Wassily Leontief

Origins and early life

Wassily Leontief was born in Munich on 5 August 1905, where his father, an economist from a Saint Petersburg family of Old Believer merchants, was a doctoral student; his mother, Zlata Becker, had been born into a Jewish family from Odessa.

Work and career

When the family settled in Saint Petersburg in 1906, his mother was baptized into the Orthodox faith as Evgenia, and the boy was baptized and raised in his grandfather's house, among Old Believers: his place in this directory is by descent, through his mother. Taught at home by her, he entered the university of Petrograd in 1921 and graduated as a Learned Economist in 1925. That year he was allowed to leave for Germany, the authorities believing him to be dying of a sarcoma that proved to be nothing of the kind, and in 1928 he took his doctorate in Berlin with a thesis on the economy as a circular flow.

After three years at the Kiel Institute for World Economics and a year in China in 1929 advising the Ministry of Railways, he went to New York in 1931 and to Harvard in 1932, the year he married the poet Estelle Marks. There he compiled the first input-output tables of the American economy, a table of what each sector delivers to every other, published in 1941 as Structure of the American Economy, 1919-1929, and directed the Harvard Economic Research Project from 1948 to 1973.

Recognition

In 1973 he received, alone, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, “for the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems”. In 1975 he moved to New York University, where he founded the Institute for Economic Analysis, and four of his doctoral students, Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Vernon Smith and Thomas Schelling, also received the prize. His daughter, Svetlana Alpers, became an art historian, and he died in New York on 5 February 1999, aged ninety-three.