Personal philosophies had such an impact on the direction of events before the second world war. @Tuchman talks about the French elan or the German will to conquer. On Schilieffen’s plan.
A hundred years of German philosophy went into the making of this decision in which hthe seed of self-destruction lay embedded… The voice was Schlieffen’s, but the hand was the hand of Fichte who saw the German people chosen by Providence to occupy the supreme place in the history of the universe, of Heegel who saw them leading the world to a glorious destiny… What made the Schlieffen plan was not Clausewitz and the Battle of Cannae but the body of accumulated egoism which suckled the German people and created a nation fed on the ‘desperate delusions of the will that deems itself absolute’
Events were also heavily dictated by seemingly unimportant quarrels between nations over pride from the late 19th century. The French were heavily affected by a war which got Alsaice annexed from them in the 1870’s and it determined their views on foreign policy.
Reading the Limits of Growth
- People unconsciously use models to solve problems. Formalising them can seem counter intuitive but trying to understand that you have some set of assumptions you just haven’t examined is important.
- This laying out of assumptions is one of the core things in model based thinking. If we’re forced to formalise our assumptions we have to examine them.
The Club of Rome model focuses on the following variables
- population (population growth)
- food production (malnutrition)
- industrialization (which they view as accelerating).
- pollution (environmental deterioration).
- consumption of natural resources (unsustainable).
A quantity exhibits exponential growth when it increases by a constant percentage of the whole in a constant time period.
They start their analysis by acknowledging that the variables of interest are growing exponentially, so they want to determine the positive feedback loops creating this growth.
The interaction between the negative and positive growth rates determines the finite growth. In the population scenario the net growth rate is determined by fertility minus mortality rate. This net growth rate determines the exponential growth of the population.