Julian Simon
Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932–February 8, 1998) was professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He wrote many books and articles, mostly on economic subjects. He is best known for his work on population, natural resources, and immigration. His works are often quoted by libertarians.His book The Ultimate Resource, later reissued as The Ultimate Resource 2, is a massive assault on the conventional wisdom of population growth and resource consumption. In it, Simon challenged the neo-Malthusian notion that an increase in population has negative economic consequences, that population is a drain on natural resources, and that we stand at risk of running out of resources through over-consumption.
In 1980 Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich entered into a famous wager, betting on a mutually agreed upon metric of resource scarcity. Simon won the bet. Later a more rigourous bet—less susceptible to statistical flukes—was offered Simon, involving 15 metrics over 10 years, victor to be determined by scientists chosen by the president of the NAS in 2005. If Simon took the bet, he did not live it out.[1]
An article profiling Julian Simon in Wired magazine inspired Bjørn Lomborg to write the revisionist environmental book The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Simon was also the first to suggest that airlines should provide rewards for travelers to give up their seats on overbooked airlines rather than arbitrarily keep certain passengers off the plane.
Simon was an omnivorous reader, and took some steps toward writing a memoir. He died at the age of 66.
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