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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.
Autobiography of Herbert A. Simon
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1978
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.