BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

GROWTH (Explosive or Exponential) 1)2)

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The characteristic of a growth phenomenon, process or rate constantly submitted to a positive feedback.

Any system affected by this type of growth is quicky running toward its destruction, because it is using up evermore growing quantities of some specific resource obtained from its environment, until the moment the resource becomes scarce and insufficient to maintain the rapidly growing structures of the system.

According to K. BOULDING's (himself an economist) barbed comment: "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can continue indefinitely in a finite world is either a madman or an economist" (1973, p.92).

As stated by J. MILSUM: "The basic growth process is of necessity escalatory or unstable, at least over a reasonable working range" (1968, p.27).

Such situations are very dangerous as they are generally not clearly perceived until the terminal runaway process is well on its way and cannot anymore be stopped. A dramatic collapse becomes then unavoidable.

This type of runaway growth is frequently observed in some physical phenomena, in ecology, in man-made disasters, in financial panics and in economics, as for example hyper-inflations.

Their early detection and avoidance could be one of the most important contribution of cybernetics and systems to practical activities in general.

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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