Leontief Keeps the Prize in the Family

An elegantly simple technique won this year's Nobel Prize in Economics for Wassily W. Leontief, Lee Professor of Economics and the fourth American cited for the award in the past four years.

Leontief's input-output analysis, praised by the Swedish Academy of Science for its broad range of applications, is a predictable tool that maps out the interdependence of industrial output in different types of economy.

Since Leontief developed his model at Harvard in the early 1930s, input-output analysis has become the backbone of planning chiefly in socialist and developing nations.

In the Russian-born economist's own words: "It [input-output] is as simple as a cooking recipe. You add the ingredients and the whole things hands together."

Members of the Economics Department, having watched two of their colleagues rise to Nobel fame in the past two years, agreed that Leontief was a deserving but hardly surprising choice.

While most of Leontief's colleagues praised the 67-year-old economist for his economic inventiveness, one Harvard economist was more impressed with Leontief's "wonderful success at resisting the conservative tendencies of our trade."

Leontief's attitude toward his field, like his input-output model, is free of dogmatic constraints. The Nobel Prize winner has praise for the profit motive in the American economy and the collective controls in the Chinese system.

Pleased with having garnered the Nobel medal for the third time, the Department retired early last Thursday for an evening of celebration.

Leontief demonstrated his independence when he and Kenneth J. Arrow, the 1972 Nobel Prize winner, joined a tiny minority in the Department in support of tenure for radical economist Samuel S. Bowles, associate professor of Economics.

MIT economist Paul A. Samuelson, who received the prize in 1970, jokingly told newsmen the presence of four Nobel medals for Economics in Cambridge was enough to warrant an anti-trust suit.