MEMORANDUM

Others have touched upon the question of when and where Leontief arrived at his
input-output approach.
An account given by Ann Carter, a close associate of Leontief over many years from
the late 1940s is the following:
“When Wassily Leontief first came to the United States, he spent a year or so in
New York working at the National Bureau for Economic Research. He was
developing a new system, later to be called input- output analysis. One day he
received an invitation to join the Harvard faculty. He replied with qualified interest:
he would be pleased to come, but he required a grant of $1500 to cover the cost of a
research assistant to help him with the implementation of his fundamental new
study. They reviewed his project with considerable skepticism. What he proposed
to do was probably impossible and certainly very strange. Still, they seemed to want
him. The $1500 was granted on condition that he agree ‘to report his failure in
writing’ at the end of the year.” (Carter 1976, p.57).
Another long-time Leontief associate, Karen Polenske, places the origin slightly
further back in time: “Leontief indicated that his development of the input-output model of
an economy was influenced by Quesnay and Walras, not Marx, and that he conceived of
the input-output structure in 1927 at the Institute for World Economics in Kiel” (Polenske
2004, p.11). Others have pointed to Leontief’s doctoral dissertation Wirtschaft als
Kreislauf as the origin of his input-output approach.
In the autobiographical note provided for his Nobel award in 1973 Leontief gave a
brief account of the scientific logic in the path he followed:
“Having come to the conclusion that so-called partial analysis cannot provide a
sufficiently broad basis for fundamental understanding of the structure and
operation of economic systems, I set out in 1931 to formulate a general equilibrium
theory capable of empirical implementation.” (Leontief 2015).
This paper thus aims at following the tracks from Leontief’s early life in St. Petersburg
via Berlin, Kiel, New York to Harvard and in that biographical context look at how it
happened that Wassily Leontief arrived at his input-output formulation. There is no
comprehensive biography of Leontief but he spoke freely, often and with many about his
life and experiences. In later years he gave interviews with fascinating details about his
experiences.
While always prepared to speak on his scholarly work and contribute his view on a
wide range of current issues Leontief was reticent about being elevated and presented as an
important personality in the field of economics. Invited in 1988 to contribute a chapter on
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