http://unstats.un.org/unsd/envaccounting/seearev/meetingMay2011/bg12_MVardon.pdf

International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Wassily_Leontief.aspx

Wassily Leontief was born into an academic family on August 5, 1905, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Saint Petersburg. Upon completing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin in 1928, Leontief started his professional life at the Institute of World Economics at the University of Kiel. He moved to the United States to work for the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1931 and then Harvard University in 1932. He served as the director of the Harvard University Research Project until 1973. Leontief left Harvard for New York University in 1975 to found the Institute for Economic Analysis. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in economic sciences in 1973.
 

Wassily Leontief, who won the Nobel prize in economics in 1973 for his analyses of
America's production machinery, showing how changes in one sector of the economy
can exact changes all along the line, affecting everything from the price of oil to the
price of peanut butter, died Friday night (February 5) at the New York University
Medical Center. He was 93.

His analytic methods, as the Nobel committee observed, were adopted and became a
permanent part of production planning and forecasting in scores of industrialized nations and in private corporations all over the world.

Following the model of his so-called input-output analysis, General Electric, for
example, was able to load data from 184 sectors of the economy -- such as energy, home construction and transportation -- into a mammoth computer to help it predict how the energy crisis brought on by the Arab oil boycott in 1973 would affect public demand for its products and services, from light bulbs to turbines.

A well-known academic figure, Leontief was the director of the Institute for Economic
Analysis of New York University from 1975 until 1991; even after his retirement he still
taught at the university into his 90's. Before coming to N.Y.U. he taught economics at
Harvard for 44 years and directed large research projects there as well.

Then he came to the United States and worked briefly in New York at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where his published work quickly attracted attention, and Harvard invited him to join its economics faculty. He agreed, provided the university help him develop his ideas about production. Harvard gave him a research assistant and a $2,000 grant to develop the system of input-output analysis that the world was to adopt. He and his assistant began constructing a table covering 42 American industries, taking months to compile figures and perform calculations that computers would latter handle in fractions of seconds.

During the war, he helped the United States Government with planning for industrial production, worked as a consultant to the Office of Strategic Services and supervised compilation of a 92-economic-sector table for the Department of Labor. In 1948, Leontief set up the Harvard Research Project on the Structure of the American Economy with the aid of large grants from the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations and the Air Force to expand and refine his input-output models. Soon he had a staff of 20 -- and a 650-punch-card computer from I.B.M., then the state-of-the art.

He did not, however, keep the Air Force grant long once the Eisenhower Administration came to power; some of its officials were critical of his input-output theory as smacking too much of a planned economy. That was precisely what he thought it should smack of.
One of his goals in studying the nature of changes in industrial production was to enable nations to plan in ways that would be economically beneficial and help them avoid periods of economic hardship...

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Nobel Prize in Economics 1973 - Autobiography
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1973/leontief-autobio.html

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. Received a research grant for compilation of the first input-output tables of the American economy (for the years 1919 and 1929) in 1932. Began to make use of a large scale mechanical computing machine in 1935 and Mark I (the first large-scale electronic computer) in 1943.

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Original Applications

After the War, at Aiken's insistence, the Mark I was used on several very original projects. Among these were programs for translating languages, and analyzing econometric models. This latter work, developed by Harvard Professor of Economics Wassily Leontief, simulated the effects of economic currents upon national economies, and eventually led to a Nobel Prize in Economics. Leontief's was the first application of a computer to a problem in the social sciences. Aiken also urged a friend to perform his research on Newton's Principia on the computer. In 1947 and 1949, the Harvard Computation Laboratories sponsored two symposia on "Largescale Digital Calculating Machines." High on the agenda of both these conferences were discussions of new applications of computers, particularly in unconventional fields such as physiology.

Thanks only in part to Adolf Hitler, the foreign rescuers were on their way: Schumpeter from Austria and Weimar Germany; Haberler from Vienna and the League of Nations. It must have been the newly-arrived-in-Cambridge Schumpeter who plucked Leontief from a brief National Bureau stint to Harvard. (I suspect Schumpeter fastened on Leontief as a genius on the basis of the 24-year-old’s German article on how to identify demand and supply elasticities from a time-series sample--a brilliant investment decision even if not 100% cogent.)

Schumpter inset

http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/schumpeterbio.html
http://mises.org/daily/5857/Joseph-A-Schumpeter-Maverick-and-Enigma

New School for Social Research:  Profile - Wassily Leontief

Wassily Leontief's name has been associated with a particular type of quantitative economics: input-output analysis. Input-output was partly inspired by the Marxian and Walrasian analysis of general equilibrium via interindustry flows - which in turn were inspired by Quesnay's Tableau Economique, and was the outgrowth of the "multi-sectoral" approach followed by the Kiel School. Although of fluctuating popularity, input-output analysis has been a mainstay of economics and economic policy and planning throughout the world for the past half-century.

Raised in Russia, Leontief obtained his Ph.D in Berlin. Although the seeds of input-output analysis were already in his work at the Kiel Institute, he would have to wait until he reached Harvard in 1932 to begin constructing an empirical example of his input-output system - an effort which gave rise to his 1941 classic, Structure of American Industry. Leontief followed up this work with a series of classical papers on input-output economics (collected in 1966). Input-output was novel and inspired large-scale empirical work. It has been used for economic planning throughout the world, whether in Western, Socialist or Third World countries.

It was also of crucial theoretical importance. Input-output inspired the analysis of linear production systems, which were instrumental in the development of modern Neo-Walrasian theory. Unusual for most economic contributions, Leontief's system was also crucial for the revival of Classical Ricardian theory. The structure of input-output (albeit with some critical differences) was employed by Piero Sraffa and the Neo-Ricardians in the 1960s to resurrect the theories of Ricardo and Marx.

Leontief's contributions to economics were not limited to input-output. His 1936 article on "composite commodities" made him, together with Hicks, the father of that famous microeconomic theorem. His early reviews of Keynes's General Theory (1936, 1937, 1947, 1948) were important stepping stones to the Neo-Keynesian synthesis's stress on fixed nominal wages in interpreting Keynes's theory. His 1933 article on the analysis of international trade is still learnt today and his 1946 contribution on the wage contract outlined what is now a classical application of the principal-agent model before that term was invented. One of his more stirring contributions has been his 1953 finding that Americans were exporting labor-intensive rather than capital- intensive goods - the "Leontief Paradox" - which brought into question the validity of the conventional factor-proportions theory of international trade.

After having presided, together with Schumpeter, as a teacher over the Harvard generation of the 1930s which was to develop much of post-war economics, Leontief moved to the C.V. Starr Center at New York University. As a critic, Leontief's repeated admonishment of economics for its misuse of mathematics and quantitative methods and the lack of relevance and realism in its theorizing (e.g. 1938, 1954, 1959, 1971) are both lucid, sharp and still pertinent. It was for his development of input-output that Wassily Leontief won the Nobel memorial prize in 1973.