Herbert A. Simon - Autobiography

08/03/2004 12.34 http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1978/simon-autobio.html 

Herbert A. Simon – Autobiography 

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. 

The Bank of Sweden 

Prize in Economic 

Sciences in Memory of 

Alfred Nobel 1978 

Press Release 

Presentation Speech 

Herbert A. Simon 

Autobiography 

Prize Lecture 

Banquet Speech 

Other Resources 

1977 1979 

The 1978 Prize in: 

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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 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. 

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 

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. 

From Nobel Lectures, Economics 1969-1980, World Scientific 

Publishing Co., Singapore 

Herbert A. Simon died in 2001. 

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Herbert A. Simon - Autobiography

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