Word: leontiefs
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...group flew from Paris last Saturday and spent yesterday at Columbia University. Today they see Donald K. David, Dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration, about problems in business economics. Later on today they go to a staff conference given by Wassily W. Leontief, professor of Economics...
Disagreeing with Slichter's optimistic outlook, Wassily W. Leontief, professor of Economics, says this inflation is serious because it affects income distribution, and sees no recession in the spiral. "I think it will creep and creep as long as our present military expenditures continue," he said. "We can stand it a very long time. An increase of five to ten percent is not disruptive to the day to day operation of the economy, but would be very disrupting to the social structure...
...Bureau of Labor Statistics, which wanted to forecast the effects of mobilization on the structure of the economy and on the postwar demand for labor. Five years later the theory had passed its first great test--not perfectly, but with a better showing than its rivals. Moreover, Leontief was virtually alone in correctly predicting the 1947 steel shortage two years in advance. At that point a host of government agencies, headed by the Air Force, queued up to sponsor his research. Leontief estimates the total amount now being spent yearly at various universities and government bureaus...
Some critics of Leontief's work fear that it will encourage central planning (a word that is carefully avoided in all sympathetic literature). "What else can you use it for?" asks one Harvard professor. "I say to Leontief. 'You'll have everything ready for the commissars.'" An article in Business Week depicted, under a slightly sinister picture of Wassily Leontief, American business men already shivering under "the chill shadow of a robot-planned and robot-managed age, the age of input-output approach to economics...
Ironically, it would be hard to find an economist so averse to giving advice (especially to politicians) as Leontief himself. It is time to make a science of economics," he says. Economists have wasted too much time trying to advice like lawyers." He shuns Washington (he commuted bi-weekly from Boston during the war, when he was Chief of Russian Economic Sub-division of OSS), where "everyone is political." Their minds are trained to ask always, 'How to do it?' I am interested only to answer, How does it work?'" Nevertheless, he readily admits that the argument of his critics...