Usually the column "How to get a Nobel Prize" tells about Nobel Prize winners in the natural sciences: physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine. Today's issue is special - it is dedicated to the Nobel economist and our compatriot.
Vasily Leontiev
Nobel Prize in Economics 1973. The wording of the Nobel Committee: "for the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems».
Wassily Leontiev was born in Munich, where his parents, Vasily Leontiev, a professor of economics at St. best clinics. Vasily spent his childhood and youth in Petrograd, at the age of 11 he survived the revolution and even listened to Lenin's speech during one of the demonstrations. In those troubled years, the wealthy Leontyev family, which previously owned a cotton-printing factory, lost its privileges. Thanks to the cares of his mother, Vasily first received an education at home, and then studied for a year at a labor school in order to obtain a certificate. Already at the age of 15, he entered Petrograd University, where he studied philosophy, sociology and economics.
During his studies, the future Nobel laureate more than once fell into the Cheka because of his categorical statements. Having received a diploma in economics in 1925, Leontiev remained at the university as a teacher. His fate was determined by the will of chance. In the same 1925, the first scientific work Leontiev was forbidden to publish. Leontiev himself later recalled that it was then that he realized that it was necessary to move abroad: “It was a historical and analytical article, terribly far from politics, from ideology. And even if it was banned, I realized that it would be impossible to do science here. Well, maybe, and partly possible, but there will be no normal working conditions. And my work is the most important thing in my life.” However, leaving the country was not so easy. Vasily did not receive permission to continue his studies abroad until he was diagnosed with a sarcoma - a tumor on his jaw. Only after the operation was he allowed to leave for Germany. It was assumed that Vasily did not have so long to live. But after consulting with German doctors, it turned out that Leontiev was diagnosed incorrectly. He soon recovered fully and continued his scientific work in Berlin.
In Germany, a 19-year-old scientist published a study of the balance National economy USSR for 1923-24. In this article, Leontiev for the first time presented his method of analyzing intersectoral relations, which later received the name "costs - output". A fierce supporter of applied economics, firmly based on empirical laws, Leontiev invented a method that later became the standard statistical analysis and was widely used both in capitalist and in socialist economies. It is used to quantify the effects that different industries - within the same country or internationally - can have on each other.
During World War II, this method was used to select the targets of the US Air Force, as well as to analyze the power of the economy of the Soviet Union. In addition, input-output analysis, using the apparatus of linear algebra, later formed the basis of forecasts and planning. economic activity USSR, and today the input-output analysis of Russia periodically conducts federal Service state statistics. It is also believed that one of the most important Google services - PageRank - borrowed the basic principles from the input-output method.
Back in the 19th century, the French economist Leon Walras laid the foundation for one of the theoretical approaches to economics - the theory of general equilibrium. It represents economic relations as a system of equations, the solution of which is an equilibrium state. However, before Leontiev, this approach was not applied empirically: it was not tested on data and, accordingly, no conclusions were drawn from it about the actual functioning of systems, for example, sectors of the economy. Using linear algebra, Vasily proposed a convenient analytical method. It is important that before the introduction of the input-output analysis, applied economic science could only qualitatively characterize the changes that will occur in a certain industry as a result of a shock (abrupt change) in the parameters of another industry. In addition, economists before Leontief mostly carried out only the analysis of partial equilibria. This means that they could predict whether prices in the gasoline market would rise or fall due to an increase in the oil tax, but they could not simultaneously predict the effect of this event, for example, on the steel industry market. Moreover, it was not about specific judgments that could be measured in monetary or quantitative terms. The Leontief method makes it possible to obtain precisely quantitative predictions concerning the entire system of parameters.
In 1927-1928, after receiving his doctorate in Berlin, Leontiev began his career as a researcher at the University of Kiel. He then spent a year in China, where he worked as an adviser to the minister railways, but quickly returned to Germany, which was in a protracted and severe crisis. In 1931, Leontiev got a job at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the United States, but left after a year, because he could not engage in research that was interesting to him. Then he married the poetess Estelle Marcos, who later wrote a book about his parents called "Vasily and Zhenya."
In 1932, Vasily Leontiev moved to Harvard University, where he worked for 47 years. He began with the fact that with the fight he received a grant for a colossal project. Leontief collected unprecedented data on production costs, commodity flows, income distribution, consumption and investment patterns from government departments, private firms, and banks. His input-output tables gave accurate predictions for a whole decade. It was a resounding success. In 1941, Leontief's monumental study of the structure of the US economy was published. During World War II, Leontief advised Roosevelt on unemployment issues. His models predicted how the economy would behave after the end of the war - and these predictions turned out to be correct.
Returning to Harvard in 1946, Leontief established the Harvard Center for Economic Research, which specialized in input-output tables. In those years, he received huge funding: many orders from both the government and private companies. In 1954, Leontiev was appointed president of the American economic society. During his time at Harvard, he taught four more future Nobel laureates: Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, Vernon Smith, and Thomas Schelling. In addition, while working with large datasets, Vasily discovered what is called the "Leontief paradox". This contradicts the standard theory of international trade (the Heckscher-Ohlin hypothesis), according to which rich countries, such as the United States, where labor is expensive, would have to export capital-intensive materials and import labour-intensive ones. Leontiev revealed the opposite, and this empirical fact has not yet found a single theoretical explanation.
In 1973, Leontiev received the Nobel Prize for his proposed method and its active implementation in applied industries. At the same time, the UN ordered him a worldwide economic model input-output. Because of this, in 1975, Leontiev moved from Harvard, where there was not enough capacity for such a grandiose project, to New York University. There, in 1976, he founded the Institute economic analysis.
Leontiev never returned to work in Russia and refused to cooperate with the Yeltsin government, but he was one of the few Western scientists to whom the Soviet government was loyal. During the "thaw" he visited the USSR several times. The Soviet Economics and Mathematics School was also engaged in research on intersectoral balance: at the Institute of Electronic Control Machines, the Research Economic Institute under the State Planning Committee of the USSR, the Laboratory for the Application of Mathematical and Statistical Methods of the USSR Academy of Sciences. During the transitional period, Leontiev communicated with the reformers. Now in St. Petersburg there is a research center named after Leontiev, opened on the initiative of the mayor of the city of Sobchak in 1991. Leontiev died in New York on February 5, 1999 at the age of 92.
Staying away from abstract theories, as well as political and ideological recommendations, Wassily Leontiev is an example of the brightest empirical researcher who has made a huge contribution to understanding how different economic systems interact with each other.
Vasily Vasilievich Leontiev (August 5, 1905, Munich - February 5, 1999, New York) - American economist of Russian origin, creator of the theory of interindustry analysis, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics for 1973 "for the development of the input-output method" and for its application to important economic problems."
Vasily Leontiev grew up in Petrograd in the family of Professor of Economic Sciences Vasily Vasilyevich Leontiev and his wife Zlata Bentionovna (later Evgenia Borisovna) Becker.
In 1925 he completed his studies of philosophy and sociology at Leningrad University. Leontiev later studied economics in Berlin and received his Ph.D. for his dissertation "Circulation of the Economy".
In 1928, Leontiev received an official invitation to come to China as an adviser to the Minister of Railways. He was given the task of calculating the best option China's transportation and transportation systems.
In 1931, Vasily Leontiev moved to America and became an employee of Wesley Mitchell, director of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Subsequently, he passed the test and became a teacher at Harvard and New York Universities, the founder and head of the American Institute for Economic Analysis, and was a UN consultant.
In 1932, Leontiev married an American citizen and the following year he himself received US citizenship.
After the outbreak of World War II, he worked as an economic planning consultant for the US Air Force. Under his leadership, an input-output matrix was built for the German economy. The matrix served as the basis for selecting Air Force targets.
1954 - President of the Econometric Society.
1970 - President of the American Economic Association.
Doctor honoris causa of Brussels (1961), Paris (1972) and Leningrad (1990) universities. Officer of the Order of the Legion of Honor (France, 1968), awarded the Order of the Rising Sun (Japan, 1984) and Arts and Letters (France, 1985). Winner of the B. Harms Prize (1970) and the Nobel Prize (1973) "for the development of the input-output method and its application to important economic problems." Since 2005, the Vasily Leontiev Server has been operating.
Wife (since 1932) - Estelle (Estella) Marx ( Estelle Marks, 1908-2005), poetess, author of the most complete biography of the Leontiev family "Genya and Vasily" ( Zephyr Press, Sommerville, Massachusetts, 1987). Daughter - Svetlana Alpers (born 1936), a well-known art critic, professor at the University of Berkeley (California).
Leontiev developed input-output analysis, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1973. A number of economic phenomena are named after Leontief - for example, Leontief's model and Leontief's paradox.
Russian economist, studied at the Leningrad and Berlin Universities. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1973 "for his development of the input-output method and its application to the solution of important economic problems."
“Then what prompted you to emigrate?
Vasily Leontiev (hereinafter - VL). The censor banned my article from publication.
Only because of this?
V.L. But it was a very important event for me and explained a lot to me. I will tell now. As a student, I did a lot of work in the Public Library, studied the works of economists of the 17th and 18th centuries in primary sources. At that time no one but me took these books; maybe that's why the director of the library, Ernest Nikolaevich Radlov, a very deep, interesting person, an idealist philosopher, drew attention to me. He talked to me about the topic of my research and offered to write an article, which he submitted for publication to the journal Annaly to Academician Tarle. It was there that the censor banned it.
But why? What was "criminal" about her?
V.L. That's the thing, nothing. It was an article about the ways of development of science, about casual and normative approaches in it. I have considered the development of these two methods among philosophers since the eighteenth century, through Kant and Hegel, and ending Bergson. It was a historical and analytical article, terribly far from politics, from ideology. And even if it was banned... I realized that it would be impossible to do science here.
Well, maybe, and partly possible, but there will be no normal working conditions. My work is the most important thing in my life. When I understood all this, I decided to leave.
But how did you do it? Leaving Russia at the beginning of 1925 was not an easy task. There was no "Iron Curtain" yet, but the border was already firmly locked.
V.L. You're right, it was almost impossible. But I got lucky. I got sick, I had a tumor on my jaw. Doctors performed an operation, removed part of the bone and decided that it was a sarcoma. Then I asked to be given a passport. And they gave me a passport. We decided - let him go, he will die soon anyway. When I was leaving, the doctor gave me a jar with the bone removed. And when I went to the doctors in Germany, they examined it and said that it was not a sarcoma, and I remained alive. So sarcoma helped me a lot. Agree, it does not help many people ... "
Kalyandina S.A., V.V. Leontiev and the repressions of the 1920s (interview with V.V. Leontiev), in Sat: Repressed Science / Ed. M.G. Yaroshevsky, Issue II, St. Petersburg, "Nauka", 1994, p. 190.
Since 1931 Vasily Leontiev works in the USA. He developed a multidimensional method of economic and mathematical analysis "costs - output" (input - output) to study intersectoral economic relations.
“The trouble with modern economics is that he believed Vasily Leontiev that "many of his colleagues pay homage to elegant but useless theorizing." In his presidential address to the Detroit Economic Association, he announced that “The vice of the modern economy is not indifference to practical problems, as many practitioners believed, but complete unsuitability scientific methods with which they are trying to solve. And, perhaps, we will add, the most striking example of this unsuitability is the inability of economists to foresee the economic collapse of communism, at least five years in advance, at least in 1985. They foresaw the little things, but did not notice the main thing - the impossibility of existence social order, which seemed to them quite combat-ready. Some prophets, who correctly set the timing of the death of communism in 20-25 years (for example, the Soviet historian Andrei Amalrik or David Sarnov), reasoned purely intuitively and were mistaken in the symptoms of this death (for example, Amalrik saw a war between the USSR and China). It is now clear that the economic reason lay in the inefficiency of production; all ties went to the production of ties and did not enter the market - it was impossible to buy a tie, even with money ... "
Mark Reitman, Famous emigrants from Russia. Essays on Russians who have achieved success in the USA, Rostov-on-Don, "Phoenix", 1999, p. 60.
45 years ago he won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Success was brought to him by the development of the input-output method, on which the author worked for more than 40 years. The Leontiev model is based on a comparison of the cost of manufactured products and the total financial costs of its production. It is used to characterize intersectoral production relationships both in the world and in national economy, as well as to analyze the economy of the city or an individual enterprise.
Relationships between sectors economic system are described by a set of linear equations expressing the balance between inputs and output of each type of physical goods or services over a certain period of time.
Recognition did not come to Leontiev immediately. In the conditions of the Great Depression and total unemployment, the American economy was solving more mundane tasks. Then they listened to other, more experienced and promoted experts. Leontiev first described his method in detail in a scientific article in 1936, and in the 1950s and 1960s he actively worked on improving the system. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics turned to the input-output model in 1939 and again in 1947. The Leontief model was used to predict how total and sectoral employment would change as the economy moved from peace to war and back again, writes Ivan Avramenko in his book Russians Nobel Laureates.
Years later, this method became the main integral part systems of national accounts of most countries of the world - both capitalist and socialist. Chess balances based on the Leontief principle began to be published by the largest economic departments.
The first such table divides the economy into 44 sectors. Sales of intermediate products and finished goods by the sectors listed on the left side of the table fit in vertical columns under the names of the respective industries, listed in the same order in the top horizontal row.
The second table, or grid, made up of "technical coefficients" is derived from a closed chessboard model. When these coefficients are placed in a system of equations that are solved simultaneously, a third table is compiled, called the "Leontief inversion". It shows what is required from each sector to increase total output by one dollar.
On October 18, 1973, Leontiev, who was then 68 years old, became one of the first winners of the Nobel Prize in Economics, established four years earlier. gave him preference over another 42 applicants. "For the development of the input-output method and its application to important economic problems," the abstract explained. In his solemn speech at the Swedish Royal, Leontief presented a simple input-output model related to world ecology, in which environmental pollution figured as an independent factor.
"In less developed countries the implementation of mitigation activities of strict standards against environmental pollution will cause an increase in employment, although it will require some sacrifices in the sphere of consumption”,
the economist stressed.
Subsequently, Leontiev became one of the critics of the principle of awarding the prize.
“I think that already now the attention of the Nobel Committee is gradually shifting from theoretical economists to institutional economists. And now the problem arises, because in specific economic research you can at least talk about some kind of hierarchy, as well as major steps forward, breakthroughs, while in the institutional school I really do not see any major breakthroughs, ”he said in 1997.
Leontiev came from a merchant family of Old Believers. The future Nobel laureate spent his early years at Koltovskaya Sloboda in Petrograd. Seeing with his own eyes the economic collapse of the country during the First World War, two revolutions and the Civil War did not prevent Leontiev from getting an excellent education. Thanks to his mother, who personally taught him, at the age of 15 he knew the main European languages and entered the university, whose professor was his father, a Social Revolutionary and a member of the Constituent Assembly, Vasily Leontiev Sr.
In the 1920s, Father Leontiev, who got a job under the Soviet regime in the People's Commissariat of Finance, went on a business trip to Berlin and became a defector. The son also worked a lot abroad, but followed his example later.
In 1931, he left for the United States, began working at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and soon married the poetess Estelle Helen Marks and obtained American citizenship.
Despite the origin, the authorities completely trusted Vasily Leontiev. The former Soviet student won the right to teach at, advised the US Air Force on economic planning, headed various economic organizations. In 1943-1945, he planned deliveries to the Soviet Union under Lend-Lease.
Apparently, with age, he developed homesickness. In 1988, Leontiev offered the USSR assistance in carrying out reforms within the framework of perestroika. In the country's foreign policy, a course towards rapprochement with the United States was already in full swing, but the services of a specialist were neglected. The planned economy was only just getting ready to switch to a market economy.
If Leontiev was offended, then not much. A few years later, he arrived in democratic Russia. But having met with the team, he returned disappointed.
“I won't go there again. They don’t listen to anything,” complained the elderly economist.
“Nobel laureate in economics Vasily Leontiev, an American by passport, but Russian by origin, got a turn from the gate, although he offered his services to the new government. Boris Nikolaevich (Yeltsin. - Gazeta.Ru) preferred yesterday's journalist Gaidar to the recognized world authority: with the same success, a bleeding patient should be taken not to a famous surgeon, but to a semi-literate healer, ”described this episode in his book“ Yeltsin, The Kremlin: the history of the disease "deputy.
But Leontiev managed to get along with the mayor of St. Petersburg, who in 1991 founded international center socio-economic research, named after the American guest. The Russian American was also an honorary member Russian Academy natural sciences.
Unlike many armchair theoretical economists, Vasily Leontiev sees his main goal in that his theoretical and methodological developments serve economic practice opening up new opportunities for progress. The methodology of intersectoral analysis developed by him on the basis of the "input-output" principle served as the basis for compiling intersectoral balances for many countries, including the Soviet Union.
Leontief's principles for the development of intersectoral balances based on the widespread use of mathematics and computers aroused great interest on the part of Soviet economists and politicians. The first intersectoral balance was developed by the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR in 1959. Since that time, work on their compilation at all levels has sharply intensified. In 1966 intersectoral balances appeared in all the union republics. The number of scientific studies in the field of national economic planning and forecasting has also grown noticeably.
Soviet economists, creatively using the Leontief methodology for analyzing intersectoral relations, made a significant contribution to the development of intersectoral balances, the theory and practice of managing structural shifts in the economy.
Unfortunately, the euphoria of the market, which took place in the first years of the reforms, led to the loss of control over the economy and the almost complete destruction of planning. This is what many domestic and foreign experts consider the main and most terrible mistake of the reformers.
World economic science and practice have long proved that modern economy is at a stage of development when the market is not able to ensure its balance and proportionality. On the other hand, a purely planned model will inevitably lead to corruption, an increase in the tax burden, and as a result, to a regression of the economy and inflation. The state serves as the most important lever for regulating the main macroproportions and for ensuring structural and investment policy. Given the fundamental importance of the "plan-market" dilemma, Vasily Leontiev pays great attention to it. His figurative comparison of the economy with a ship is well known. The private initiative born of the market is the wind in the sails. And planning is the steering wheel that directs the movement of the economy to achieve the goal. The plan and the market are not antipodes, but good allies, partners who, helping each other, more successfully achieve their goals.
American economist Wassily Leontiev was born on August 5, 1905 in St. Petersburg (Russia). His parents are Vasily Leontiev, professor of economics, and Evgenia (nee Becker) Leontiev. The years of his childhood were a time of great social and political upheaval. He was eight years old when the first World War. He was a first-hand witness to the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and remembered Lenin's speech at a mass rally outside the Winter Palace in Petrograd, which he attended. Entering Leningrad University in 1921, he first studied philosophy and sociology, and then economic sciences. They have developed Theoretical basis input-output balance in the USSR in 1923-1924. After graduating from the university in 1925, he continued his education at the University of Berlin. In 1927-1928, while still a student, he began his professional career as a junior research fellow at the University of Kiel. At the age of 22, he received his Ph.D. in economics. He spent the next year in Pankin as an economic adviser to the Chinese Ministry of Railways. After emigrating to the United States in 1931, he joined the National Bureau of Economic Research. Wassily Leontiev applied the method of analysis of interindustry relations with the use of the apparatus of linear algebra to study the US economy. In 1932 he married the poet Estell Helen Marks. Their only daughter, Svetlana Alpers (through her husband), later became a professor of art history at the University of California, Berkeley. L. began his long-term work in the United States at Harvard University in 1931. as a teacher of economics. In 1946 he became a full (real) professor. Two years later, he founded the Harvard Economic Research Project - a center for research in the field of analysis by the method of "cost - output" - and led this project until it closed in 1973. Ibid, at Harvard University, L. headed the Department of Political Economy named after Henry Lees 1953 to 1975, after which he became professor of economics and director of the New York University Institute for Economic Analysis. Since the publication in 1936 of his first article on the method of "cost - output", the scientific works of L. distinguished by high analytical rigor and a wide range of interests in general economic problems. Although L. himself is a qualified mathematician, he constantly criticizes attempts to apply mathematical theories to explain the world's economic problems. In his opinion, economics is one of the applied sciences, and its theories can be useful if they are empirically implemented in life. This point of view can be clearly seen already in his first book, The Structure American economy, 1919...1929: An Empirical Application of Equilibrium Analysis" ("The Structure of the American Economy, 1919...1929: An Empirical Application of Equilibrium Analysis"), published in 1941. analysis "cost - output", formed the basis of the reputation of L. as an outstanding innovator in the field of economics. However, the recognition of his system in a world engulfed by the Great Depression did not come immediately. The most painful economic problems then were chronic unemployment and the instability of the capitalist economy. The world then completely listened to the English economist John Maynard Keynes, who published a book entitled "The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money" in 1936. During the Second World War, the matrix developed by Leontief " costs - output "for the German economy served to select the goals of the US Air Force. A similar balance for the USSR, developed by Leontiev, was used by the authorities of C SHA to decide on the volume and structure of Lend-Lease. At this time, unemployment as a problem disappeared, but after the war it sharply worsened again. That was the first time the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics turned to the Leontief input-output method. First in 1939 and then in 1947, the L. model was used to predict how general and sectoral employment would change as the economy moved from peace to war and back. The economics of disarmament also later became one of the subjects of L.'s research activities, deeply interested in his whole life. In less than 10 years after the work carried out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the L. method has become the main component of the systems of national accounts of most countries of the world, both capitalist and socialist. It is still used and improved by governmental and international organizations and research institutes all over the world. Input-output analysis refers to a field of economics pioneered by a 19th-century French economist. Leon Walras and which is known as the theory of general equilibrium. It focuses on interdependence economic relations, represented by a system of equations expressing the economy as a whole. From the very beginning of his work, L. recognized the system of interdependencies of Walras. But before the systematic application of L. these interdependencies in practice, the analysis of general equilibrium was not used as a tool in the process of formation economic policy. Prior to the innovations of L. the main method in the main stream of economic science was the analysis of partial equilibrium, which puts the focus on a small number of changing variables. Thus, for example, an economist could calculate how a tax on imported oil might affect the demand for motor gasoline, while ignoring any long-term effects that tax might have on the steel industry. Economists have long been aware of the fact that partial equilibrium analysis seriously distorts reality if the scale of industry or the degree of change being studied is large enough. L.'s application of the Walrasian system for solving this problem and L.'s analysis by the "cost-output" method are connected with the compilation of chess tables (chess balances). Such a table divides the economy into a large number of industries (sectors) - initially into 44 sectors. Sales of intermediate products and finished goods by the sectors listed on the left side of the table fit in vertical columns below the names of the respective sectors, listed in the same order in the top horizontal row. The second table, or grid, made up of "technical coefficients" is derived from a closed chessboard model. When these coefficients are placed in a system of equations that are solved simultaneously, a third table is drawn up, called the "inversion of L.", which shows what is required from each sector to increase total output by one dollar. The value of inversion L. is determined by three circumstances. First, its use has led to an improvement in the collection of international economic and statistical data, which has grown tremendously in numbers in recent decades. Secondly, inversion reveals in detail the work of the internal mechanism of the economy. Third, once demand for finished goods has been assessed or prospective, inversion can be used for policy analysis because it shows, both directly and indirectly, what is required of each sector in terms of costs to increase the output of these goods. Leontiev improved his system throughout the 50s and 60s. With the advent of more sophisticated computers, he increased the number of sectors and freed himself from some simplifying assumptions, primarily from the condition that technical coefficients remain unchanged despite price changes and technical progress. To explore issues economic growth and development, L. developed a dynamic version of the previously static model of analysis "cost - output", adding to it the indicators of capital requirements to the list of so-called final demand, or final sales. Since the input-output method has proved its usefulness as an analytical tool in a new area regional economy, chess balances began to be drawn up for the economy of some American cities. Gradually, the preparation of such balances became a standard operation. In the United States Department of Commerce, for example, the Office of Interindustry Economics has begun publishing such balance sheets every five years. United Nations, The World Bank and most governments, including the government of the Soviet Union, have also become involved in the application of input-output analysis as the most important method economic planning and government budget policy. In 1959, the Central Statistical Bureau of the USSR developed a reporting intersectoral balance in value terms (for 83 industries) and the world's first intersectoral balance in physical terms (for 257 positions). At the same time, applied work was launched in the central planning bodies (Gosplan and the State Economic Council) and their scientific organizations. The first planned intersectoral balances in value and physical terms were built in 1962. Further work was extended to the republics and regions. According to the data for 1966, intersectoral balances were built for all Union republics and economic regions RSFSR. Soviet scientists created groundwork for a wider application of intersectoral models (including dynamic, optimization, in-kind value, interregional, etc.)
Analysis according to the method of "cost - output" remains no less productive tool in fundamental economic research, in which L. continued to work in important areas. For example, starting, like Walras, with constant technical coefficients, L. later began to apply flexible coefficients to price relations and to technical development. In the mid 50s. he proved that American exports contain more labor than imports, thus challenging the main tenet of the theory international trade. Known as the "paradox of L.", this fundamental principle has become the source of a deeper understanding of the structure of trade in relations between countries. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the USSR, on the basis of data from intersectoral balances, more complex intersectoral models and model complexes were developed, which were used in forecast calculations and were partly included in the technology of national economic planning. In a number of areas, Soviet intersectoral research occupied a worthy place in world science. At the same time, Leontiev clearly understood that the theoretical developments of Soviet scientists did not find practical application in the real economy, where all decisions were made based on the political situation. Western economists have often tried to uncover the "principle" of the Soviet method of planning. They never succeeded, because there is no such method at all until now. Leontief's success in applying input-output models of economic analysis is due in no small measure to his outstanding abilities as a generalist economist with diverse interests in many fields, such as international trade theory, monopoly theory, and econometrics. Attitude L. to the methodology was clearly expressed over the decades of his scientific activity. He opposed the "implicit", as he called it, economic theorizing inherent in the line of the Cambridge School (John Hicks and Keynes). In the book "Essays in Economics: Theories and Theorizing" ("Essays in Economics: Theories and Theorizing", 1966) L. wrote: define promising directions further theoretical research and empirical research". L. was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1973 "for the development of the input-output method and its application to important economic problems." Being one of the first economists concerned about the impact of economic activity on the quality of the environment, L. led in his Nobel lecture a simple model of "cost - output", relating to the world ecology, in which environmental pollution clearly figured as an independent sector. "In less developed countries - he concluded - the introduction of mitigating strict anti-pollution standards... will bring about an increase in employment, although it will require some sacrifice in consumption."
L. study of the impact of various economic strategies on the environment and on the development of the world economy continued in the future. Intermediate results of research L. in this area were published in 1977 in the form of a book "The Future of the World Economy" ("The Future of the World Economy"). His work on the problems of the world economy, especially on intersectoral relations, continues under the auspices of the United Nations and the Institute for Economic Analysis at New York University. Input-output analysis is recognized as a classic tool in economics, and L., along with Keynes, is considered the scientist who made the largest contribution to economics. economics 20th century L. is an American citizen.
In addition to the Nobel Prize, he was elevated to the rank of officer of the Legion of Honor of France. He is a member of the American National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Sciences and Arts. British Academy and the Royal Statistical Society in London. He served as president of the Econometric Society in 1954 and of the American Economic Association in 1970. Among others, he received honorary doctorates from the universities of Brussels, York, Louvain, Paris.
An important field of activity of Vasily Vasilyevich at all stages was the training of scientific personnel. He did a lot of good for the young scientists of Russia who were trained at Harvard and New York. V.V. Leontiev compares the heads of our state-owned enterprises, who are accustomed to planned deliveries and are unable to find suppliers and consumers on their own, with penguins who are very difficult to teach to fly. Vasily Vasilyevich Leontiev died on February 5, 1999 in New York.
