Julian Simon

Julian L. Simon ( Julian Lincoln Simon, born February 12, 1932 † February 8, 1998 ) was a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, College Park and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. Simon was the author of numerous books and articles, best known are his works on population, resources and immigration. The American is an important representative of kornukopischen view that limits growth and raw materials are not natural, but can be stretched and expanded almost by technical progress. Simon was married and had three children and died at age 65 of a heart attack.

Dealing with Simon and a Wired interview with him was also the inspiration for Bjørn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist.

Theses

"There is no reason to believe did at any moment in the future givenName the available quantity of any natural resource or service at present prices will be much smaller than it is now, or non-existent. "

According to Simon natural resources remain in the longer term always available at prices comparable and will in future not go out. This contradicts the conventional wisdom of the limits of growth he lays in his 1981 book The Ultimate Resource detail dar. Simon conducted research over the course of commodity prices over longer periods. It occurred to him that this did not increase the long-term inflation-adjusted means, but remained constant level and even fell.

For the price development of metals led, among other things, that at times the Paris World Exposition in 1855 Napoleon III. had given a banquet where only the guests of honor cutlery received from the then immensely valuable aluminum, the other kind of gold. The material value of an iron armor was much more important than it is today in the Middle Ages. Simon assumed that rising market prices of a commodity (eg copper) intensified the search for substitutes ( glass fibers instead of metal telephone cable). Accordingly, the price adjusted for inflation, the range of economically exploitable resources or reserves ( cf. the so-called petroleum constant) remains constant falls again.

" This is my long -run forecast in brief: [ ... ] The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today 's Western living standards. I also speculate, HOWEVER, so that many people will continue to think and say did the conditions of life are getting worse. "

The above statement and other theories are considered as crucial for excitation Bjørn Lomborg's book Apocalypse No! The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg sought to refute Simon's provocative thesis that would be better off humanity and increasingly in almost all aspects, but this would not be perceived, but he changed his mind after careful consideration of the data.

Simon had already in 1984 - along with Herman Kahn - critical in The Resourceful Earth dealt with Dennis Meadows Limits to Growth and the report Global 2000 and - until recently, to everyone's surprise rightly - a clear fall of the inflation-adjusted price of oil after the oil crisis in 1972 predicted.

Bet with Paul R. Ehrlich

In 1980, he graduated with a known particularly dramatic predictions of famine and scarcity disasters become entomologist Paul R. Ehrlich from a public bet. Simon asked Ehrlich to call him 5 metal levels in the value of $ 1000, which, if as assumed by Ehrlich and others, constraints in the foreseeable period, and thus to expect significant price increases.

Honest selected chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten in a time frame of 10 years. In September 1990, but the total price was like all these metals and Ehrlich paid Simon the difference of $ 576.07. Ehrlich would have lost if he had invested in petroleum, foodstuffs, sugar, coffee, cotton, wool or phosphates, for all these goods became cheaper adjusted for inflation. A similar bet on timber prices with the forest scientist David Southwood has lost more not accepted or able to complete Simon.

Infinity of resources

For Simon, it did not make sense, the purely physically limited amount of elements on earth to also consider the economic perspective so - recycling and the development of new ideas and technologies by the market made ​​raw materials ultimately endlessly available, as energy ( the sun ) to human standards am always sufficiently available. Human activity is ultimately small compared to the wealth and Vielfaltigkeit nature, which Simon also moved from resisting fears to show to the ozone hole and global warming skeptic.

Simon turned in no uncertain terms against the population- related doomsday scenarios of a Malthusian Paul R. Ehrlich and his predecessors - for Simon was population growth positive foundation for innovation and progress.

Trivia

Major economists such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman and Aaron Wildavsky voted to Simon, Paul R. Ehrlich and Albert Bartlett are among his critics, Bjorn Lomborg to his imitators; in German-speaking countries it is outside the libertarian scene (Dirk Maxeiner, Michael Miersch ) hardly known.

Today's global practice of airlines overbook flights to systematically, but voluntarily resigning passengers to pay an attractive premium, goes back to a proposal Simons. Previously on overbooking individual passengers had been rejected at random.

Had John M. Tierney of the New York Times and Peak Oil expert Matthew Simmons - future completed again falling oil price runs until 2011, a bet on a ( so Tierney's assumption) - with reference to Simons. Tierney, a student Julian Lincoln Simon won the bet, which continued to run even after death and Simmons commented pointedly, " for now I'd say did Julian Simon's advice remains as good as ever. You can always make news with doomsday predictions, but you can make money betting against Usually them " (, German: " Julian Simon's advice remains still true: You can make headlines with Weltuntergangsprophezeihungen earns you money one by holding against them " )

His most successful book publication has written about mail order catalogs Simon, to the success of his pessimistic adversary Simons refutations were never approach.

Training

• BA, Harvard University, experimental psychology, 1953
• MBA, University of Chicago, 1959
• PhD, University of Chicago, business economics, 1961

Writings

• The Ultimate Resource. ' 1981, ISBN 0-85520-563-6.
• The Ultimate Resource II 1996, ISBN 0-691-00381-5.
• Julian Simon and Herman Kahn ( ed.): The Resourceful Earth: A Response to " Global 2000 ". 1984, ISBN 0-631-13467-0.
• The Economic Consequences of Immigration into the United States.
• Effort, Opportunity, and Wealth: Some Economics of the Human Spirit.
• Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression. Foreword by Albert Ellis and Kenneth Colby. ISBN 0-8126-9098-2.
• The Hoodwinking of a Nation. ISBN 1-56000-434-7.
• A Life Against the Grain: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist. ISBN 0-7658-0532-4.
• Norman Myers: Scarcity or Abundance? A Debate on the Environment. 1994, ISBN 0-393-03590-5.
• The Philosophy and Practice of Resampling Statistics.
• Basic research methods in social sciences: The art of empirical investigation. ISBN 0-394-32049-2.
• With Peter C. Bruce: Resampling: A Better Way to Teach ( and Do ) Statistics.
• The Science and Art of Thinking Well in Science, Business, the Arts, and Love.
• Economics of Population: Key Modern Writings. ISBN 1-85278-765-1.
• The State of Humanity. ISBN 1-55786-585 -X.
• Stephen Moore: It's Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years. ISBN 1-882577-97-3 (Manuscript completed posthumously by Stephen Moore).