Wassily Leontief On winning the Nobel Prize for Economic Science, 1 Jan. 1973. Courtesy of AP Images.

Leontief, Wassily (1906-1999), economist, was born in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the son of Wassily W. Leontief, an economics professor, and Eugenia Bekker Leontief. Young Wassily was a precocious child who managed to withstand the political turmoil surrounding his early years, as various radical groups attempted to end tsarist rule. In 1917, under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin, revolutionaries succeeded in deposing the monarchy. Four years later, at the age of fifteen, Wassily Leontief entered the University of Saint Petersburg, now called the University of Leningrad to reflect the new name of his birthplace. There he studied economics and became something of a counterrevolutionary, as he joined with other students to protest restrictions of the Communist government on intellectual freedom, and he was jailed on several occasions. In 1925, after four years of study and the receipt of a master's degree, Leontief developed a tumor that was thought to be malignant. He was allowed to leave the country for treatment, and he emigrated to Berlin; his parents joined him there soon afterward. Leontief's medical condition proved benign, and he enrolled at the University of Berlin, where he completed his doctorate in economics in 1928. In 1927-1928 he was employed at the Institut für Weltwirtschaft (Institute for World Economics), a research institution at the University of Kiel, where he focused on supply-and-demand curves. In 1929, at the invitation of the Chinese government, he traveled to Nanking, China, and served as an economic adviser to the Chinese Ministry of Railroads. Leontief resumed his research at the University of Kiel the following year; then, in 1930, he emigrated to the United States. He was hired by the private, nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, the preeminent organization in his field in the United States. In the New York City office of the National Bureau he began research on the American economy, then in the early stages of the Great Depression that would soon engulf the world.

In late 1931 Leontief joined the faculty of Harvard University as an instructor in the economics department. He gradually moved up the academic ladder, becoming an assistant professor in 1933 and an associate in 1939. During World War II, he took a leave of absence from Harvard to work for two years (1943-1945) at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C.; the OSS, a newly formed national security agency in Washington, D.C., was the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Promoted to full professor in 1946, Leontief founded the Harvard Economic Research Project two years later and remained its director until 1972. Leontief was named the Henry Lee Professor of Economics in 1953 and held that chair for twenty-two years. During his years at Harvard, Leontief was a visiting professor at the University of Manchester, England (1951), and the University of California (1959), and was a consultant to the U.S. Department of Labor (1941-1947; 1961-1965). In 1961 he served as a consultant to the United Nations on the economic consequences of disarmament, and in the late 1960s he was also a consultant to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Beginning in the early 1930s, Leontief had begun focusing on what would become his life's work: the study of industrial outputs and their relationship to inputs, which Leontief named input-output analysis. Traditionally, economies and their consequences had been studied as the sum of four basic inputs--land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Leontief proposed a more finely tuned way of looking at a given economy, examining the interrelationships of industries functioning within that economy--specifically, how one industry's outputs become the input of another industry. To cite one widely used, though simplistic, example, part of the output of the rubber industry provides input for the automobile industry in the form of tires, while some of the automobile industry's output of vehicles is bought by the rubber industry and thus becomes input for that industry.

As a tool for input-output analysis, Leontief devised a grid representing various sectors of the economy that could be used to document multiple transactions. By manipulating and cross-referencing the grid data, an analyst could determine the "Leontief inverse"--what was required of any given sector to produce an additional dollar's worth of output. Input-output analysis became a valuable tool for economists and businesspeople alike, enabling them to project demand and to predict so-called ripple effects among various sectors of the economy. Leontief's method also encouraged policy makers to consider the interdependence of a number of variables in predicting outcomes, rather than focusing on a simple one-to-one relationship. A tax on a specific commodity such as oil, for example, might affect not only the demand for gasoline but would also have an impact on other related industries, such as automobile manufacturing and steel.

In postwar America, as well as in other parts of the Western world that had been severely affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s, Leontief's analytic methods improved efficiency and were widely put into practice. Even Marxist economists in the Soviet Union were believed to have profited from his insights prior to the collapse of the Communist system there in the early 1990s, and in the late twentieth century he was hired as an adviser to the Communist government in China. Meanwhile, Leontief had refined his methods over the years, extending their application. In the early 1960s, as the rise in U.S. defense spending came under increasing scrutiny and criticism, he became a nationally recognized authority on the impact of military budgets on the national economy. His argument that cuts were both necessary and viable was persuasive to presidents as well as legislators in Washington, with the result that defense spending as a percentage of overall expenditures declined over a period of several decades.

In addition to input-output analysis, Leontief became identified with another important formulation that challenged classical economic assumptions about the export of capital: the so-called Leontief paradox. Because the United States was richer in capital--i.e., money and goods to create wealth--than in labor, the classical position held that the nation would export primarily capital-intensive products. In fact, Leontief demonstrated that the United States was exporting a preponderance of labor-intensive goods, such as farm produce.

Leontief's professional accomplishments earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1973. By this time, he had become openly critical of the Harvard economics department, as well as the university administration, which he believed was not responding effectively to student protests and demands for curriculum changes that had arisen on college campuses throughout the nation. In 1975 he left Harvard to become the director of the Institute for Economic Analysis at New York University (NYU) and remained in that post until 1991. Even in retirement Leontief continued to teach as an emeritus professor at NYU until shortly before his death.

Leontief was the author of several major studies in his field, beginning with his first book, The Structure of the American Economy, 1919-1929, published in 1941; an enlarged edition, The Structure of the American Economy, 1919-1939, appeared in 1951 and was reprinted in 1976. His other books include Die Multiregionale Input-Output-Analyse (Multiregional Input-Output Analysis), published in West Germany in 1963; Input-Output Economics (1966; 2nd ed. 1986); Essays in Economics: Theories and Theorizing (1966), later reissued as Essays in Economics: Theories, Theorizing, Facts, and Policies (1985); Struktureller Ansatz zur Analyse internationaler ökonomischer Interdependenzen (Structural Approaches to the Analysis of International Economic Interdependency), published in West Germany in 1971; and The Future of the World Economy (1977). With Herbert Stein, he coauthored The Economic System in an Age of Discontinuity (1976); with Faye Duchin, he coauthored Military Spending: Facts and Figures, Worldwide Implications, and Future Outlook (1983), The Future of Nonfuel Minerals in the U.S. and World Economy: Input-Output Projections, 1980-2030 (1983), and The Future Impact of Automation on Workers (1986). In addition, he was the editor of Structure, System, and Economic Policy: Proceedings of Section F of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1977). Leontief was also a contributor to an essay collection, Studies in the Structure of the American Economy (1953; reprinted 1976), and wrote frequently for academic and professional journals in the United States and abroad.

In his personal life, Leontief was a wine connoisseur and a lover of ballet, and he enjoyed trout fishing at his summer home in rural Vermont. Publicly he was known as a man fiercely dedicated to his profession, with little patience for small talk. Moreover, he disdained those both within and outside the field who eschewed the meticulous collection and examination of data as a basis for their pronouncements. Like the infamous Mr. Gradgrind in Charles Dickens's Hard Times, Leontief, above all, demanded facts. He was also a tireless exponent of technology, dismissing those who did not extol and embrace its benefits. Yet he apparently became something of a Luddite himself, at least by default, as he grew older: though he witnessed the wholesale adoption of computers not only by business and industry but also in the home, he reportedly never learned to type well enough on a keyboard to make use of them.

Leontief married Estelle Marks, a poet, in 1932; they had one child, a daughter. He died in New York City.

Biographical information is limited. See Robert Dorfman, "Wassily Leontief's Contributions to Economics," in Henry W. Spiegel and Warren J. Samuels, eds., Contemporary Economists in Perspective (1984). See also the Web site of the International Input Output Association: www.iioa.org/leontief/memoriam.html. In addition, see entries for "Wassily Leontief" in the Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History (1999) and the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1979). An obituary is in the New York Times, 7 Feb. 1999.