MEMORANDUM

Another Schumpeter initiative soon after arrival at Harvard and much appreciated by
Leontief was an informal group which dined once a month and called themselves “The
Seven Wise Men.” In addition to Schumpeter and Leontief the members of the original
group were Edward Mason, Edward Chamberlain, Overton Hume Taylor, Seymour Harris,
and Douglas Brown. It was Leontief’s idea to make a joint effort to compile funds to
establish a wine cellar. The group wrote an “anti-New Deal” book, published in 1934;
Leontief’s contribution was a chapter in agricultural economics.
The Harvard Committee on Research in the Social Sciences
Harvard had a Committee on Research in the Social Sciences. Harvard faculty in the
social sciences could apply for grants for research assistance, primarily for conducting
empirical investigations. Not many at Harvard Faculty exploited the opportunity, perhaps
not more than five or six each year and often the same persons in successive years. During
Leontief’s third visit to Harvard in March 1932 he was told about the Committee, and as he
would be Harvard faculty from the forthcoming academic year, he was invited to apply.
The secretary of the Committee was Elizabeth Waterman Gilboy whom Leontief knew
from his last years in Germany as a critical, but positively inclined, reviewer of his work on
demand and supply analysis. He would be in frequent touch with her as secretary of the
Committee for the next ten years, as he applied for and received grants from the Committee.
Gilboy went out of her way to smooth out problems that arose in this process. 205
The Committee practiced a simple system for doling out grants for research assistance
to social science faculty. Application for grants from the Harvard Committee had to be
submitted by February for the forthcoming academic year. Applications were submitted on
a two-page form with of a small number of entries; no further project documentation was
normally required. It was a semi-formal procedure. A brief report on the outcome of the
project was expected at the end of the academic year.
The key entries on the form were the name of the project (usually given as descriptive
phrase) and an outline of what it was about. Other entries on the form were about the kind
and cost of assistance required, data needs, publication plans, etc.
The applications and reports submitted by Leontief to the Harvard Committee make up
an interesting source about his research in the 1930s. The early applications were
formulated within the paradigm he had developed in Germany. But at some points the
input-output paradigm emerged out of this process. There are limitations as to what can be
read out of the applications as the information is brief. Applications might have been
discussed informally with the Committee being recorded.
205 Gilboy later became the administrative director of Leontief’s Harvard Economic Research
Project (HERP) from 1948.
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