This Nobel Laureate in Economics known "for his pioneering
research in the decision-making process within economic organizations,"
was a member of the First Unitarian Church of Pittsburg, PA beginning
in 1955. The following autobiography was issued by the Nobel Foundation.
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.
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Photo by Kjel Ake Andersson, © Time
Inc.
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| The
Simon family in the best of humor, on our way to the ball
at the Royal Palace during Nobel Week, December 1978: Myself,
Dorothea, Barbara, Katherine, Peter. I acquired the traditional
top hat after being awarded a doctorate by the university
of Lund in 1968. |
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 Universtity 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.
 |
| Simons
(at top) and fellows outside the University of Chicago's Burton
Hall, 1934. |
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.
 |
| Research
on problem solving, using the Tower of Hanoi puzzle as the
laboratory task, 1969. The Tower of Hanoi was to cognitive
science what the fruit flies were to modern genetics—an
invaluable standard research setting. |
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.
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Photo by Duane Michaels, © Time Inc.
|
|
Simon
and Alan Newell, his collaborator during the 1950's at the
Rand Coporation, together in 1985
|
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.
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| Dorothea
and Herbert Simon after their wedding in Milwaukee, Christmas
Day, 1937 |
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 activites 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.
© Copyright The Nobel Foundation
Recommended
Reading
Models of My Life, Herbert Alexander Simon
( New York: Basic Books, 1991)
