Julian Simon

Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) was an American economist.

Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 12, 1932.

He grew up in a Jewish family who migrated to Newark as part of a wave of Jews who moved into the suburbs.

His grandparents owned a hardware store in the city's downtown.

In 1941, he moved with his parents to Millburn, New Jersey, where they experienced significant financial insecurity.

At the age of 12, Simon became estranged from his father, who he saw as distant "except when I did something that annoyed him."

He developed a closer relationship with his mother and two aunts.

Reflecting on his childhood, he later recalled that he had "little joy" and fewer "celebrations and happy moments."

Simon joined the Boy Scouts of America and became an Eagle Scout at age 14.

His experience being hazed as a scout influenced a worldview which disliked elitism and sympathized with what he described as "the struggling poor, the powerless, and those denied opportunity by circumstance."

He was educated at the local Millburn High School.

In his autobiography, A Life Against the Grain, Simon wrote that "I first learned to say ‘Do you want to bet?’" when arguing with his father.

"He would say outrageously wrong things in an authoritative fashion and refuse to hear any questions. There really was nothing I could say except ‘Do you want to bet?’"

Simon studied experimental psychology as an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he also took graduate courses in the subject and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in 1953.

At Harvard, Simon was a member of its Reserve Officers' Training Corps program and attended on a full scholarship provided by the Holloway Plan.

He was active as a member of the university's debate team.

To help defray his expenses, Simon worked various jobs—including those as a salesman, clerk, and factory worker—and used his winnings from daily poker games.

Among his close friends in college was sculptor Aristides Demetrios.

From 1953 to 1956, Simon served as an officer in the U.S. Navy on USS Samuel B. Roberts.

He was also stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for the U.S. Marine Corps.

In 1957, he began graduate studies at the University of Chicago, where he received a Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) in 1959 and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in business economics in 1961.

He came under the influence of economists Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Theodore Schultz, who were all based at the university.

From 1961 to 1963, Simon operated Julian Simon Associates, an agency for mail-orders and advertising.

He had moved to New York with his wife, Rita James, to start a business.

However, he complained of his encounters with regulatory restrictions, which he called "tyranny of bureaucracy."

Simon resolved to write a book about direct mail and sought an academic position.

During a time of rapid expansion among universities, he obtained a position as a professor of advertising at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

His time owning a personal business would have an effect on his economic perspectives.

Simon would spend most of his adult life in academia.

He published widely on topics concerning advertising and marketing, later broadly researching subjects from library storage to suicide to airline overbooking.

He was a professor of economics and business administration at the University of Illinois from 1963 to 1983 before later moving to the University of Maryland, where he taught for the remainder of his academic career.

Simon wrote many books and articles, mostly on economic subjects, from an optimistic viewpoint.

He is best known for his work on population, natural resources, and immigration.

Simon is sometimes associated with cornucopian views and as a critic of Malthusianism.

Rather than focus on the abundance of nature, Simon focused on lasting economic benefits from continuous population growth, even despite limited or finite physical resources, primarily by the power of human ingenuity to create substitutes, and from technological progress.

He is also known for the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet he made with ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich.

Ehrlich bet that the prices for five metals would increase over a decade, while Simon took the opposite stance.

Simon won the bet, as the prices for the metals sharply declined during that decade.

At the University of Illinois, he switched in 1966 to teach marketing there.

His research focuses shifted towards addressing population growth.