In honor of Wassily Leontief's 90th birthday

Abstract

On 5 August 1995 Wassily Leontief celebrates his 90th birthday, and we have invited several papers about his contributions to economics to commemorate this occasion. Some colleagues know Professor Leontiefs year of birth as 1906, rather than 1905, so a few words of explanation are in order. Over the past decade, a historian of science unearthed nearly 80 documents concerning Professor Leontiefs family in the archives of St. Petersburg, dating as far back as 1742. This research produced a few surprises, and one of them is that Professor Leontief was born in 1905 and not 1906 as he had thought. A volume about this history, The Unknown Leontief, edited by S. Kalyadina, will be published by Rubikon in Russia this year. Wassily Leontief was Professor of Economics at Harvard University from 1933 until 1975, the year in which he came to New York University and founded the Institute for Economic Analysis. At the Institute he is currently investigating the configuration of clustering of scientific research activities that potentially precede the emergence of new, multi-disciplinary fields. This undertaking utilizes an extensive database of journal citations and is based on a generalization of the principles of economic interdependence that he made operational through inputoutput economics. The papers that follow, by A. Augusztinovics, A. Amsden, A. Rose, R. Dorfman, K. Polenske, B. Bjerkholt, and B. Hannon, provide a variety of perspectives about the man who received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for the creation of input-output economics. The authors range from individuals who worked closely with him for many years at Harvard to those who have never met him. Having had the opportunity to read all the papers, I would like to add two observations of my own. From the point of view of pure theory, Leontief offered his notion of general interdependence as an alternative to Walrasian general equilibrium. Subsequently, a synthesis has been achieved by the incorporation of Leontievian general interdependence within computable general equilibrium models. But this state of affairs