Julian Simon, American economist and author (b. 1932)
Julian Lincoln Simon (February 12, 1932 – February 8, 1998) was an American professor of business administration at the University of Maryland and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute at the time of his death, after previously serving as a longtime economics and business professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Simon wrote many books and articles, mostly on economic subjects. He is best known for his work on population, natural resources, and immigration. Simon is sometimes associated with cornucopian views, but he denied the label. Rather than focus on the abundance of nature, Simon focused lasting economic benefits from continuous population growth, even despite limited or finite physical resources, empowered primarily by human ingenuity which would create substitutes, and technological progress.
He is also known for the famous Simon–Ehrlich wager, a bet he made with ecologist Paul R. Ehrlich. Ehrlich bet that the prices for five metals would increase over a decade, while Simon took the opposite stance. Simon won the bet, as the prices for the metals sharply declined during that decade.