Herbert A. Simon - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Herbert Alexander Simon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on June 15, 1916. His father, Arthur Simon (1881–1948), was an electrical engineer who had come to the United States from Germany in 1903 after earning his engineering degree from the Technische Hochschule of Darmstadt. Arthur, an inventor who was granted "several dozen patents", was also an independent patent attorney. Herbert's mother, Edna Marguerite Merkel, was an accomplished pianist whose ancestors had come from Prague and Cologne. Herbert's European ancestors had been piano makers, goldsmiths, and vintners. Simon's father was Jewish and his mother came from a family of Jewish, Lutheran, and Catholic backgrounds.

Herbert Simon was educated as a child in the public school system in Milwaukee where he developed an interest in science. He found schoolwork to be interesting but rather easy. Unlike many children, Simon was exposed to the idea that human behavior could be studied scientifically at a relatively young age due to the influence of his mother’s younger brother, Harold Merkel, who had studied economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under John R. Commons. Through his uncle’s books on economics and psychology, Simon discovered the social sciences. Simon received both his B.A. (1936) and his Ph.D. (1943) in political science, from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Harold Lasswell and Charles Edward Merriam.

Among his earliest influences, Simon has cited Richard Ely’s economics textbook, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion, and Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. In 1933, Simon entered the University of Chicago, and following those early influences, he studied the social sciences and mathematics. He was interested in biology, but chose not to study it because of his "color-blindness and awkwardness in the laboratory". He chose instead to focus on political science and economics. His most important mentor at the University was Henry Schultz who was an econometrician and mathematical economist. After enrolling in a course on "Measuring Municipal Governments," Simon was invited to be a research assistant for Clarence Ridley, with whom he coauthored the book Measuring Municipal Activities in 1938. Eventually his studies led him to the field of organizational decision-making, which would become the subject of his doctoral dissertation.