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A Life in Economics

Wassily Leontief was born August 5th, 1905 in Munich, the son of Wassily W. Leontief and his wife Eugenia. A brilliant student, he enrolled in the newly renamed University of Leningrad at only 15 years old.

He got in trouble by expressing vehement opposition to the lack of intellectual and personal freedom under the country's Communist regime, which had taken power three years earlier. He was arrested several times.

In 1925, he was allowed to leave. He said the authorities believed that a growth on his neck was cancerous and that he would die and be of no use to the state. He went to Berlin to resume his studies in Economics at the University of Berlin. The growth was benign and he received his doctorate in 1929.

He spent a year in China as an economist advising the government of China. Then he came to the United States and worked briefly with the National Bureau of Economic Research, where his work received much attention. Harvard then invited him to join its economics faculty.

At Harvard, he developed his theories and methods of Input-Output analysis. This work earned him the Nobel prize in Economics in 1973 for his analysis of America's production machinery. His analytic methods, as the Nobel committee observed, became a permanent part of production planning and forecasting in scores of industrialized nations and in private corporations all over the world.

Wassily Leontief stayed at Harvard for 44 years. He then became the director of the Institute for Economic Analysis of New York University from 1975 until 1991. Even after his retirement he still taught at the university until he was in his 90's.

Wassily Leontief, a balletomane and connoisseur of fine wines, said it was all very well and good to be an internationally regarded scholar, but landing a beautiful brook trout was his passion.

Professor Leontief passed away on Friday February 6th, 1999.

Adapted by Turi McKinley from "Wassily Leontief, Economist who won a Nobel prize, dies at 93" by Holcomb B. Noble, The New York Times

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