Julian Simon

• 1. Introduction

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  Julian Lincoln Simon stood at the podium on Earth Day 1970 in Urbana, Illinois, and told a crowd that population growth was not a disaster. It was, he said, a triumph for mankind. The room included Planned Parenthood president Alan Frank Guttmacher, who had just finished speaking, and a biology professor named Paul Silverman, who would publicly call Simon a false prophet before the evening was over. Two weeks later, the two men came to blows at a faculty party. The Washington Post later wrote that the incident launched Simon's intellectual war. That war would consume the next three decades of his life. It would pit him against some of the most prominent scientists of his era, result in one of the most famous wagers in the history of economics, and eventually reshape how demographers talk about the relationship between people and resources. How did a mail-order businessman from New Jersey become the country's most combative optimist? And what does his story reveal about the battle between ecologists and economists over the future of the planet?

• 2. A Newark Boyhood

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  Simon was born in Newark, New Jersey, on the 12th of February, 1932, into a Jewish family that had moved to the suburbs as part of a broader migration wave. His grandparents ran a hardware store in the city's downtown. By 1941, the family had relocated to Millburn, New Jersey, where financial insecurity shadowed his childhood. Simon later recalled having little joy in those years, with fewer celebrations and happy moments than most children remember. At 12, he grew estranged from a father he described as distant except when annoyed by something Simon did. He found warmer relationships with his mother and two aunts.

  At 14, Simon joined the Boy Scouts of America and earned the rank of Eagle Scout. He was hazed as a scout, and the experience shaped his sympathies. He came to dislike elitism and to identify with, as he put it, the struggling poor, the powerless, and those denied opportunity by circumstance. At Millburn High School he was already developing the habit that would define his adult life: in his autobiography, A Life Against the Grain, he recalled first learning to say "Do you want to bet?" in arguments with his father, who would state wrong things with authority and refuse any challenge. The wager, for Simon, was not provocation. It was the only honest response available to him.

• 3. From Harvard to the Navy

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  Simon arrived at Harvard University on a full scholarship provided by the Holloway Plan. He studied experimental psychology as an undergraduate and also took graduate courses in the subject before graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1953. He was active on the debate team and a member of the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. To cover his living expenses, he worked as a salesman, a clerk, and a factory worker, and supplemented those earnings with daily poker winnings. Among his close college friends was sculptor Aristides Demetrios.

  After graduation, Simon served from 1953 to 1956 as a naval officer aboard USS Samuel B. Roberts and was stationed at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for the Marine Corps. He then returned to academic life, beginning graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1957. There he earned a Master of Business Administration in 1959 and a doctorate in business economics in 1961. The Chicago years brought him under the influence of three economists who would remain important to his intellectual development: Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Theodore Schultz. His doctoral dissertation, completed under Herman H. Fussler, examined the economics of book storage plans for a university library. The subject was unglamorous, but it pointed toward a habit of mind that would persist: Simon was drawn to problems that sounded mundane and turned out to be deeply revealing about how resources and systems actually worked.

• 4. Mail Order to Academia

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  From 1961 to 1963, Simon ran Julian Simon Associates, a mail-order and advertising agency in New York, alongside his wife, Rita James. The experience soured him on regulatory bureaucracy, which he called a tyranny, and gave him a firsthand perspective on markets that his academic peers lacked. Out of frustration came a practical book: How to Start and Operate a Mail Order Business, first published in 1965 and revised four more times, the last edition appearing in 1993. That book sold more copies than any subsequent work he wrote.

  Academic opportunities opened during a period of rapid university expansion, and Simon landed a position at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign teaching advertising. He switched to marketing in 1966 and began directing his research toward population growth. His early work in this area was not yet contrarian. He used marketing skills to promote birth control, publishing articles recommending family planning campaigns and drawing the attention of W. Parker Mauldin of the Population Council, who arranged a research visit to India. At that stage, Simon believed population growth carried serious economic risks. The reversal came gradually, as he worked through the data and encountered economists who had read it differently.

• 5. The Epiphany and the War

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  Essays by economists Simon Kuznets and Richard Easterlin in 1967 began to unsettle Simon's assumptions. Both argued that historical data showed population growth had no negative effect on economic growth. Around the same time, Simon encountered the work of Danish economist Ester Boserup, who had found that a growing population tends to drive more efficient agricultural practices rather than strain them. The accumulated weight of this evidence pushed Simon toward a conclusion that ran against the policy consensus of his era.

  The internal shift became public in February 1970, when Simon took the place of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton at a faculty forum in Urbana, titled "Science Does Not Show There Is Over-Population." Then came Earth Day and the confrontation with Paul Silverman. During a 1969 visit to Washington, D.C., Simon had already experienced what he called 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?" By 1975, his published articles were arguing directly that population growth produced economic gains. They appeared alongside growing fears drawn from Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb and the Club of Rome's 1972 report The Limits to Growth. The contest between ecologists and economists had a new combatant, and this one was not inclined to moderate his tone.

• 6. The Wager

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  Simon and Paul Ehrlich first clashed directly in the summer of 1980, when Simon publicly challenged claims by Newsweek and the United Nations, both of which had overestimated deaths from a West African drought spanning 1968 to 1973. His rebuttals ran in Science journal and The Washington Post. Ehrlich, along with his wife Anne Ehrlich and colleagues John Holdren and John Harte, responded in Science in December 1980, dismissing Simon's work as a tired old argument reflecting economists who know nothing about geology.

  Simon believed Ehrlich's influence had grown dangerously large without accountability. Ehrlich had appeared at least 20 times on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, delivered 100 public lectures in 1970 alone, and appeared on 200 radio and television programs that year. Simon later said he felt utterly helpless watching Ehrlich lead what he called a juggernaut of environmentalist hysteria. His answer was to propose a bet. If resource scarcity was real and worsening, the prices of raw materials should rise. Simon offered to bet on declining prices. Ehrlich accepted, quipping that he would take Simon's astonishing offer before other greedy people jump in. Consulting Harte and Holdren, Ehrlich selected five metals: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten.

  When the decade closed, all five metals had dropped in price. Tin fell because aluminium, more abundant and cheaper, displaced it. Nickel's price fell after better mining technologies uncovered vast new lodes, ending a near-monopoly. Tungsten dropped as ceramics replaced it in cookware. Chromium declined due to improved smelting. Copper fell partly because fiber-optic cable, derived from sand, took over functions once requiring copper wire. In each case, technology had either improved efficiency or made a more abundant substitute viable, exactly as Simon had argued it would.

• 7. The Ultimate Resource

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  Simon's 1981 book The Ultimate Resource laid out his theory in full. Writing in direct response to The Population Bomb and The Limits to Growth, he argued that the standard view of resource scarcity ignored the long-term record of declining wage-adjusted prices for raw materials. He pointed to aluminium, which had never been as expensive as it was before 1886, and to steel, which had carried a far higher price in medieval times than any modern equivalent. Increasing wealth and technology, he argued, make more resources economically available over time, even when physical supplies appear finite.

  His 1984 book The Resourceful Earth, co-edited with Herman Kahn, extended this argument as a direct rebuttal to the Global 2000 report. It predicted that world oil prices had no compelling reason to rise in coming decades and might fall below 1984 levels. Oil did trend downward for nearly two decades before rising above 1984 levels around 2003-2004. Simon was also the first to propose that airlines offer incentives for travelers to voluntarily give up seats on overbooked flights, rather than removing passengers arbitrarily, a practice known as bumping. The industry initially rejected the idea. It was later adopted, and 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 away to federal regulators and received no personal profit from it. Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both praised his ideas; Friedman wrote the foreword to The Ultimate Resource II in 1998.

• 8. Legacy and the Long Argument

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  Simon moved to the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1983 to join the Robert H. Smith School of Business, where he remained until his death. His wife, Rita James, a former socialist activist whom he had met and married while both were students at the University of Chicago, became a public affairs professor at American University. They had three children: David, Judith, and Daniel. For much of his life, Simon dealt with debilitating depression that limited his productive working hours to just a few each day. He studied the psychology of depression and wrote a book on overcoming it. He died of a heart attack at his home in Chevy Chase on the 8th of February, 1998, at age 65.

  An article in Wired magazine titled "The Doomslayer" inspired Danish writer Bjorn Lomborg to begin the research that became The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg later said he had started out intending to counter Simon's arguments but changed his mind after examining the data. The Institute for the Study of Labor established the annual Julian L. Simon Lecture in his honor. The Competitive Enterprise Institute gives the Julian Simon Memorial Award annually to an economist working in his tradition; the first recipient was Stephen Moore, who had served as a research fellow under Simon during the 1980s. Simon's widow published his memoir, A Life Against the Grain, after his death. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign held a symposium on his work on the 24th of April, 2002, and established the Julian Simon Memorial Faculty Scholar Endowment to fund an associate faculty member in its business school.