By Donald M. Bishop
This is the story of one young Navy officer in the 1950s, Lieutenant (junior grade) Julian L. Simon. A Harvard graduate commissioned through the Navy ROTC program, he served on one destroyer and finished his three-year career as a naval gunfire liaison officer with the Eighth Marines. When he passed away more than 40 years later, he was honored as an economist who challenged and altered the conventional paradigms on development.[1]
He provides an example of the long and positive effects of even a short time in the Navy. Personnel planners who hope that most new officers – and most new sailors and Marines – will continue to serve for a full career should take heart from Simon’s example. The influence of his short years of service contributed to the nation long after he put his uniform in the closet.
Simon was a contrary junior officer. The captain of his first ship made it easy for him to be transferred, and ambitious naval officers shied away from assignments with Marines. Yet in his short Navy career he absorbed lessons of leadership from positive and negative examples, developed a respect for enlisted sailors and Marines that widened into broad feeling for the worth of every individual, saw ports and countries that influenced his future research, and was profoundly inspired both by Iwo Jima and the Felix de Weldon memorial.
After serving in the Navy and earning advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, Simon (1932-1998) went on to become Professor of Business Administration at the University of Maryland. Many Americans made a living thanks to his book, How to Start and Operate a Mail Order Business.[2]Many more benefit from the “airline oversales auction system” he conceived to deal with the overbooking of flights.[3] His major contributions, however, focused on population, economics, and development, where he altered the trajectory of policy thinking.
Reading Simon's autobiography, A Life Against the Grain,[4] published in 2003, it’s possible to see his unconventional future partly revealed during his three years in the U.S. Navy. He was an officer willing to challenge authority. The 40 pages on his Navy experience in his memoir have not been noticed in the Navy and Marine Corps, but they should be.
Sea Duty
In 1953, Simon completed Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology, a Navy ROTC commission, and a three-year service commitment.
He served aboard the destroyer Samuel B. Roberts (DD-823), and his book relates episodes that sailors and Marines of any generation can recognize — plane guard, refueling at sea, drydock, shore patrol officer, playing poker, leading a handful of sailors in Jewish services, a typhoon, and “the close relationship to awesome nature.”
He was also learning about himself, and Simon is frank about his shortcomings. He found it hard to advocate for more resources needed by his own division, for instance, when he understood the demands on other units of the ship. (Writing on business management later in life, he emphasized that “a sensible manager learns how to fight for resources.”) The Naval Institute Proceedings published an article he wrote,[5] and he heard on the grapevine that General Maxwell Taylor had noticed it, favorably. The ship’s captain, however, dressed him down for not submitting the article through channels.
Frequently assigned to represent sailors as a defense counsel for low level offenses, Simon defended them vigorously. Getting to know his “clients” gave him a window on their world that broadened him as a man. His account, however, includes this self-critical insight: “I did not realize that I was supposed to act my part in a court-martial drama whose script was informally written in the wardroom over coffee. Giving one man a spirited defense that got him off on appeal to higher authority got me in trouble because it was a black mark against the ship. My stupidity about organizational realities like this has persisted throughout my life.”[6]
He loved the outdoor work as the vessel’s First Lieutenant, but then he was assigned to the ship’s Combat Information Center. When the vessel, weaving its way into a harbor, got too close to one of the many small craft there, it placed the ship “in an extremely embarrassing position.” Though the passage was made in daylight, and Simon was not on the bridge, the captain’s ire fell on him in the CIC for not reporting radar contacts. The ensign was informed by letter that he was “relieved of all duties and restricted to the ship for two weeks” under Article 15 of the UCMJ.[7]
Simon's reply surely vexed the captain.
I appeal from this punishment on the basis that the procedure specified in [Manual for Courts Martial, Article 133] was not followed, to the substantial prejudice of my rights. Specifically, no copy of an accusation was furnished to me in accordance with [Article 133]; no warning of self-incrimination, consistent with [Article 134] was given to me before I was asked by the Commanding Officer for a report on what had happened; I was given no opportunity to bring forth the testimony of witnesses; no mast was held; and I had no chance to prove the following facts and circumstances in defense, mitigation, and extenuation, all of which I believe to be true. . . .
Ensign Simon and the captain were not a mutual admiration society, and the skipper made him available for transfer sooner not later.
“With the Girenes”
Simon had heard that ambitious officers did not take such assignments, but he became a Naval Gunfire Liaison Officer with the 2nd Battalion of the 8th Marine Regiment. His chapter on life at Camp Lejeune, “Troopin’ and Stompin’ with the Girenes,” is a good read, full of affection for the Marine Corps. Marksmanship instructors on the ranges of Parris Island and Camp Pendleton might enjoy reading his ideas to improve pistol training.[8]
When he first arrived at Camp Lejeune after 18 months aboard ship, he was no specimen of fitness. By chance, he arrived just before the 2nd Battalion’s annual 26-mile march. A long hike in brand-new boots would be painful. He asked a Navy doctor what he should do, but the physician had no advice. He turned to the Chief Medical Corpsman and to the Gunnery Sergeant.
The “doc” told him to paint tincture of benzoine on his feet wherever they would rub, and the Gunny told him to put on his boots and stand in a bucket of water until the leather got wet and swelled. The boots, the NCO told him, would dry to the shape of his feet. Simon later recalled that he received “Brilliant advice by both ... knowledge that an MD did not have, of course, because one doesn’t die of sore feet.”[9] He was learning that expertise and character don’t necessarily correlate with education, rank, and class.
After a cruise to the Mediterranean with the 1st Battalion, 8th Marines, his service commitment was up.
The Influence of Iwo Jima, Chaplain Gittelsohn, and Felix de Weldon
When he returned to civilian life, Simon spent some time trying to figure out what his life’s work might be. He studied for medical school, spent some time in advertising in New York, earned a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago, married, and taught at the University of Illinois. Later he would move on to the University of Maryland.
In the 1960s and 1970s, learned economists and development specialists promoted a fear of world “overpopulation.” They gave the ideas of Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) – for instance, the “power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man”[10] — a new gloss.
Books like Famine, 1975!, The Population Bomb, and The Population Explosion popularized the theory.[11] Congress appropriated billions of dollars for population control and family planning programs overseas. Some thinkers even became “coercionists,” believing that governments should strictly limit family size. Of course, no family size limits could ever become law in the United States, but that did not make these experts hesitate to advocate them for other countries.
Looking for work in the Washington area in the 1960s, Simon read about the crisis of “overpopulation,” and he heard that population and family planning organizations were hiring. He was ready to sign up for the campaign to reduce the world’s fertility, and he had an appointment for a hiring interview in Rosslyn.
Arriving early, he had some time to kill, so he walked over to the Marine Corps Memorial to see Felix de Weldon’s outsize sculpture of the Marines raising the flag atop Mount Suribachi. As he looked at the Memorial, he remembered reading in a Jewish magazine the great eulogy delivered on Iwo Jima by Navy Chaplain, Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn.[12] This part of the Chaplain’s address came to Simon’s mind:
Somewhere in this plot of ground there may lie the man who could have discovered the cure for cancer. Under one of these Christian crosses, or beneath a Jewish Star of David, there may rest now a man who was destined to be a great prophet to find the way, perhaps, for all to live in plenty, with poverty and hardship for none. Now they lie here silently in this sacred soil, and we gather to consecrate this earth in their memory.[13]
Gittelsohn had spoken of “the man who could have discovered the cure to cancer.” Simon extended the insight to the man who would found a small business or simply be a good employee, the woman who with some training could make childbirths safer, or the farmer who grew food for people in the cities. Surely he thought too of the sailor who kept his eyes open on watch, or the Marine who knew about new boots.
In one of the Navy chapters in his memoir, he wrote, “All my life I have identified and felt more solidarity with the buck private than with his sergeant, more with the sharecropping peasant than the landowner, more with the last team in the league than with the first, more with the caddies than with the golfers whose bags we carried.”[14]
Simon could not, then, square the idea of preventing births on a massive scale with the insight that every newborn has something to offer to the world, a nation, a region, a neighborhood, or a family. In time he saw “population control” as a kind of social engineering directed against the poor and disadvantaged, when their own hands and minds could, even in small ways, make the world better.
Thinking over Chaplain Gittelsohn’s words and the goals of population control, he began to reconsider the notion that the world had too many people. Memories of port calls to crowded Hong Kong and Singapore prompted him to examine the evidence behind the notion that there was a link between dense population and poverty. He found that facts didn’t fit the theories.
I first saw [Hong Kong] in 1955, when I went ashore from a U.S. Navy destroyer. At the time, I felt great pity for the thousands who slept every night on the sidewalks or on small boats. It then seemed clear to me, as it must have to almost any observer, that it would be impossible for Hong Kong to surmount its problems — huge masses of impoverished people without jobs, total lack of exploitable natural resources, more refugees pouring across the border each day.
Fly over Hong Kong ... and you will marvel at the astounding collection of modern high-rise apartments and office buildings. Take a ride on its excellent, smooth-flowing highways for an hour or two, and you will realize that a very dense concentration of human beings does not prevent comfortable existence and exciting economic expansion — as long as the economic system gives individuals the freedom to exercise their talents and to take advantage of opportunities.[15]
A Transfer of Moral Insights
It’s quite striking how Simon took a moral insight from one realm, war and faith, and relocated it in another realm, economics and demography. So is how he began to think that it is people — not farmland, not natural resources, not investment — who are the “ultimate resource.”[16] He didn’t explicitly say so in his autobiography, but his economic conclusion about people as the ultimate resource parallels the insight that it is the individual Marine that is the most important weapon.
That spark of an idea undergirded his later research and thinking on population issues. He founded a school of development economics that emphasized the creative spirit of people in making the world a better place. To Simon, people in the developed world are not “mouths to feed.” They have hands to work, hearts to love, and minds to use.
To those who elided population control with environmentalism, he wrote in 1997, “Our species is better off in just about every measurable material way. Just about every important long-run measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials — all of them — have become less scarce rather than more. The air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe. Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy, with every prospect that this trend will continue.”[17]
The Loneliness of Conviction
Simon's challenge to population control thinking made him a pariah in some academic circles, and he wrote his books with little of the millions of dollars of public and private funding received by the family planners who favored the limitation of population. Although Simon refused any medication, he suffered from depression for many years, and he was discouraged that graduate students followed not the facts of development and growth, but the money available for population control.
Appreciation for his work was scant until he received a letter from Friedrich Hayek. The author of The Road to Serfdom wrote:
I have never before written a fan letter to a professional colleague, but to discover that you have in your Economics of Population Growth provided the empirical evidence for what with me is the result of a life-time of theoretical speculation, is too exciting an experience not to share it with you.[18]
Simon died in 1998. In his honor, The Institute for the Study of Labor and the Liberty Institute in India hold annual Simon lectures. The Competitive Enterprise Institute gives an annual Julian Simon Memorial Award. The Cato Institute in Washington publishes an annual Simon Abundance Index.[19]
Books and studies on population control and family planning would fill a large library, so summarizing the effects of Julian Simon's thinking on the field — largely unacknowledged — in a few words is a challenge.[20] The programs of today are now justified in quite different ways than they were a few decades ago. Early programs pointed to a coming catastrophe caused by “overpopulation” or “runaway population growth.” When Simon challenged population alarmism and reaffirmed the worth of every person, no matter how poor, he helped set the field on a new trajectory. Now advocates of family planning programs focus on woman and child health.
Willing but Contrary
Economists and development specialists have their own views of Professor Julian Simon. What leadership lessons might military leaders draw from the case file of Lieutenant (junior grade) Simon?
The aim of Simon’s autobiography, tellingly titled A Life Against the Grain, was to examine what experiences and influences led him to a certain contrariness, a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. It wasn’t serving in the Navy and with the Marines that made him so. The seeds were planted earlier in his upbringing. Rather his time in uniform made him conscious of this disposition.
His enthusiasm for work as his destroyer’s First Lieutenant, his eagerness to see how problems might be solved by applying sociological principles to a ship, his thinking through a device to improve pistol training, his willingness to do an important job (NGLO with the Marines) not considered career enhancing – all showed a character anchored by duty and service.
At the same time, serving under a captain he came to dislike, pushing against non-judicial punishment that violated the procedures in the Manual for Courts Martial, representing enlisted personnel as a sea lawyer, coming to understand the rigidity of institutions, and gaining respect for the contribution of enlisted men and NCOs showed that a sense of integrity ran strong in his personality. Respect for those who had fewer advantages than he did, sailors and Marines, testify to his worldview.
Some Lessons from Lt. J.G. Simon
Midshipmen and junior officers are urged to read the biographies and autobiographies of the great captains. This is all to the good, but an ensign or a lieutenant may gain more from reading the accounts of junior officers. Simon was not “going up like a rocket” in the Navy, but the frankness of his memoir offers many lessons.
Although we have only Simon’s version of serving on the Samuel B. Roberts, his account might provide some material for a professional discussion among midshipmen and in the schoolhouses. “The case of the unhappy junior officer” is a theme in The Caine Mutiny and Mr. Roberts, and Simon’s memoir might usefully be looked at from an ensign’s point of view, from the captain’s cabin, from the wardroom, and from the deckplates. In the end, both Simon and the ship probably benefited from the captain’s ability to finesse his early transfer. Yet I sense the captain missed an opportunity – to find a way to use Simon’s enthusiasms and talents even if they were not related to his MOS.
Simon’s memoir and his career testify, moreover, that the heritage of the Navy and Marine Corps is a great patrimony. Everyone has heard of Iwo Jima, and the current generation may have seen “Flags of Our Fathers,” but my guess is that few serving sailors and Marines have seen “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” Dan Levin’s great novel of the battle, Mask of Glory,[21] needs to be on service reading lists, as does his account of sending dispatches from the beach, From the Battlefield,[22] published by the Naval Institute on the fiftieth anniversary of the landing. Why not on solemn occasions read Levin's great memorial poem, “We Clasp Our Fallen,”[23] and have the chaplain lead discussions of Rabbi Gittelsohn’s “The Purest Democracy,” which so inspired Julian Simon.
The world is unsettled and each of the armed services faces intimidating new challenges. The Marine Corps hopes to foster creativity and innovation to give it an edge. That’s another way to say it’s time for “unconventional” thinking. Julian Simon’s career offers lessons.
Donald M. Bishop was a Foreign Service Officer. The State Department detailed him to the Pentagon as the Foreign Policy Advisor to Commandant of the Marine Corps General James Conway from 2006 to 2008. Now retired, he is a Krulak Center Distinguished Fellow at Marine Corps University.
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[1] Ben Wattenberg, “Malthus, Watch Out,” The Wall Street Journal, February 11, 1998, reprinted in Robert Bradley, Jr., “ Remembering Julian Simon (1932–1998),” MasterResource blog, at https://www.masterresource.org/simon-julian/remembering-julian-simon-19321998/, accessed 15 January 2024. Gilpin, Kenneth N., “Julian Simon, 65, Optimistic Economist, Dies,” The New York Times, February 12, 1998, B11, at http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/12/business/julian-simon-65-optimistic-economist-dies.html, accessed 15 January 2024.
[2] Julian L. Simon, How to Start and Operate a Mail Order Business (New York: McGraw Hill). The first edition was published in 1965; the fifth edition in 1991.
[3] Julian L. Simon, “The Airline Oversales Auction Plan — The Results,” Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, Volume XXVIII, No. 3, September 1994, pp. 319-23.
[4] Julian L. Simon, A Life Against the Grain: The Autobiography of an Unconventional Economist (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).
[5] Julian L. Simon, “Discipline and the Division,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, v. 81, no. 10, October 1955, 1111-1115, at https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/1955/october/discipline-and-division, accessed 15 . Using David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character (1950) as a starting point, Simon was wrestling with leadership, popularity, and discipline on ships with few experienced officers and petty officers.
[6] A Life Against the Grain, 133.
[7] A Life Against the Grain, 137-138.
[8] A Life Against the Grain, 151-53.
[9] A Life Against the Grain, 150.
[10] Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society (Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard: London, 1798), 13.
[11] William Paddock and Paul Paddock, Famine 1975! America's Decision: Who Will Survive (New York: Little, Brown, 1967); Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968); Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich, The Population Explosion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
[12] A Life Against the Grain, 242-243.
[13] Surprisingly, it is difficult to find the full text of Chaplain Gittelsohn’s eulogy, but the History Division of the Marine Corps provides it: https://www.usmcu.edu/Research/Marine-Corps-History-Division/Frequently-Requested-Topics/Historical-Documents-Orders-and-Speeches/The-Purest-Democracy/, accessed 15 January 2024.
[14] A Life Against the Grain, 132-133.
[15] A Life Against the Grain, 143.
[16] Simon used the phrase to title his most comprehensive study of population: Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). The revised edition, The Ultimate Resource 2, appeared in 1998.
[17] Julian L. Simon, “More People, Greater Wealth, More Resources, Healthier Environment,” Economic Affairs, v. 14, issue 3, April 1994, 22-29. Available online at: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Articles/POPENVI2.txt
[18] The full letter is in A Life Against the Grain, 268.
[19] See Gale L. Pooley and Marian L. Tupy, “The Simon Abundance Index: A new Way to Measure Availability of Resources, Cato institute, Policy Analysis 857, 4 December 2018, at https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/simon-abundance-index-new-way-measure-availability-resources# and “The Simon Abundance Index 2023,” at https://humanprogress.org/the-simon-abundance-index-2023/, both accessed 15 January 2024.
[20] I provided a “wave tops” summary in “Delete ‘Overpopulation’ from the Briefing Slides: Do a Global Replace,” Marine Corps Gazette, vol. 97, no. 3, March 2013, pp. 67-68.
[21] Dan Levin, Mask of Glory (New York: McGraw Hill, 1949). Levin, a Marine Corps Combat Correspondent, landed on Iwo Jima on D-Day.
[22] Dan Levin, From the Battlefield: Dispatches of a World War II Marine (Annapolis: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1995). All of his wartime poetry can be read in Dan Levin, Waiting for B-Train and Other Poems, Southampton, NY: The North Sea Poetry Scene Press, 2010, pp. 67-82.
[23] From the Battlefield, 107ff.