Short answers, pulled from the story.
Julian Lincoln Simon (the 12th of February 1932 - the 8th of February 1998) was an American economist and professor who argued that population growth and human ingenuity drive long-term improvements in resource availability and living standards. He is best known for challenging Malthusian views on scarcity and for winning a famous wager against ecologist Paul Ehrlich over the prices of five metals.
The Simon-Ehrlich wager was a bet made between Julian Simon and ecologist Paul Ehrlich over whether the prices of five metals (chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would rise or fall over a decade, starting in 1980. Simon predicted prices would fall due to technological progress; Ehrlich predicted they would rise due to increasing scarcity. Simon won: all five metals dropped in price by the end of the period.
The Ultimate Resource, published in 1981, argues that conventional views of resource scarcity ignore the long-term historical record of declining wage-adjusted raw material prices. Simon contended that increasing wealth and technology make resources economically more available over time, and that human ingenuity rather than physical limits is the decisive constraint on prosperity. The book was praised by Nobel Laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.
Julian Simon was the first to propose that airlines offer incentives for passengers to voluntarily give up seats on overbooked flights rather than removing passengers arbitrarily. The airline industry initially rejected the idea, but later adopted it. Economist James Heins estimated in 2009 that the practice had added $100 billion to the United States economy over the preceding 30 years. Simon gave the idea to federal regulators and received no personal profit from it.
Simon was a professor at the University of Illinois from 1963 to 1983, where he taught advertising and later marketing and economics. He then moved to the University of Maryland, College Park, joining the Robert H. Smith School of Business, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. He was also a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem from 1970 to 1971 and again in 1974-75.
Simon initially believed population growth posed serious economic risks, and his early research promoted family planning and birth control campaigns. His views shifted after encountering essays by economists Simon Kuznets and Richard Easterlin in 1967, who showed that historical data did not support negative effects of population growth on economic growth, and the work of Danish economist Ester Boserup. By 1975, Simon was publishing articles arguing that population growth produced economic gains rather than harm.