W. Leontief; Economist Won Nobel Prize

Wassily Leontief, the Nobel Prize-winning economist whose groundbreaking analysis of the interrelatedness of American production showed how shifts in one sector influenced other sectors, has died.

Leontief died Friday night at New York University Medical Center in New York. He was 93.

The basis of Leontief’s analysis was a table showing what individual industries buy and sell from one another. Adding such sectors as government, foreign countries and consumers, it gave an overall picture of the circulation of goods and services in a national economy.

This analysis of input and output revolutionized business planning and took on a permanent role in both government and private industry around the world.

Born on Aug. 5, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia, Leontief’s family lost its wealth during the revolution. A brilliant student, he enrolled at the University of Leningrad at the age of 15 to study philosophy and mathematics, but his criticism of the new government caught the attention of Communist authorities and he soon landed in jail. “I had some very interesting philosophical discussions with my jailers,” he recalled. “At that time, the Checka [secret police] had some idealists and intellectuals in it, and we had some lively discussions and debates.”

Stints in jail didn’t discourage him from continuing his protests, however, and he was once arrested while putting up anti-government posters on the wall of a military barracks.

He continued his academic studies and changed fields twice before graduating at 18 with a “Learned Economist” degree.

“I began in philosophy and logic but found them . . . too abstract. . . . Then I sank lower into economics, the field nearest to philosophy, but with some substance,” he said.

He was allowed to leave the country in 1925 when a growth was discovered on his neck. Officials believed that Leontief would soon die of what was believed to be a cancerous condition. He moved to Berlin, where he continued his education and his medical care, learning that the growth on his neck was benign. He completed his doctoral work in economics in 1929, with his dissertation containing some of the seeds of his input-output theory.

He spent the next year living in Nanking helping the Chinese government with its industrial planning, specifically a new railroad network.

He joined Harvard University after coming to the United States in the early 1930s. The university gave him a grant and an assistant to develop the input-output theory of economic forecasting, which much of the world would eventually adopt.

It was at Harvard that Leontief began work on his first input-output table. The table listed 10 sectors of the economy, and in a grid pattern showed the values of certain goods and services, where they originated and how they were used. He was able to see the interrelated components of the U.S. economy and to reduce their relative values to algebraic notations that allowed him to analyze current conditions and forecast the effects of various changes.

How, for example, does the output of automobiles hinge on the input of steel, machine tools, paint, rubber and so forth?

It took him months to compile and digest figures that computers would later be able to handle in days. Leontief spent most of the first half of the decade on the project, publishing input-output analyses of the U.S. economy in 1936 and 1937.

“From my studies, I came to the conclusion that you have to use logic and mathematics and quantitative science together,” he said at the time. “You have to develop the interplay between theory and empirical analysis. One cannot only postulate and hypothesize. One must roll up one’s sleeves and do the dirty work too.”

At the turn of the decade, when the United States was anticipating mobilization for war, the government enlisted Leontief’s help. Working as a consultant to the Department of Labor, he supervised the construction of an input-output table covering 95 industries and sectors, based on the business census figures of 1939. He continued as a consultant to the Labor Department until 1947 and from 1943 to 1945 worked for the Office of Strategic Services on the Russian economy.

Through the years, he continued to teach and do research at Harvard.

In awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1973, the Swedish Royal Academy of Science cited Leontief as the “sole and unchallenged creator of the input-output technique. This important innovation has given to economic science an empirically useful method to highlight the general interdependence in the production system of a society.”

The urbane Leontief, who enjoyed wine, the ballet and trout fishing, marched to his own drummer in academic life. Colleagues said he had a “wild” sense of humor, and he often ate lunch at the university’s student cafeteria rather than the faculty club because he said he liked the undergraduates best. “They’re excited about ideas. They’re not afraid to say what they think.”

Although he was the chairman of the university’s Society of Fellows, its most distinguished group of academics, he ended his 44-year relationship with the university a year ahead of retirement. He was critical of an atmosphere in which teachers did not teach and researchers did not do research. He moved to New York University, where he took the position of director of the Institute for Economic Analysis until his retirement in 1991.

From his experiences in and after the revolution, Leontief said he learned that “material conditions of life are not important. “You can live and have ideas . . . even if the temperature in your room is 37 degrees and even if you must walk three blocks for water.”

He is survived by his wife, writer Estelle Helena Marks; his daughter, Svetlana Alpers, an art historian, writer and professor of fine arts at UC Berkeley; and two grandsons.