Models of My Life (Magill Book Reviews)

As befits a world-class theorist, Herbert Simon’s MODELS OF MY LIFE is more explicit than most autobiographies in establishing at the outset the structural principles governing his telling of his life. Describing his life as a maze or series of mazes, Simon is consciously playing against preconceptions. For many readers, he knows, the maze will conjure negative images of intense pressure and confusion, of fateful choices with possibly disastrous consequences. For many, too, the maze will suggest a negative image of the scientist as an aloof experimenter, full of hubris, running his subjects through their paces.

Simon takes this charged image and makes it symbolic of his life’s work: the study of human decision-making. Most of the key choices he has made, Simon notes, were not “deliberate, wrenching decisions to go off in one direction or another.” Only in retrospect did it become clear how his decision to follow one path subsequently determined the range of other paths from which he could choose.

Human beings, Simon argued while still in his early twenties, don’t make decisions in the manner assumed by classical economics, rationally arriving at the optimum choice. Rather, “behavior is determined by the irrational and nonrational elements that bound the area of rationality.” This concept of bounded rationality, central to all of Simon’s work, is illustrated by his account of his own life, which he presents as a series of choices within the bounds determined by various givens.

Recounting his boyhood in Wisconsin, his education at the University of Chicago, and his highly successful career, Simon delights in a perspective on human behavior which will strike many readers as reductionist. Not coincidentally perhaps, he largely avoids personal details while giving a great deal of space to matters of academic administration. His brief and somewhat self-conscious look at “Personal Threads in the Warp” merely serves to emphasize all that which his autobiography excludes.

Readers with an interest in autobiography as a genre, especially the flourishing subgenre of scientific autobiography, will not want to miss MODELS OF MY LIFE. The text is supplemented by photographs, a bibliography, and an index.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. LXXXVII, March 1, 1991, p. 1306.

Boston Globe. March 17, 1991, p. 71.

Byte. XVI, July, 1991, p. 351.

Kirkus Reviews. LIX, February 1, 1991, p. 165.

Library Journal. CXVI, February 15, 1991, p. 204.

Nature. CCCL, April 11, 1991, p. 531.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVI, March 17, 1991, p. 1.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXVIII, January 25, 1991, p. 41.

Science. CCLII, May 17, 1991, p. 1014.

SciTech Book News. XV, May, 1991, p. 3.