Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Part I Reflections on input-output economics
- 1 A portrait of the master as a young man
- 2 Leontief's “magnificent machine” and other contributions to applied economics
- 3 Leontief and the future of the world economy
- 4 International trade: evolution in the thought and analysis of Wassily Leontief
- 5 Leontief's input-output table and the French Development Plan
- 6 Leontief and dynamic regional models
- 7 Experiences with input-output and isomorphic analytical tools in spatial economics
- 8 Leontief and Schumpeter: a joint heritage with surprises
- 9 Some highlights in the life of Wassily Leontief – an interview with Estelle and Wassily Leontief
- Part II Perspectives of input-output economics
- Subject index
- Author index
8 - Leontief and Schumpeter: a joint heritage with surprises
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Part I Reflections on input-output economics
- 1 A portrait of the master as a young man
- 2 Leontief's “magnificent machine” and other contributions to applied economics
- 3 Leontief and the future of the world economy
- 4 International trade: evolution in the thought and analysis of Wassily Leontief
- 5 Leontief's input-output table and the French Development Plan
- 6 Leontief and dynamic regional models
- 7 Experiences with input-output and isomorphic analytical tools in spatial economics
- 8 Leontief and Schumpeter: a joint heritage with surprises
- 9 Some highlights in the life of Wassily Leontief – an interview with Estelle and Wassily Leontief
- Part II Perspectives of input-output economics
- Subject index
- Author index
Summary
Close but distant neighbors
Except for the dwindling band of us old-timers, there are few who associate Leontief with Schumpeter. Yet, in many ways, they were a pair. Schumpeter welcomed Leontief to the Harvard faculty in the mid-1930s and continued to respect and even envy Leontief's talents and accomplishments until his death in 1950. Their lives had a lot in common. Both were cultivated European intellectuals, wiry and compact in physical stature, who appreciated Russian caviar, French champagne, ballet, opera and well-informed cultural discussions on topics beyond the range of interest of the average American economist then, or now. Leontief taught the first-year graduate theory course; Schumpeter taught the second. Each had an office of modest size in Littauer Center, headquarters of the Harvard Department of Economics. They walked home across the Cambridge Common to their spacious clapboard houses in Cambridge, less than a block apart. Some twenty years after Schumpeter died Leontief settled into a summer residence in Lakeville, Connecticut, the next town to Taconic, where th Schumpeters had had their country retreat. When the Leontiefs decided to be buried in Connecticut, they approached the caretaker of the local cemetery. He steered them, unwittingly, to the area where “another economist” (guess who?) was buried. Thus Leontief and Schumpeter remain neighbors to this day.
Leontief focused on the interdependencies of the real growth process, though these were often obscured by the jagged contours of observed economic time series.
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- Information
- Wassily Leontief and Input-Output Economics , pp. 123 - 134Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004