Someone told me to read Meadows over a year ago, and I can no longer remember who, and to make it worse it slipped off my radar. I'm filled with regret now because they appear to be a concise and insightful thinker, or at least an effective proliferative of good ideas.

No reason to regret, still time to read her works. That essay is also a chapter in her book Thinking in Systems: A Primer (publish posthumously), and more essays are on that site.