His experience being hazed as a scout influenced a worldview which disliked elitism and sympathized with what he described as "the struggling poor, the powerless, and those denied opportunity by circumstance.

At Harvard, Simon was a member of its Reserve Officers' Training Corps program and attended on a full scholarship provided by the Holloway Plan.

[25] He published widely on topics concerning advertising and marketing, later broadly researching subjects from library storage to suicide to airline overbooking.

Simon used his previous experience in marketing towards promoting birth control; articles he published recommended campaigns for family planning.

He drew the attention of W. Parker Mauldin of the Population Council, who arranged for him to visit India to research possible ways to advertise birth control.

He also came to be influenced by Danish economist Ester Boserup, who found that, in contrast to Thomas Malthus, a growing population determined the most efficient agricultural practices.

"[30] In February 1970, Simon took the place of psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton to speak at a faculty forum in his home city of Urbana, Illinois.

They came amid growing fears by environmental activists, who drew from biologist Paul R. Ehrlich's 1968 book, The Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome's 1972 report, The Limits to Growth.

Economists posited that scarcity was a changing, dynamic variable rather than the more commonly espoused view among scientists that it was a constraint which caused an ecological collapse.

[39] Simon moved in 1983 to join the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, as a professor in its Robert H. Smith School of Business, where he remained for the rest of his academic career.

"[43] Simon explained that technological advancements would alleviate scarcity because "we find new lodes, invent better production methods, and discover new substitutes.

Arguing that technology was not sufficient to replace essential ecological systems, they asserted that a scarcity of energy and minerals remained a present danger.

"[45] Biologist Wayne Davis at the University of Kentucky disputed a claim made by Simon's article that oil prices would decrease, saying it "defies logic.

[46] Ehrlich garnered broad public attention for his views and disseminated his concerns in the Saturday Review, Playboy, Penthouse, and on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, where he was a frequent guest and had at least 20 appearances.

[49] Simon later recalled of Ehrlich: "Here was a guy reaching a vast audience, leading his juggernaut of environmentalist hysteria, and I felt utterly helpless.

Ehrlich offered Simon a set of 15 metrics over 10 years, victor to be determined by scientists chosen by the president of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005.

There was no meeting of minds, because Simon felt that too many of the metric's measured attributes of the world were not directly related to human welfare, e.g. the amount of nitrous oxide in the atmosphere.

Simon argues that our notions of increasing resource scarcity ignore the long-term declines in wage-adjusted raw material prices.

His ideas were praised by Nobel Laureate economists Friedrich Hayek[57] and Milton Friedman, the latter in a 1998 foreword to The Ultimate Resource II, but they have also attracted critics such as Paul R. Ehrlich, Albert Allen Bartlett and Herman Daly.

E.g. aluminium was never as expensive as before 1886 and steel used for medieval armor carried a much higher price tag in current dollars than any modern parallel.

[59] Simon was skeptical, in 1994, of claims that human activity caused global environmental damage, notably in relation to CFCs, ozone depletion and climate change.

These included lead pollution & IQ, DDT, PCBs, malathion, Agent Orange, asbestos, and the chemical contamination at Love Canal.

But also, to a startling degree, the decision about whether the overall effect of a child or migrant is positive or negative depends on the values of whoever is making the judgment – your preference to spend a dollar now rather than to wait for a dollar-plus-something in twenty or thirty years, your preferences for having more or fewer wild animals alive as opposed to more or fewer human beings alive, and so on.

An article entitled "The Doomslayer"[29] profiling Julian Simon in Wired magazine inspired Danish Bjørn Lomborg to write the book The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Simon was also the first to suggest that airlines should provide incentives for travelers to give up their seats on overbooked flights, rather than arbitrarily taking random passengers off the plane (a practice known as "bumping").

[57] Although the airline industry initially rejected it, his plan was later implemented with resounding success, as recounted by Milton Friedman in the foreword to The Ultimate Resource II.

(Simon along The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving 1995[63]) Diamond claims that a continued stable growth rate of earth's population would result in extreme over-population long before the suggested time limit.

Simon argued that people do not become poorer as the population expands; increasing numbers produce what they needed to support themselves, and have and will prosper while food prices sink.

He therefore argued physical limitations play a minor role and shortages of raw materials tend to be local and temporary.

Lomborg has stated that he began his research as an attempt to counter what he saw as Simons' anti-ecological arguments but changed his mind after starting to analyze the data.