MEMORANDUM

* * *
Wassily and Estelle went on a pleasure trip to Europe in the early part of the summer
of 1934. In Paris they run into Henry Schultz in the middle of June. Later they visited the
parents in Berlin and went to Spain. Leontief may have been worried about the situation of
the parents in Germany after Hitler’s accession to paper.
* * *
In 1935 Leontief asked for an additional appropriation for an assistant to complete the
table. To compile an input-output table is a quite demanding project, especially when there
is no blueprint or guidebook. Very comprehensive work on the 1919 table had been done
with few resources and it should not surprise that scrutiny at a late stage indicates that an
additional effort is required before publishing the table. An application for an additional
appropriation was held up by the Committee, causing some aggravation both inside and
outside the Committee. It seems that within the committee some members doubted both
the worthwhileness of the table and whether it would ever be finished. This was a very
serious matter for Leontief because without the completed table he would not have much to
show for himself as an outcome of his research activity at Harvard. In the short run nothing
more could be done. Leontief decided to raise the matter again by applying the following
year for reopening the project.
But Leontief had also another project in 1935: “A statistical study of price-quantity
changes of selected commodity markets from the point of view of general equilibrium.”
The title was almost identical with project (b) in 1934. Leontief took crucial steps towards
basing his general equilibrium on a linear structure. Also at this point the application
documents use disappointingly few words conveying the ideas he dealt with. The outline of
the 1935 project described it as an investigation combining on the one hand the empirical
survey of the mutual interrelation of American industries which has supplied “quantitative
information concerning the circuit flow of commodities, services and incomes”, i.e. the
1919 input-output table, and on the results of his study of price-quantity relations of
selected commodities, i.e. project b) in 1934.
* * *
After his confrontations with Frisch in 1934 Leontief may have felt disinclined to
submit any more of his work to Econometrica but in 1935 he got a paper accepted. It
happened more or less accidentally without a prior intention of submitting a paper.
Leontief presented in June 1935 a paper titled Composite commodities and the
problem of index numbers to an Econometric Society meeting in Colorado Springs. It was
a small meeting, only a handful of papers were presented. Charles Roos and Harold
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