This video walks through a critique of the World model that kicked off the Limits to Growth debate, starting with Forrester’s World Dynamics, followed by World3 and the Limits to Growth and many subsequent works.

The purpose of this video is not to discuss the mapping of the world models to the real world, though that is of great importance to everyone. Instead, we take a technical approach to exercising the model to reveal its strengths, limitations and assumptions as quickly as possible.

Model critique skills are useful when you’re evaluating someone else’s model. They’re even more important for your own work. As you build a model, you should be subjecting it to regular testing in many ways. Even though testing takes time, it’s actually much faster to work this way, because you avoid endless rework cycles.

The model and materials are provided in 2-Analysis-Global.zip.

Other resources:
How to critique a model
Good modeling practices
Writing an SD conference paper
Writing a good system dynamics paper II