The Limits to Growth and the Latin American World Model

In stark contrast with the Meadows model

Alejandro Teitelbaum - editor

In January 2023, Jus Semper published "Note on The Limits to Growth" by the editors of Monthly Review, a commentary on the report prepared in 1972 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by Dennis Meadows and others.1 In 1974, the Latin American World Model (LAWM), a report by a group of Latin American sociologists and economists, was published with a critical and different approach from The Limits to Growth.

Referring to The Limits to Growth, the Latin American report stated that the ecological catastrophe predicted in other models for the more or less distant future was now a reality for a large part of humanity.

There are also other differences in the interpretation of the Latin American World Model with the Meadows report. For example, the relationship between inequality and demography: whereas The Limits to Growth had explicitly stated that demographic pressures led to inequality in the distribution of resources among people (Meadows et al. 1972), the LAWM had labelled Meadows' approach as Malthusian and adopted the opposite explanation, i.e. that poverty and inequality are the main drivers of population growth.

The philosophical/epistemological critique focused mainly on the claims of objectivity of the Meadows report, which resulted in the explicit affirmation of the LAWM as a normative model. "Any long-term prognosis of human development is based on a worldview founded on a particular value system and ideology. The assumption that the current structure of the world and the value system underpinning it can be projected unchanged into the future is not an 'objective' view of reality but also implies an ideological position. This is why the often-made distinction between projective and normative long-term models is misleading. The model presented here is explicitly normative: it does not predict what will happen if current human trends continue but points to a way to achieve the ultimate goal of a world free of backwardness and poverty.

A second edition of the LAWM was published in 2004: ¿Castrofe o Nueva Sociedad? Modelo Mundial Latinoamericano. 30 años después,2 in which Hugo D. Scolnick, Gabriela Chichilnisky, Gilberto C. Gallopin, Jorge E. Hardoy, Diana Mosovich, Enrique Oteiza, Gilda L. de Romero Brest, Carlos E. Suárez and Luis Talavera participated and included the Prologue by Amílcar Herrera (who died in 1995) to the first edition. Some parts of the 2004 text are reproduced below.

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