MEMORANDUM

In the beginning of 1936 Estelle gave birth to a daughter. Pitirim Sorokin served as
godfather when she was baptized in the Russian orthodox church and given the name
Svetlana, the same as Stalin’s daughter, born ten years earlier.
* * *
In the 1937 application Leontief asked for a grant for a comparative statistical study of
the structure and interrelation of American industries in 1919-1929. He foreshadowed a
monograph from the complete study. He called it at first in 1937 a “monograph on
statistical study of the general equilibrium”; then in 1938 “monograph on the empirical
application of economic theory of general interdependence.” (Leontief was not particularly
proficient neither at making titles of books and articles, nor on coining new terms.)
Leontief had held the cards close to his chest about the input-output ideas he struggled
with until he had published Leontief (1937). At the Econometric Society meeting in
Atlantic City in December 1937 he presented a paper about what he had achieved under the
title “Empirical application of the economic theory of general interdependence.” The
report in Econometrica comprised the following passage:
“The speaker stressed the difference between his approach and the other similar
attempts to empirical application of the theoretical concept of general interdependence.
The majority of investigators in this field are constrained to reduce the number of the
variables to a few aggregative price and quantity indices because they base their
analysis on the small number of rather complicated non-linear equations. He himself,
on the contrary, reduces the theoretical issue to a solution of large systems of
relatively simple linear equations and thus us able to operate with a much greater
number of variables.” (Econometrica 8, pp.190-191).
* * *
In 1938 the Leontief family moved from a rented apartment on 22 Forest Street to a
bigger and more comfortable one on 16 Kirkland Road, both in Cambridge. Just after the
war the Leontief family purchased half of a two-family house on 14 Ash Street to become
neighbors with the Schumpeters around the corner on Acacia Street. Leontief had bought a
piece of American soil already in 1937 when he purchased an estate – a dacha – on Lake
Willoughby at Barton, Vermont. It was a retreat for the family and a place for trout fishing
as well as for hiking and mushroom picking .
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