Today, February 12th, 2025, would have been the 93rd birthday of the late economist Julian Simon. Simon died of a heart attack just a few days short of his 66th birthday on February 8th, 1998. Despite his death occurring nearly 30 years ago, Simon still has admirers who promote and continue his work to this day. Since 2001, the Competitive Enterprise Institute has given out an annual award and hosts a dinner in his honor. Some have even named their website after quotes from Julian Simon. Simon’s work continues to inspire new generations of researchers in economics and public policy.
Julian Simon is certainly most known for his work on population economics. By the 1980s, the conventional wisdom on population growth was that an increase in the number of humans would drastically outpace our ability to feed them and get resources necessary for the increase in population. This neo-Malthusian view was championed by many, most famously by people like Paul Erlich, author of the acclaimed The Population Bomb, and organizations like the Club of Rome.
In 1981, Simon published what might be considered his magnum opus, The Ultimate Resource (linked to the second, expanded edition of the book). In this book, he outlined how the incentives of a market price system help avoid a resource crisis. As materials become more scarce, their price rises, meaning entrepreneurs have a greater incentive to discover more of said resource or innovate with substitutes. Additionally, price increases incentivize people to use less of a scarce resource. Additionally, Simon develops his idea that human imagination, not material resources, is the “ultimate resource.” This view is best stated in his work The State of Humanity:
“Adding more people causes problems. But people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.”
Every profession has its stories, and economics is not short of them. Some of these stories become legends. Julian Simon etched his name in the history books as a wager of his has since become legend. In 1980, Julian Simon and Paul Erlich entered into a wager on resource scarcity over the next decade. Erlich believed that the world’s population would grow at a rate that would outpace man’s ability to keep up with the demand for food and resources. Simon, of course, believed the opposite. So Simon proposed a bet. Erlich could pick any commodity he liked, and Simon bet that in one or more years, the price of that resource would fall. Erlich picked five metals that he believed would have a large price increase by the year 1990. By 1990, not only did the earth’s population drastically increase, but the price of all five of Erlich’s metals had fallen. Simon won the bet, and Erlich later paid out $576.07. Years have passed since the conclusion of the wager, and Simon’s perspective continues to hold true.
Despite being most known for his work on population economics, Simon’s writing spanned multiple fields. In 1968, Simon published “An Almost Practical Solution to Airline Overbooking.” In this work, Simon suggests that when an airline overbooks a flight, the airline ought to have every passenger write down the lowest they are willing to accept to wait for the next flight. Sound familiar? With some slight changes, this incentive system has been adopted by airlines across the globe. Few men get to honestly call themselves “great” economists, but Simon was one of them. Simon truly was a polymath, another thing few men can call themselves. Simon also wrote on issues of suicide, self-help, and even library book storage.
Perhaps Simon is best remembered for his optimism. Simon’s view that the human mind, through creativity, ingenuity, and imagination, could solve all of humanity’s material problems, or what he called the “ultimate resource,” is needed in today’s world where anti-human movements like degrowth grow in popularity. In an age where throwing soup on paintings to “save the environment” and calling population decline a “change for the better,” a simple reading of Julian Simon would do both activists and policymakers some good. So, on the occasion of his birthday, let us give three hearty cheers to Julian Simon for his life and work, reminding us that humanity’s fate is not so doom-and-gloom and that “human beings create more than they destroy.”
