Models of My Life

Simon won the Nobel Prize in economics, helped found artificial intelligence, and worked across political science, psychology, organisation theory and computer science. This autobiography covers that range, from his childhood in Milwaukee and his municipal administration research in the 1930s through Carnegie Mellon, the Logic Theorist program, and the development of bounded rationality.

The intellectual through-line is a single question: how do people make decisions when they cannot possibly compute the optimum? Simon's answer, developed first in Administrative Behavior and elaborated for fifty years, is that people satisfice rather than maximise. They set an aspiration level, search until they find an option that meets it, and stop. He argues this is not a failure of rationality but the only rationality available to a system with limited computation facing an environment of enormous complexity. He applies the same framework to organisations, treating a firm as a structure that decomposes an unmanageable decision problem into parts small enough for people to handle.

Simon also uses the book to describe his own career as a series of decisions made under exactly the conditions he studied, including his account of academic politics, his fights over the direction of economics, and his view of why the field rejected his position. He is candid about which of his predictions about artificial intelligence were wrong, though he remained more optimistic than the record supported. The book is discursive and some sections on university administration are of limited interest. Read it for bounded rationality stated by its author and for the account of how a research programme crosses disciplines.