Wassily Leontief

In 1932, Wassily Leontief married Estelle Marks, a poet and an author, known for her memoir ‘Genia and Wassily’. They had one daughter, Svetlana Leontief Alpers, who later became an art historian, professor, writer and critic.

He passed away at the New York University Medical Center on the night of February 5, 1999. He was then 93 years old and was survived by his wife and daughter.

Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief was born on August 5, 1906 in Munich, Germany. Both his parents were Russians. His father, Wassily W. Leontief, a professor of labor economics at the University of St. Petersburg, belonged to an old-believer family living in that city since 1741. He was educated in Germany.

His mother, Genya nee Becker, an art historian, came from a wealthy Jewish family from Odessa. Shortly before his birth, they had traveled to Munich to avail better medical facility, as a result of which, Wassily was born in Munich, not in St. Petersburg, as claimed by many biographers.

Soon after Wassily’s birth, the family moved back to St. Petersburg, where he was baptized at the Spaso-Preobrazhenskaya Kolotyshinskaya Church at the age of three weeks. Initially they lived in his grandfather’s house; but later moved to Krestovskiy Island.

Like most other children, Wassily had his initial education at the local gymnasium. But everything changed with the advent of the February Revolution in 1917. Although his father was able to keep his job, they lost their property and had to move out of their home.

From 1917 to 1919, Wassily studied at home. Thereafter, he was admitted to the 27th Soviet Union Labor School, from where he graduated in 1921, receiving his school leaving diploma at the age of fifteen.

In 1927, Leontief began his career at the Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Institute for the World Economy) under the University of Kiel. Remaining there until 1930, he worked mostly on the derivation of statistical demand and supply curves.

In 1929, while he was still under the employment of the University of Kiel, he traveled to Nanking, China, at the invitation of the Chinese government, and was employed as an advisor to the Ministry of Railroad. He returned to Germany in the following year, resuming his research work at Kiel.

In 1931, he moved to the United States of America, where he joined the National Bureau of Economic Research, one of the finest organizations working in his field. Here, working from the organization’s New York office, he began his research on the American economy, which had just entered the Great Depression.

Realizing that partial analysis was incapable of explaining the structure and operation of economic systems, he began to formulate a general equilibrium theory that would help in empirical implementation. The papers he published attracted the attention of many economists.

In 1932, he was invited to join the economics department of the Harvard University as an instructor in economics. Before he took up the position, he made sure that the university helped him to develop his ideas on, what later became known as input-output analysis.

As agreed upon, Harvard provided him with a grant of $2,000 as well as a research assistant. With that, he began constructing a table covering 42 American industries for the years 1919 and 1929. It was a tedious work and the figures took him months to compile, after which, they had to perform manual calculations.

In 1933, he was promoted to the post of Assistant Professor. While working on the input-output analysis, he also published a number of papers. For example, in 1933, he published an important article on the analysis of international trade via indifference curves. In 1934, he created his non-linear cobweb model.

In 1935, he became the first social scientist to use a computer. It was, however, not an electronic computer, but a large scale mechanical computing machine. In the same year, he also launched his ‘Price Analysis’ seminar, which would one day help to establish mathematical economics at Harvard.

In 1936, Wassily Leontief published a paper on ‘composite commodities’, which later formed the basis of microeconomic theorem. In addition, he also published reviews on Keynes's General Theory.