Economics Professor, Nobel Laureate Leontif Dies

Wassily Leontief, a professor who taught at Harvard for 44 years until 1975 and won the 1973 Nobel Prize in economics, died last Saturday. He was 93.

The Russian immigrant, whose academic genius led him to teach at one of the most prestigious economics programs in America, was a pioneer of the study of production systems.

His analysis of the 1973 Arab oil crisis, which he said would splinter off to affect demand for many other goods became a permanent part of the way countries and businesses all over the world accurately predicted and planned production, according to the Nobel committee.

Leontief left his native Soviet Union in 1925 to continue his studies at the University of Berlin, because he felt intellectual and personal freedoms were being restricted. Four years later, he emigrated to the United States where he found a job with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), based in Cambridge.

His work attracted the attention of the university, which later hired him as a professor in the Department of Economics. While at Harvard, Leontief developed his theories on production, especially in third-world nations.

Leontief used his ideas to assist the U.S. government in World War II as a consultant to the Department of Labor. He also received funding from the Ford Foundation, which he used to establish the Harvard Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy.

At Harvard, where he would eventually be honored with the Lee chair in economics, Leontief completed his ground breaking research on these modes of production, and attracted the attention of the Nobel Committee.

"His ideas of input-output greatly helped administrators and researchers understand economics, and increase levels of efficiency and profitability," said Robert Dorfman, Wells Professor of Political Economy and a close friend of Leontief.

Friends and colleagues describe Leontief as an academic free thinker. When students took over University Hall in 1969, Leontief sided with a younger group of professors who sympathized with students' concern. He also challenged the teaching situation at the University, saying that teachers spent too much time theorizing and less time gathering facts, which should constitute the meat of their work.

Dorfman said that Leontief's prominence was due to his meticulous compilation and analysis of evidence, which was deficient in academia at the time.

"No one before had really done the work to get the data and publish the results. It made him famous," he said.

In 1975, Leontief accepted a position at New York University (NYU), which offered him a lucrative job in their department of economics.

"It was pretty common knowledge that he was not receiving enough support and recognition from Harvard," Dorfman said. "New York University offered him a very nice job. They offered him excellent terms which Harvard was not prepared to match."

Leontief taught at NYU as the Director of the Institute of Economic Analysis until his retirement in 1990. He continued to do research on economic input-output analysis, advising many foreign countries, including China, to increase their industrial production.

"He was a very pleasant person, and proud of his accomplishments," Dorfman said. "He was a very intelligent and able man."