Wassily Leontief — econ (nobel) with roots in the Russian Empire
He was born in Munich in August 1905 to Russian parents - his father a professor of economics, his mother an art historian from a wealthy Jewish family of Odessa. The paternal line were Old Believer merchants who had been in Saint Petersburg since 1741. The family returned to the Russian capital when he was a year old and re-registered his birth there, which is why most reference works give his birth as 1906 in Saint Petersburg. He kept that version on his documents for the rest of his life, having found by the 1940s that the FBI, the security services and his own passport had all accepted it and that correcting it would cause more trouble than it solved. He told his own family the true date on his ninetieth birthday, in 1995.
He was educated at home by his mother and tutors and entered Petrograd University in 1921 at fifteen, moving through philosophy and sociology before settling on economics. He took his degree of Learned Economist in 1925, aged nineteen. Among the memories he set down decades later were the national mourning at Tolstoy's death, stray bullets in the first days of the February Revolution, and Lenin addressing a crowd from a platform in front of the Winter Palace.
He was detained several times by the Cheka in those student years for campaigning for the independence of the sciences and for free speech. What eventually got him out was a medical error. In 1925 a growth was found, diagnosed as a sarcoma, and the authorities granted him permission to travel to Germany on the reasoning that he was going to die anyway. In Berlin it was found to be benign.
He took his doctorate at Berlin in 1928 under Ladislaus Bortkiewicz and Werner Sombart, with a thesis on the economy as a circular flow, worked at the Institute of World Economics in Kiel, and moved to the United States in 1931. He was at Harvard from 1932 to 1975, latterly as Henry Lee Professor and director of the Harvard Economic Research Project, and then at New York University, where he founded the Institute for Economic Analysis.
His contribution was input-output analysis: a method for tracing how a change in one sector of an economy propagates through all the others, set out for the American economy in The Structure of American Economy in 1941. It has since become standard equipment for governments and firms trying to anticipate the downstream consequences of demand. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1973.
Four of his doctoral students also won it - Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Vernon Smith and Thomas Schelling - and Hyman Minsky, Dale Jorgenson and Hollis Chenery were among the others he trained. His daughter is the art historian Svetlana Alpers. He died in New York in February 1999, aged ninety-three.
"Left the USSR in 1925 for Berlin; to the United States in 1931"
Migration storyTracing the roots — St. Petersburg
Detained several times by the Cheka as a student for campaigning for academic freedom. He was permitted to leave in 1925 only because doctors had diagnosed a sarcoma and the authorities expected him to die; in Berlin the growth proved benign. Most reference works still give his birth as 1906 in Saint Petersburg, the re-registered version he kept on his documents throughout his life.
Born in Munich in 1905 to Russian parents and raised in Saint Petersburg from the age of one. His father, also Wassily Leontief, was a professor of economics from a family of Old Believer merchants resident in Saint Petersburg since 1741; his mother came from a wealthy Jewish family of Odessa.
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St. Petersburg. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.