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Comment by gooseus | Hacker News Reader

As an aside Meadow's primer Thinking in Systems[1] should be a required text in middle/high schools (imho).

Donella Meadows died of cerebral meningitis at the age of 59 in 2001[2], I truly wish she was someone we could be hearing from today.

[1] https://wtf.tw/ref/meadows.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donella_Meadows

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Strongly endorsed for middle/high schoolers introduction. I read it last year and thought it was a good introduction but will feel a little simple for the HN crowd. Most of the value is in The Appendix followed by Chapters 1, 2 and 6, so you could even shorten it more. My only caveat is there's a lot of degrowther propaganda in it that you would need to caution the kids against

> degrowther propaganda

What do you mean by that?

I don't have a copy in front of me but throughout the book there are many comments made against modern society and some of the examples that she gives are clearly 'set up' to be against growth. I didn't realize she also wrote Limits to Growth and according to wikipedia, used some of that work and was edited by an org called the Sustainability Institute which explains it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_In_Systems%3A_A_Prime...

You seem to conflate the term sustainability with "degrowth" which is just not the case in the book Thinking in Systems. I'm really curious where you picked that up from? In fact, a non-sustainable system is a system that is very far from any growth because it is about to collapse - only a sustainable system is able to grow, natural and artifical alike.

But propaganda? What is the agenda, then, and what would be obtained through that agenda?

There are very clear issues in both society and the environment that are both directly and indirectly caused by the obsession with growth.

The whole book is an argument against growth (cf the title). More specifically, all the models implicitly assume that rising costs will never reduce demand (and thus consumption), drive the search for alternatives, or make increased efficiency economically viable. It like writing a book called "The limits to driving" and showing that pretty much every car on the road will quickly smash into something if the drivers are assumed to continue accelerating in their present direction, and no one is going to use their steering wheel or breaks effectively.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer is an introduction into systems thinking, about stocks (resources), flows (actions) and feedback loops. The book isn't an argument against growth, but an argument for the sustainability of systems, especially how to think about and model them. The boundaries of a modelled system are purely conceptional and won't exist in the real world like we'd wrongly assume, D. Meadows makes this more than clear. I think @arthurjj is reading something into it that just isn't there.

Ah. Thank you. I misread the thread.

This particular subthread is about the book Thinking in Systems, not The Limits to Growth.

While related, they are not the same book.

My bad. Thank you for the correction.

*brakes. Freudian slip much? ;)

If you're curious, Meadows has addresses this common counterargument about price (time stamp directly to the relevant remark, but the whole talk is excellent):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc&t=614s

I think that when trying to determine what is propaganda, all else being equal, a good rule of thumb is that the messaging in support of the prevailing system is more likely to be propaganda than the messaging against it. This is due to the simple fact that the prevailing system (in this case growth focus / capitalism) has all societal institutions built to support it.

Hard disagree. Just because people reached a consensus on something doesn't then mean talking about that something is propaganda. Is all talk about modern medicine propaganda? All talk/technology that uses AC electrics over DC?

In the modern world it seems like EVERY discussion is 'why XYZ is wrong' and there is zero defense/explanation of how/why we reached/settled on XYZ (current norms) in those discussion, just attempts to discredit xyz/norms.

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