Time & Perspective Quote by Herbert Simon

Simon is doing something quietly subversive here: puncturing the ego-soothing idea that humans are bottomless wells of mystery. Read as a scientist’s provocation, the line reframes “complex people” as “complex situations.” The hook is its reversal of common sense. We treat contradictory choices, shifting moods, and long-term life arcs as proof of an intricate inner machine. Simon suggests the opposite: the machine can be relatively simple; it’s the input stream that’s baroque.

The intent is methodological as much as philosophical. Simon, a pioneer of bounded rationality and systems thinking, is arguing for an approach to human behavior that looks outward: at incentives, information, institutions, and constraints. The subtext is a critique of explanations that flatter psychology at the expense of structure. If behavior looks chaotic, don’t rush to diagnose an unfathomable psyche; map the environment’s moving parts. In practice, that means policy, design, and organizational choices can produce “new people” without anyone’s personality changing at all.

Context matters: mid-20th-century social science was wrestling with whether humans could be modeled without reducing them to cartoons. Simon’s move is to keep the model but widen the frame. Complexity migrates from the person to the system. That shift also carries a moral charge. It nudges responsibility upward: if workplaces, platforms, or bureaucracies reliably yield shortsighted or cruel behavior, the convenient story is individual failure. Simon’s line insists we scrutinize the architecture that makes certain actions the easiest ones to take.