The World Dynamics Project

Our colleagues Pierluigi Crescenzi, Emanuele Natale and Paulo Bruno Serafim have been doing some work on what they call the World Dynamics project, whose goal is to provide a modern framework for studying models of sustainable development, based on cutting-edge techniques from software engineering and machine learning. 

The first outcome of their work is a Julia library that allows scientists to use and adapt different world models, from Meadows et al.'s World3 to recent proposals, in an easy way.

IMHO, this is a fascinating and timely research effort. I encourage readers of this blog to try the current version of the Julia library, which is still under development. It would be great if this library contributed to "an open, interdisciplinary, and consistent comparative approach to scientific model development" and I hope that global policy makers on environmental and economic issues will use similar tools in the nearest future.

Thanks to Emanuele, Paulo and Pierluigi for their work. I'll be following its future development with great interest.

If you speak Italian, I strongly recommend this podcast, in the GSSI-SISSA Sidecar series, in which Pierluigi discusses economic growth with Michele Boldrin.