Wassily Leontief: He Resisted Conservatism'

Most Harvard professors yesterday attached the usual string of superlatives to Wassily W. Leontief, Lee Professor of Economics, who was awarded the 1973 Nobel Prize in Economics: he is "hardworking," "inventive," "brilliant," "creative" and so on.

But only one of Leontief's colleagues cited a quality that probably played no role in the Swedish Academy of Science's selection process.

"Professor Leontief has been wonderfully successful in resisting the conservative tendencies of our trade," John Kenneth Galbraith, War burg Professor of Economics, said yesterday.

Leontief distinguished himself as an independent in Harvard's Economics Department last year when he joined a small minority of Faculty members who voted to award tenure to Samuel S. Bowles, associate professor of Economics.

At that time, Leontief said he supported the radical economist's bid because he felt the Department should concentrate on the broader social issues in the economics field.

Although the Department soundly defeated Bowles' bid for tenure, Leontief said at a press conference yesterday he does not think the situation for Marxist economists at Harvard is hopeless.

"The Department is opening its doors slowly," Leontief said. "Many members are now starting to focus on problems economists previously ignored."

Leontief's own perspective of the discipline in general is consistent with his decision to support Harvard's unsuccessful radical economists. He will not assert that one system or one doctrine is necessarily better than another, but that a variety of economic structures and values are acceptable depending on specific circumstances.

With this outlook, Leontief is able to see virtues both in capitalist America and socialist China. He considers the profit motive the best driving force of the American economy but admires the "purposefulness of the Chinese people."

After a trip to china in 1972, Leontief praised the Chinese Government, which he said "has succeeded in providing a decent living for 800 million people, not an easy thing to do."

A guideline of good government, Leontief said, is: "Never promise more than you can deliver and always deliver what you promise."

Leontief does not believe President Nixon has successfully followed that guideline, and suggests a variety of needed reforms-including tax reform, reallocation of government spending away from the military and toward the "common man", and more aid for less developed countries.

"Let me use Sweden as an example since they gave me this prize," Leontief said. "That country gives four times as much aid to less developed countries in proportion to its income than the U.S."

The Soviet Union, Leontief's birthplace, is not high on his list of model economic systems. Leontief does not emphasize the problems of the Russian economy, but rather says it is plagued by the "troubles familiar to most socialist and most capitalist countries."

Leontief left the Soviet Union in 1925 to continue his education at the University of Berlin. The year after he received his Ph.D., he worked for the Chinese government, planning transportation systems.

He was invited to the United Stated by the National Board of Economic Researchers in New York and in 1931 was offered a teaching post at Harvard. There he began to develop the analysis for which the Swedish Academy awarded him the prize.

Leontief's input-output analysis, in line with his perspective on economics, is value-free and applicable to a variety of market structures.

Basically, the method highlights the interdependence of economic systems-both socialistic and capitalist ones-by recognizing that most goods have a dual nature. What is produced (output) by one industry is used (an input) by another industry to produce something else.

The analysis has ready applications for any type of economic system. In the Soviet Union, for example, input-output analysis has the potential to be used to plan annual production quotas. However, the complexity of data involved has limited Soviet use of the model.

In the U.S. economy, where no central planning is involved, the model can be used to predict consequences of a change in distribution. For example, if fewer resources were allocated to military production, the model could predict which firms and what industries would suffer as a result, and by how much.

In a lighter moment, Leontief compared his Nobel Prize-winning input-output analysis to a cooking recipe: "You add some ingredients, and then you figure out how the whole thing hangs together."