The Global 2000 Report to the President and the Threshold 21 model: influences of Dana Meadows and system dynamics

Gerald O. Barney

System Dynamics Review, 2002, vol. 18, issue 2, 123-136

Abstract: The author first met Dana Meadows and her colleagues in the Limits to Growth project during a postdoctoral year at MIT, setting the author on a new career and life path. The first major step was directing the Global 2000 Report for President Jimmy Carter. In the Global 2000 project, we improved the connections and consistency among the sector‐specific elements of the Government's Global Model. The results of the projections were generally consistent with the Limits study, but analysis showed that the Government's models were biased optimistically because of omitted feedbacks. Another major step was the establishment of Millennium Institute (MI) and the development of the Threshold 21 (T21) integrated national development model. There are no global decision makers who can address the global issues of Limits; humanity's global decisions are largely the combined consequences of national level decisions. MI's T21 model provides an analytical tool for ministers of finance and planning that produces the same financial and monetary outputs as the models used by the World Bank and IMF, but that also address the social and environmental aspects of national sustainability issues. After more than a decade of work, T21 has gained much respect and has been customized to more than a dozen countries, industrialized as well as developing. In addition to describing the influence of Dana and system dynamics on the author's life, the article sketches out work needed for the future. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Date: 2002
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