Club of Rome Revisited

By Limits to Growth.

Coming from almost any other organization, a call for economic growth to alleviate world poverty would produce only yawns. From the Club of Rome, it is an intellectual bombshell. The Club --really an informal organization of some 100 top International businessmen, scientists and thinkers--has been synonymous with advocacy of a no-growth world ever since it produced its explosive little book, The Limits to Growth, in 1972. Using a complicated computer model of the world, the book argued that because the earth's resources were finite, mankind might starve or suffocate in pollution if runaway population and economic growth were not stopped cold. True, the computer model was flawed and the no-growth notion faulty (TIME, Aug. 14,1972). But the basic message became famous; 3 million copies of Limits have been sold worldwide.

Last week the Club reversed its position. At a three-day meeting in Philadelphia sponsored mainly by the First Pennsylvania Corp., a leading bank, speaker after speaker came out for more growth. Why? The Club's founder, Italian Industrialist Aurelio Peccei, says that Limits was intended to jolt people from the comfortable idea that present growth trends could continue indefinitely. That done, he says, the Club could then seek ways to close the widening gap between rich and poor nations--inequities that, if they continue, could all too easily lead to famine, pollution and war. The Club's startling shift, Peccei says, is thus not so much a turnabout as part of an evolving strategy.

What the Club of Rome prescribes now is selective growth. This concept, which promises to be every bit as difficult to put into operation as no-growth, requires nations to take voluntary actions aimed at speeding the development of the poorer countries while slowing that of their industrialized brethren. The desired result would be a much more equal division of the world's riches and productive capacities, which could lead to global peace and prosperity through economic interdependence.

To promote this one-worldism, the Club is developing what Peccei calls "a trilogy of efforts," starting with a report titled "Reshaping the International Order." Written by Nobel Prizewinning Dutch Economist Jan Tinbergen and 20 top government advisers--Club members are nothing if not highly placed--it is mainly concerned with the kinds of action that might influence selective growth. One recommendation will be to create new international monetary reserves to finance development in Third World countries. Other recommendations are to reduce tariffs on industrial products sold by developing nations, to set up new international agencies to subsidize the conservation of resources and, perhaps most startling, new controls on multinational companies so that they heed the needs of the countries in which they do business, as well as their own welfare.

Such moves would obviously substitute international planning for the workings of the free market. The Club aims to help that planning with a computer model, developed by Edouard Pestel, professor of engineering at West Germany's Hannover University and Mihajlo Mesarovic, director of the Systems Research Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Concentrating on ten separate world regions, the model is fed data--population growth, food production, climate changes, energy supplies, etc.--that can permit economists to test scenarios for various situations. West Germany, for instance, is already using the model to find out how to transfer some industrial production to less-developed countries without harming its own economy.

Will people actually go along with such changes in growth patterns? The Club's third effort, a sociological investigation of human goals, optimistically indicates as much. Explains Philosopher Ervin Laszlo, now working at the U.N.'s Institute for Training and Research: "The materialistic growth ethic is not an immutable expression of human nature." Beyond this possibility of altruism, however, the Club of Rome holds out the motivation of simple self-interest. If nations do not act to equalize resources, Club members warned in Philadelphia, mankind will rush lemming-like to the disasters so well publicized by Limits to Growth.

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