is nonlinear. Trying to make it linear for our mathematical or administrative convenience is not usually a good idea even when feasible, and it is rarely feasible.

In physical, exponentially growing systems, there must be at least one reinforcing loop driving the growth and at least one balancing loop constraining the growth, because no physical system can grow forever in a finite environment.

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.

we don't talk about what we see; we see only what we can talk about

Pretending that something doesn't exist if it's hard to quantify leads to faulty models. You've already seen the system trap that comes from setting goals around what is easily measured, rather than around what is important. So

Keeping sub-purposes and overall system purposes in harmony is an essential function of successful systems.

Loss of resilience can come as a surprise, because the system usually is paying much more attention to its play than to its playing space.

There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed.

Words and sentences must, by necessity, come only one at a time in linear, logical order. Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.

To discuss them properly, it is necessary somehow to use a language that shares some of the same properties as the phenomena under discussion. Pictures work for this language better than words, because you can see all the parts of a picture at once.

Now imagine starting again with a full tub, and again open the drain, but this time, when the tub is about half empty, turn on the inflow faucet so the rate of water flowing in is just equal to that flowing out. What happens? The amount of water in the tub stays constant at whatever level it had reached when the inflow became equal to the outflow. It is in a state of dynamic equilibrium—its level does not change, although water is continuously flowing through it.

How to know whether you are looking at a system or just a bunch of stuff: A) Can you identify parts? … and B) Do the parts affect each other? … and C) Do the parts together produce an effect that is different from the effect of each part on its own? … and perhaps D) Does the effect, the behavior over time, persist in a variety of circumstances?

Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil-based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil. A breakthrough in energy efficiency is equivalent, in its effect on the stock of available oil, to the discovery of a new oil field—although different people profit from it.

These equalizing mechanisms may derive from simple morality, or they may come from the practical understanding that losers, if they are unable to get out of the game of success to the successful, and if they have no hope of winning, could get frustrated enough to destroy the playing field.

President Jimmy Carter had an unusual ability to think in feedback terms and to make feedback policies. Unfortunately, he had a hard time explaining them to a press and public that didn't understand feedback.

A quantity growing exponentially toward a constraint or limit reaches that limit in a surprisingly short time.

The least obvious part of the system, its function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system's behavior.

In other words, if you see a behavior that persists over time, there is likely a mechanism creating that consistent behavior.

Hierarchical systems evolve from the bottom up. The purpose of the upper layers of the hierarchy is to serve the purposes of the lower layers.