MEMORANDUM

added: “The arrangement would be as advantageous for you as for him, I feel quite sure,
for he seems to me to be one of those intuitive geniuses in the field who occur so rarely.” 131
Colonel Leonard Ayres was Vice President of The Cleveland Trust Company. Ezekiel
knew as well and in his letter to Ayres he commented upon Leontief Versuch treatise:
“You may have seen his article…in the Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, in which
he puts forth an entirely new method of price analysis. This method does away with
the old assumption that a given analysis would give either a supply curve or a
demand curve, and instead enables the two curves to be determined simultaneously.
I have spent a good deal of time going over his method with him here, and am
convinced that it will considerably extend the possible scope of price analysis,
particularly in industrial products, where the supply as well as the consumption can
be continually adjusted as prices change.” 132
Ezekiel thus had a very positive assessment of Leontief’s method unlike Schultz and
some of those who later reviewed Leontief (1929). Ayres had in his employ the statistician
Bradford B. Smith who Ezekiel held in high regard. Ezekiel remarked if Leontief came to
work at Cleveland Trust he would have Ayres and Smith to confer with and an interest in
much the same industries as those Ayres had been concerned with. Cleveland Trust would
therefore be an ideal place for Leontief to spend the time. At the end of the letter Ezekiel
made the same remark as in the letter to Nourse that Leontief was “one of those intuitive
geniuses” but in this case he added, “and one of whom you have already acquired in the
person of B.B. Smith.” 133
In the preparation of the founding of the Econometric Schumpeter had put forth
Leontief’s name as one who ought to be invited to the organization meeting to found the
Society. Leontief received at the beginning of December 1930 the invitation to attend the
organization meeting in Cleveland, together with the list of all those invited. 134 It is easy to
understand Leontief’s enthusiasm about the Econometric Society, as the key sentence in
the draft constitution that the Society’s aim was to “promote studies that aim at a
unification of the theoretical-quantitative and the empirical-quantitative approach to
economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking similar
to that which has come to dominate in the natural sciences” must have appealed to
131 Ezekiel to Nourse, 10 Novemebr 1930. Edwin G. Nourse became in 1945 the first chairman of
the Council of Economic Advisors.
132 Ezekiel to Ayres, 10 Nov. 1930.
133 The remark suggests Ezekiel’s high appreciation of Smith whose deep insight in econometric
analysis seems to have been unacknowledged at the time, see Mills (2011).
134 Bjerkholt (2017).
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