Julian Simon

Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey, on February 12, 1932. He grew up in a Jewish family that 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, Simon later recalled that he had "little joy" and fewer "celebrations and happy moments."

At age 14, Simon joined the Boy Scouts of America and became an Eagle Scout. 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. At the University of Illinois, he switched in 1966 to teach marketing there. His research focuses also shifted towards addressing population growth. Simon used his previous experience in marketing towards promoting birth control; articles he published recommended campaigns for family planning. He drew the attention of W. Parker Mauldin of the Population Council, who arranged for him to visit India to research possible ways to advertise birth control. His initial assumptions held that an increasing population were accompanied by serious economic threats. After calculating the costs and benefits of family planning, he concluded that countries could gain financially by averting births and advocated stronger investments in planning programs.

Essays by economists Simon Kuznets and Richard Easterlin in 1967 greatly influenced Simon, who began to be increasingly skeptical about the implications of population growth as he researched fertility rates. Kuznets and Easterlin argued that the historical data demonstrated that population growth had no negative effect on economic growth; Simon credited their findings as leading to his skeptic outlook. He also came to be influenced by Danish economist Ester Boserup, who found that, in contrast to Thomas Malthus, a growing population determined the most efficient agricultural practices. During a 1969 visit to Washington, D.C., Simon experienced an epiphany at the Marine Corps War Memorial. He later wrote: "And then I thought, Have I gone crazy? What business do I have trying to help arrange it that fewer human beings will be born, each one of whom might be a Mozart or a Michelangelo or an Einstein—or simply a joy to his or her family and community and a person who will enjoy life?"

In February 1970, Simon took the place of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton to speak at a faculty forum in his home city of Urbana, Illinois. His talk was titled "Science Does Not Show There Is Over-Population." He declared, "I view the population explosion not as a disaster, but as a triumph for mankind. Whether population growth is too fast or too slow is a value judgment, not a scientific one." The talk gained attention among his colleagues, and he was invited to speak at the 1970 Earth Day in Urbana. Simon spoke to a large audience; after Planned Parenthood president Alan Frank Guttmacher finished giving his address, Simon delivered his skeptical view questioning whether growth and scarcity posed a threat to society. Biology professor and colleague Paul Silverman soon rose to the podium and denounced Simon's remarks, while Simon was beside him. Silverman called him a "false prophet" who "lacks scholarship or substance." The event stayed with Simon, who now held a grudge against Silverman. Two weeks later, he soused Silverman at a faculty party and the two scuffled. The Washington Post wrote in 1985 that the incident launched Simon's "intellectual war."

In 1969, Simon was named as a professor of economics and business administration at the University of Illinois, and would remain in that position until 1983. From 1970–71 and 1974–75, he was a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the early 1970s, Simon's academic work largely concerned the relationship between population and fertility. He wrote primarily in economic, demographic, and developmental journals. By 1975, his published articles argued that there were economic gains from population growth, contrary to assumptions that growth lead to reduced investment. They came amid growing fears by environmental activists, who drew from biologist Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 book, The Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome's 1972 report, The Limits to Growth. By then, the view of scarcity among economists such as Simon, Robert Solow, and William Nordhaus differed from ecologists. Economists posited that scarcity was a changing, dynamic variable rather than the more commonly espoused view among scientists that it was a constraint which caused an ecological collapse.

Simon took an aggressive approach in attacking what had been the dominant consensus on population growth. He issued rhetorical challenges that distinguished him from and went further than other economists. A stronger belief in the free market also set him apart from Nordhaus and Solow, who were part of the mainstream. Political progressives and environmentalists saw his views as being overly-optimistic. Even as environmental pessimists gained greater influence in policy decisions under President Jimmy Carter, Simon and other optimists intensified their criticisms of population control and environmental regulations.

Simon moved in 1983 to join the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, as a professor in its Robert H. Smith School of Business, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. He was a member of the American Economics Association, the American Statistics Association, and the Population Association of America.