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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

You may be interested in reading more about system dynamics. There are a number of good books out there:

- Thinking in Systems, also by Meadows

- Business Dynamics, by Sterman (slowly working through this)

- Strategic Modelling and Business Dynamics, by Morecroft

- General Systems Thinking, by Weinberg (on Leanpub you can get the PDFs, it's 4 books there, as I recall the first two were published as one book when it was published as a paper book)

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Awesome. Pretty much the only book I partially read on systems thinking was introduction to cybernetics by Ross Ashby.

http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/IntroCyb.pdf

Ashby's book is pretty decent, considering that Cybernetics as a field can feel unapproachable to lay folk. In terms of DNA, cybernetics and systems dynamics both draw deeply from the well of early control 20th-century theory and so there are some conceptual overlaps. In relative terms I think cybernetics does a better job of surfacing the contributions of information theory and system dynamics does a better job of surfacing the impact of stocks and flows on overall dynamics (as its name would suggest).

I've found Business Dynamics by Sterman to be the best all-round System Dynamics book in my collection (I have three of the above, excluding Weinberg's).

Meadows is interesting and a quick read, but shallow. Morecroft is a thorough read and a decent alternative to Sterman's if you can't get it. But Sterman's really is the best textbook.

I got my copy of Sterman from my sister (who had studied systems engineering at MIT and so had a copy from her coursework there), but at your recommendation from a few years ago.

I worked through (most of) Morecroft because it was available through O'Reilly's online library and I had a subscription through work. I read Meadows specifically because of the leverage points essay, and wanted to see what else she had. It's definitely shallower than the others, but I think a good introduction because of its relative brevity.

I should ask him for a royalty.

Perhaps. She actually gave it to me during her speech at my wedding to demonstrate how big a nerd I am.

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