William Nordhaus's 1992 paper in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, "Lethal Model 2: The Limits to Growth Revisited," is the most influential academic dismissal of limits-to-growth-1972 and the World3 model by an economist of significant standing.
Nordhaus argued that the World3 model was methodologically simplistic — that it ignored the price system's role in driving substitution and technological change, that it treated resources as fixed stocks rather than economically-determined quantities, and that its projections of resource exhaustion were based on assumptions no serious economist could accept. His framing was that the model was "lethal" to good policy analysis because it encouraged alarmism disconnected from economic realities.
The paper appeared in beyond-the-limits-1992 era, when dennis-meadows and jorgen-randers had updated their analysis. Nordhaus's critique was directed at both the original work and its successors, and it carried substantial weight within economics because of his own standing.
The irony noted by later commentators is acute: Nordhaus received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2018 for his work on integrating climate change into long-run macroeconomic analysis — work that, in the view of critics including jorgen-randers, employed the same discounting logic that made mainstream economics slow to acknowledge overshoot-and-collapse dynamics. The very framework Nordhaus used to dismiss Meadows's concerns about exponential-growth in a finite world was later criticized as systematically underweighting long-run catastrophic risks.
The paper represents a genuine methodological dispute between systems dynamics and neoclassical economics: where Nordhaus saw price signals and substitution as buffering mechanisms that would prevent the feedback-loops modeled in World3 from playing out, Meadows and her collaborators saw those same mechanisms as insufficient to prevent overshoot-and-collapse given delays-in-systems and the physical constraints on stocks-and-flows.
The Nordhaus critique remained influential in economics departments for decades and contributed to the relative neglect of limits-to-growth-1972 in mainstream academic economics, even as vindication studies by graham-turner and gaya-herrington accumulated.