Jay Forrester (Part 1)

Two hours of oral history for MIT’s 150th anniversary, recorded in 2009. Forrester traces a single arc from feedback-control servomechanisms for Navy gun mounts, to Whirlwind and the magnetic-core memory he describes as “a clear case of necessity being the mother of invention,” to the SAGE air-defense computers. Then he turns to system dynamics, which he built from what people know by experience rather than from numerical data alone, and to Urban Dynamics and World Dynamics, models that “caused quite a sensation.” His sharpest claim comes near the end: in complex systems most policies are low-leverage, and anyone who has found a high-leverage one is very likely “pushing that policy in the opposite direction.”