I was born in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on June 15, 1916. My father, an electrical
engineer, had come to the United States in 1903 after earning his
engineering diploma at the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt, Germany.
He was an inventor and designer of electrical control gear, later
also a patent attorney. An active leader in professional and
civic affairs, he received an honorary doctorate from Marquette University for
his many activities in the community. My mother, an accomplished
pianist, was a third generation American, her forebears having
been '48ers who immigrated from Prague and Köln. Among my
European ancestors were piano builders, goldsmiths, and vintners
but to the best of my knowledge, no professionals of any kind.
The Merkels in Köln were Lutherans, the Goldschmidts in
Prague and the Simons in Ebersheim, Jews.
My home nurtured in me an early attachment to books and other
things of the intellect, to music, and to the out of doors. I
received an excellent general education from the public
elementary and high schools in Milwaukee, supplemented by the
fine science department of the public library and the many books
I found at home. School work was interesting but not difficult,
leaving me plenty of time for sandlot baseball and football, for
hiking and camping, for reading and for many extracurricular
activities during my high school years. A brother, five years my
senior, while not a close companion, gave me some anticipatory
glimpses of each stage of growing up. Our dinner table at home
was a place for discussion and debate - often political,
sometimes scientific.
Until well along in my high school years, my interests were quite
dispersed, although they were increasingly directed toward
science - of what sort I wasn't sure. For most adolescents,
science means physics, mathematics, chemistry, or biology - those
are the subjects to which they are exposed in school. The idea
that human behavior may be studied scientifically is never hinted
until much later in the educational process - it was certainly
not conveyed by history or "civics" courses as they were then
taught.
My case was different. My mother's younger brother, Harold
Merkel, had studied economics at the University of Wisconsin
under John R. Commons. Uncle Harold had died after a brief career
with the National Industrial Conference Board, but his memory was
always present in our household as an admired model, as were some
of his books on economics and psychology. In that way I
discovered the social sciences. Uncle Harold having been an
ardent formal debater, I followed him in that activity too.
In order to defend free trade, disarmament, the single tax and
other unpopular causes in high school debates, I was led to a
serious study of Ely's economics textbook, Norman Angell's The
Great Illusion, Henry George's Progress and Poverty,
and much else of the same sort.
By the time I was ready to enter the University of
Chicago, in 1933, I had a general sense of direction. The
social sciences, I thought, needed the same kind of rigor and the
same mathematical underpinnings that had made the "hard" sciences
so brilliantly successful. I would prepare myself to become a
mathematical social scientist. By a combination of formal
training and self study, the latter continuing systematically
well into the 1940s, I was able to gain a broad base of knowledge
in economics and political science, together with reasonable
skills in advanced mathematics, symbolic logic, and mathematical
statistics. My most important mentor at Chicago was the
econometrician and mathematical economist, Henry Schultz, but I
studied too with Rudolf Carnap in logic, Nicholas Rashevsky in
mathematical biophysics, and Harold Lasswell and Charles Merriam
in political science. I also made a serious study of
graduate-level physics in order to strengthen and practice my
mathematical skills and to gain an intimate knowledge of what a
"hard" science was like, particularly on the theoretical side. An
unexpected by-product of the latter study has been a lifelong
interest in the philosophy of physics and several publications on
the axiomatization of classical mechanics.
My career was settled at least as much by drift as by choice. An
undergraduate field study for a term paper developed an interest
in decision-making in organizations. On graduation in 1936, the
term paper led to a research assistantship with Clarence E.
Ridley in the field of municipal administration, carrying out
investigations that would now be classified as operations
research. The research assistantship led to the directorship,
from 1939 to 1942, of a research group at the University of
California, Berkeley, engaged in the same kinds of studies.
By arrangement with the University of Chicago, I took my doctoral
exams by mail and moonlighted a dissertation on administrative
decision-making during my three years at Berkeley.
When our research grant was exhausted, in 1942, jobs were not
plentiful and my military obligations were uncertain. I secured a
position in political science at Illinois Institute of Technology by the
intercession of a friend who was leaving. The return to Chicago
had important, but again largely unanticipated, consequences for
me. At that time, the Cowles Commission for Research in Economics
was located at the University of Chicago. Its staff included
Jacob Marschak and Tjalling
Koopmans who were then directing the graduate work of such
students as Kenneth Arrow, Leo
Hurwicz, Lawrence Klein, and Don
Patinkin. Oscar Lange, not yet returned to Poland, Milton Friedman, and Franco Modigliani frequently
participated in the Cowles staff seminars, and I also became a
regular participant.
That started me on a second education in economics, supplementing
the Walrasian theory and Neyman-Pearson statistics I had learned
earlier from Henry Schultz (and from Jerzy Neyman in Berkeley)
with a careful study of Keyne's General Theory (made
comprehensible by the mathematical models proposed by Meade, Hicks, and Modigliani), and the novel
econometric techniques being introduced by Frisch and investigated by the Cowles
staff. With considerable excitement, too, we examined Samuelson's new papers on comparative
statics and dynamics.
I was soon co-opted by Marschak into participating in the study
he and Sam Schurr were directing of the prospective economic
effects of atomic energy. Taking responsibility for the
macroeconomic parts of that study, I used as my analytic tools
both classical Cobb-Douglas functions, and the new activity
analysis being developed by Koopmans. Although I had earlier
published papers on tax incidence (1943) and technological
development (1947), the atomic energy project was my real baptism
in economic analysis. My interest in mathematical economics
having been aroused, I continued active work on problems in that
domain, mainly in the period from 1950 to 1955. It was during
this time that I worked out the relations between causal ordering
and identifiability - coming for the first time in contact with
the related work of Herman Wold - discovered and proved (with
David Hawkins) the Hawkins-Simon theorem on the conditions for
the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output
matrices, and developed (with Albert Ando) theorems on
near-decomposability and aggregation.
In 1949, Carnegie Institute of Technology received an endowment
to establish a Graduate School of Industrial Administration. I
left Chicago for Pittsburgh to participate with G.L. Bach,
William W. Cooper, and others in developing the new school. Our
goal was to place business education on a foundation of
fundamental studies in economics and behavioral science. We were
fortunate to pick a time for launching this venture when the new
management science techniques were just appearing on the horizon,
together with the electronic computer. As one part of the effort,
I engaged with Charles Holt, and later with Franco Modigliani and
John Muth, in developing dynamic programming techniques - the
so-called "linear decision rules" - for aggregate inventory
control and production smoothing. Holt and I derived the rules
for optimal decision under certainty, then proved a
certainty-equivalence theorem that permitted our technique to be
applied under conditions of uncertainty. Modigliani and Muth went
on to construct efficient computational algorithms. At this same
time, Tinbergen and Theil were
independently developing very similar techniques for national
planning in the Netherlands.
Meanwhile, however, the descriptive study of organizational
decision-making continued as my main occupation, in this case in
collaboration with Harold Guetzkow, James March, Richard Cyert
and others. Our work led us to feel increasingly the need for a
more adequate theory of human problem-solving if we were to
understand decisions. Allen Newell, whom I had met at the
Rand
Corporation in 1952, held similar views. About 1954, he and I
conceived the idea that the right way to study problem-solving
was to simulate it with computer programs. Gradually, computer
simulation of human cognition became my central research
interest, an interest that has continued to be absorbing up to
the present time.
My research on problem-solving left me relatively little
opportunity to do work of a more classical sort in economics. I
did, however, continue to develop stochastic models to explain
the observed highly-skewed distributions of sizes of business
firms. That work, in collaboration with Yuji Ijiri and others,
was summarized in a book published just two years ago.
In this sketch, I have said less about my work on decision-making
than about my other research in economics because the former is
discussed at greater length in my Nobel lecture. I have also left
out of this account those very important parts of my life that
have been occupied with my family and with non-scientific
pursuits. One of my few important decisions, and the best, was to
persuade Dorothea Pye to marry me on Christmas Day, 1937. We have
been blessed in being able to share a wide range of our
experiences, even to publishing together in two widely separate
fields: public administration and cognitive psychology. We have
shared also the pleasures and responsibilities of raising three
children, none of whom seem imitative of their parents'
professional directions, but all of whom have shaped for
themselves interesting and challenging lives.
My interests in organizations and administration have extended to
participation as well as observation. In addition to three stints
as a university department chairman, I have had several modest
public assignments. One involved playing a role, in 1948, in the
creation of the Economic Cooperation Administration, the agency
that administered Marshall Plan aid for the U.S. Government.
Another, more frustrating, was service on the President's Science
Advisory Committee during the last year of the Johnson
administration and the first three years of the Nixon
administration. While serving on PSAC, and during another
committee assignment with the National
Academy of Sciences, I have had opportunities to take part in
studies of environmental protection policies. In all of this
work, I have tried - I know not with what success - to apply my
scientific knowledge of organizations and decision-making, and,
conversely, to use these practical experiences to gain new
research ideas and insights.
In the "politics" of science, which these and other activities
have entailed, I have had two guiding principles - to work for
the "hardening" of the social sciences so that they will be
better equipped with the tools they need for their difficult
research tasks; and to work for close relations between natural
scientists and social scientists so that they can jointly
contribute their special knowledge and skills to those many
complex questions of public policy that call for both kinds of
wisdom.
From Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, Editor Assar Lindbeck, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1992
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Herbert A. Simon died on February 9, 2001.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1978
Herbert Simon
