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Today in History
Wassily W. Leontief dies
Russian-born American economist (b. Aug. 5, 1906, St. Petersburg, Russia—d. Feb. 5, 1999, New York, N.Y.), won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economics for his development of input-output analysis, a method used for analyzing the interrelationships of different sectors of a local or national economy and calculating how changes in one sector will affect others. Although many American economists rejected the notion of centralized economic planning—and opposed Leontief's proposal that the federal government establish an office of national economic planning—input-output analysis was adopted by the governments of numerous industrial countries. Leontief was educated at the Universities of Petrograd/Leningrad in Russia (1921–25) and Berlin (1925–28). In 1928–29, after receiving his Ph.D., he served as an economic adviser to the government of China. Immigrating to the U.S. in 1931, Leontief joined the economics faculty at Harvard University, where he remained until 1975. During 1961 and 1962 he served as a member of an international team of experts studying the potential social and economic impact of disarmament. The group agreed that disarmament would not cause a severe depression, as many other authorities had contended. From 1975 to 1991 Leontief held the post of professor of economics at New York University, where he also served for 13 years as director of the university's Institute for Economic Analysis. Another of his unique contributions to economic theory was his elucidation of the so-called Leontief Paradox, his finding that in the U.S., capital rather than labour is the relatively scarce factor in production. Leontief's publications include The Structure of the American Economy 1919–1929: An Empirical Application of Equilibrium Analysis (1941) and Input-Output Economics (1966).