Simulation and "Seduction" at the Policy Interface

At a press conference held at the Smithsonian Institution in 1972, an interdisciplinary team of researchers from one of the world's most prestigious scientific institutions predicted the end of industrial civilization. If current trends in population and economic growth continued, they argued, pollution and the depletion of natural resources would cause billions to die of starvation and environmentally induced illnesses by the middle of the 21^st century. The MIT team behind this study, led by Donella and Dennis Meadows, reached this conclusion using a new method of computer simulation. Their work was sponsored by the Club of Rome, a predominantly European organization of industrialists, intellectuals, and academics led by Aurelio Peccei, a charismatic, globetrotting automobile executive. The Club of Rome had organized the Smithsonian conference to announce the release of The Limits to Growth, a book based on the MIT team's study. The Limits to Growth went on to sell over 12 million copies worldwide and was translated into nearly 40 languages.¹

The book's harrowing predictions about the consequences of economic growth sparked a debate that dominated international politics in the 1970s and remains with us today. Although the book—and the "World 3" simulation model that formed the book's methodological core—carried the prestige of computation and quantification with it, this new kind of simulation lacked the prestige of econometric modeling, a discipline with a long postwar pedigree and a close relationship with policy making. Lay audiences may have been electrified (and terrified) by World 3's gloomy projections, but most policymakers and the people who advised them were decidedly more skeptical. Seeking to address these problems, the researchers in the new field of global modeling developed new ways of presenting their simulations to policymakers, leaning on the new affordances offered by time-sharing and interactive terminals.

Beginning in the 1980s, scholars in science and technology studies have investigated how expert communities have incorporated computer simulation in their work and how these computer programs have altered the character of that work. This field has been defined by the work of Sherry Turkle, who, starting with The Second Self, has stressed the seductive, immersive nature of simulations. For Turkle, these technologies enable us to go beyond mere representation; simulation allows users to build, inhabit, and manipulate new worlds. "Simulation," as she puts it, "demands immersion and immersion makes it hard to doubt simulation."²

Yet this was not always the case. Practitioners in the field of global modeling found it all too easy for their audiences to doubt simulation. My dissertation deals with how researchers in the new field of global modeling inspired by the Limits report sought to address and overcome this skepticism. In the world of public policy, the usual way to do this was by offering quantitative evidence. Since the start of the 20^th century, experts had relied on quantitative data to establish authority and to inspire confidence in the plausibility and objectivity of their recommendations. As historians of science such as Theodore Porter have shown, researchers began to offer their assessments in a quantified form at a historical moment when the culture's trust in elites was eroding in the face of a democratizing, growing society.³ Partly as the result of this shift, "trust in numbers" had come to stand in for trust in people in public policy debates in the first half of the 20^th century.

But the global modelers I study faced a situation where trust in numbers was no longer sufficient. These "simulationists" were working within a new, relatively unknown discipline with a methodology illegible to most policymakers and bureaucrats. Faced with these problems, as this discipline matured in the mid-1970s, its practitioners increasingly saw their goal as not only producing truth with their models but also imbuing them with trust.

In doing so, designers reimagined policymakers as users and began to focus on creating interactive experiences that could incorporate the experienced judgment of these users. The spread of time-sharing and terminals in the 1970s offered new possibilities, including that of close real-time interactivity. Simulationists seized on this more intimate...