Critics
From the 1970s, the Club of Rome attracted substantial criticism. Economist Robert Solow, recipient of a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, criticized The Limits to Growth (LTG) as having "simplistic" scenarios. He has also been a vocal critic of the Club of Rome. In 2002 he said that "the one thing that really annoys me is amateurs making absurd statements about economics, and I thought that the Club of Rome was nonsense. Not because natural resources or environmental necessities might not at some time pose a limit, not on growth, but on the level of economic activity—I didn't think that was a nonsensical idea—but because the Club of Rome was doing amateur dynamics without a license, without a proper qualification. And they were doing it badly, so I got steamed up about that." However, in 2009, Solow said that "I have not changed my mind about [the Club of Rome]... [But] Thirty years later, the situation may have changed. It is possible that real demands on natural resources, and therefore on the natural environment, will be dramatically different in a world in which India and China, and other countries, too, grow at 8 or 10 percent a year, and need to pass through the material-goods-intensive phase of growth before they arrive at the service economy... it will probably be more important in the future to deal intellectually, quantitatively, as well as practically, with the mutual interdependence of economic growth, natural resource availability, and environmental constraints."
An analysis of the world model used for The Limits to Growth in 1976 by mathematicians Vermeulen and De Jongh has shown it to be "very sensitive to small parameter variations" and having "dubious assumptions and approximations".
In 1973, an interdisciplinary team at Sussex University's Science Policy Research Unit reviewed the structure and assumptions of the models used and published their analysis in Models of Doom, finding that the forecasts of the world's future are very sensitive to a few unduly pessimistic key assumptions. The Sussex scientists also wrote that the Dennis Meadows et al. methods, data, and predictions were faulty, that their world models (and their Malthusian bias) did not accurately reflect reality.
Economist Thomas Sowell, in his 1995 book The Vision of the Anointed, describes economist John Kenneth Galbraith, biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, the Club of Rome and Worldwatch Institute as "the anointed", declaring that "they were utterly certain in their predictions, yet completely disproven empirically, though their reputations remained perfectly undamaged". According to the National Review, he describes them "promoters of a worldview concocted out of fantasy, impervious to any real-world considerations".
