Jay W. Forrester and System Dynamics
Jay Forrester passed away at the age of 98 on November 16, 2016
The link below will take you to JWF memorial webpage.
Jay W Forrester Memorial Web Page at the System Dynamics Society
I admire Jay W Forrester greatly. I was introduced to Operational Research and System dynamics back in early 1980s after I graduated from IIT Roorkee Engineering undergraduate degree in India. I had bought a book on Operations Research at a road side book seller in Dariya Ganj, Old Delhi, India.
I met Jay on three occasions. I attended Business Dynamics Executive Education program at MIT Sloan School of Management back in 2002. Jay was one of the Instructor. Then I again met Jay at 2003 SDS International Conference at New York City. Last time I met Jay was in Washington DC at the Club of Rome Symposium celebrating 40 yrs anniversary of publication of The Limits to Growth book.
Jay will be missed greatly.
– Mayank Chaturvedi
Jay Forrester’s vision of future of Economics and System Dynamics.
Traditional mainstream academic economics, by trying to be a science, has failed to answer major questions about real- life economic behavior. Economics should become a systems profession, such as management, engineering, and medicine. By closely observing the structures and policies in business and government, simulation models can be constructed to answer questions about business cycles, causes of major depressions, inflation, monetary policy, and the validity of descriptive economic theories. A system dynamics model, as a general theory of economic behavior, now endogenously generates business cycles, Kuznets cycles, the economic long wave, and growth. A model is a theory of the behavior that it generates. The economic model provides the theory, thus far missing from economics, for the Great Depression of the 1930s and how such episodes can recur 50–70 years apart. Simpler system dynamics models can become the vehicle for a relevant and exciting pre-college economics education.
From PHD thesis of I David Wheat
Within the interdisciplinary system dynamics (SD) community, the motivation to improve understanding of economic systems came nearly fifty years ago with Jay W. Forrester’s seminal call for a new kind of economics education, a call that he has renewed in the K-12 education setting in recent years. John Sterman’s encyclopedic Business Dynamics is a symbol not only of the breadth of his own economic policy and management research and teaching but also the range of work done by others in this field.
Teaching the economics of resource management with system dynamics tools has been the devotion of Andrew Ford and Erling Moxnes. James Lyneis took his management consultant’s expertise into the university classroom and developed an SD-based microeconomics course. Economists Michael Radzicki and Kaoru Yamaguchi have developed complete graduate-level economics courses on a system dynamics foundation. An informal survey produced this list of others who have used SD as a teaching tool in economics courses: Glen Atkinson, Scott Fullwiler, John Harvey, Steve Keen, Ali Mashayekhi, Jairo Parada, Oleg Pavlov, Khalid Saeed, Jim Sturgeon, Linwood Tauheed, Pavlina Tcherneva, Scott Trees, Eric Tymoigne, Lars Weber, and Agnieszka Ziomek, and that is surely just a fraction.
Key Sources of Research:
Economic theory for the new millennium
Jay W. Forrester
2003
System Dynamics Review vol 29, No 1 (January-March 2013): 26–41
Three slices of Jay Forrester’s general theory of economic behavior: An interpretation
Khalid Saeed
Worcester Polytechnic Institute Worcester, MA, USA
February 13, 2013
System Dynamics: A disruptive science
A conversation with Jay W. Forrester, founder of the field
Khalid Saeed Worcester Polytechnic Institute Sept. 2013
Click to access ISDC2013_forresterchat.pdf
Unintended Consequences
Jay Forrester
Click to access SB_Forrester.pdf
A dynamic synthesis of basic macroeconomic theory : implications for stabilization policy analysis
Nathan Forrester
PHD THESIS
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/15739
SYSTEM DYNAMICS: PORTRAYING BOUNDED RATIONALITY
John D.W. Morecroft
1982
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/49181/systemdynamicspo00more.pdf?sequence=1
THE SYSTEM DYNAMICS NATIONAL MODEL: MACRO BEHAVIOR FROM MICRO STRUCTURE
JAY W FORRESTER
Click to access 1470_0a924c5b-b909-42fa-be9b-932588278f36_forre004.pdf
1976 Economic Forecast Report including studies by Jay W Forrester and Nathial Mass
US congress Joint Economic Review of US Economy
Click to access 76603310f_1.pdf
Backround Material for a Meeting on Long Waves, Depression and Innovation –
IMPLICATIONS FOR NATIONAL AND REGIONAL ECONOMIC POLICY
Jay W. Forrester, Alan K.Oraham, Peter M.Senge, John D Sterman
Siena/Florence, October 26-29, 1983
Bianchi, G., Bruckmann, G. and Vasko, T.
Industrial Dynamics-After the First Decade
Author(s): Jay W. Forrester
Management Science, Vol. 14, No. 7, Theory Series (Mar., 1968), pp. 398-415
Click to access Forrester68.pdf
Systems Analysis as a Tool for Urban Planning
JAY W. FORRESTER, FELLOW, IEEE
1970
IS ECONOMETRIC MODELING OBSOLETE?
AUTHOR: Mr. Oakley E. Van Slyke
Money and Macroeconomic Dynamics : Accounting System Dynamics Approach
Kaoru Yamaguchi
Ph.D. Japan Futures Research Center
Awaji Island, Japan
November 11, 2016
Click to access Macro%20Dynamics.pdf
The Feedback Method : A System Dynamics Approach to Teaching Macroeconomics
I. David Wheat, Jr.
Dissertation for the degree philosophiae doctor (PhD)
System Dynamics Group, Social Science Faculty University of Bergen
http://bora.uib.no/bitstream/handle/1956/2239/Introduction_David_Wheat.pdf?sequence=46
Disequilibrium Systems Representation of Growth Models—Harrod-Domar, Solow, Leontief, Minsky, and Why the U.S. Fed Opened the Discount Window to Money-Market Funds
Frederick Betz
2015
Click to access ME_2015120814432915.pdf
Cyclical dynamics of airline industry earnings
Kawika Piersona and John D. Sterman
System Dynamics Review vol 29, No 3 (July-September 2013): 129–156
Modeling Financial Instability
Steve Keen
Click to access Keen2014ModelingFinancialInstability.pdf
Harvey, J.T.,
2013.
Keynes’s trade cycle: a system dynamics model.
Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 36(1), pp.105-130.
ECONOMICS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Jay Forrester
https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/2197/SWP-1983-18213738.pdf?sequence=1
Forrester, J. W. (1968). Market Growth as Influenced by Capital Investment. Industrial Management Review (now Sloan Management Review), 9(2), 83-105.
Forrester, J. W 1971). Counterintuitive Behavior of Social Systems. Collected Papers of J.W. Forrester. Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press.
Forrester, J. W (1976). Business Structure, Economic Cycles, and National Policy. Futures, June.
Forrester, J. W (1979). An Alternative Approach to Economic Policy: Macrobehavior from Microstructure. In Kamrany & Day (Eds.), Economic Issues of the Eighties. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Forrester, J. W., Mass, N. J., & Ryan, C. (1980). The System Dynamics National Model: Understanding Socio-economic Behavior and Policy Alternatives. Technology Forecasting and Social Change, 9, 51-68.
Forrester, N. B. (1982). A Dynamic Synthesis of Basic Macroeconomic Theory: Implications for Stabilization Policy Analysis. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.
Low, G. (1980). The Multiplier-Accelerator Model of Business Cycles Interpreted from a System Dynamics Perspective. In J. Randers (Ed.), Elements of the System Dynamics Method. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mass, N. J. (1975). Economic Cycles: An Analysis of Underlying Causes. Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press, Inc.
Mass, N. J.(1980). Stock and Flow Variables and the Dynamics of Supply and Demand. In J. Randers (Ed.), Elements of the System Dynamics Method. (pp. 95-112). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Meadows, D. L., Behrens III, W. W., Meadows, D. H., Naill, R. F., & Zahn, E. (1974). Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World. Cambridge, MA: Wright-Allen Press.
Morecroft, J. D. W. & Sterman, J. D. (Eds.). (1994). Modeling for Learning Organizations. Portland, OR: Productivity Press.
Radzicki, M. (1993). A System Dynamics Approach to Macroeconomics (Guest lecture at the Department of Information Science, University of Bergen.).
Richardson, G. P. (1991). Feedback Thought in Social Science and Systems Theory. Waltham, MA: Pegasus Communications, Inc.
Senge, P. M. (1990). The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday.
Sterman, J. D. (1985). A Behavioral Model of the Economic Long Wave. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 6, 17-53.
Sterman, J. D. (2000). Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill Companies.
Viewpoints which Matter 
10 thoughts on “Jay W. Forrester and System Dynamics”