|
Arabic
Bengali
Chinese
English
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Malay
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish
Turkish
Ukrainian
Vietnamese|
BIOGRAPHIES OF GREAT SCIENTISTS
Leontiev Vasily Vasilievich
Directory / Biographies of great scientists
Vasily Vasilievich Leontiev was born on August 5, 1905 in Munich. Leontiev's ancestors were simple peasants, but his great-grandfather got off the ground and moved to St. Petersburg. Vasily's grandfather got rich by opening a weaving factory there. One of his sons married an Englishwoman, from where the British branch of the Leontief family came from. The father of the future Nobel laureate was already a Russian intellectual, a professor of labor economics at St. Petersburg University. So Vasily followed the beaten path, but he went incredibly fast: at the age of fourteen he graduated from high school and in 1921 entered Petrograd University, where he studied philosophy, sociology, and then economics. Being at the university in the status of a child prodigy, despite all the attempts of the “only true” teaching, diamat, he allowed himself to be called a “Menshevik”. In 1925, Leontiev had already completed a four-year course at the university and received a diploma in economics. Education then was conducted neither shaky nor rolls, but the teenager read many books on economics in the university library in Russian, English, French and German. After graduation, he got a job teaching economic geography, at the same time he applied for a visa to Germany to continue his education at the University of Berlin. Permission was granted six months later. In Germany, he continued his studies and began working on his doctoral dissertation at the University of Berlin under the guidance of the famous German economist and sociologist Sombart and a prominent theoretical statistician, a native of Russia, Vl. Bortkevich. The topic of Leontiev's dissertation was the study of the national economy as a continuous process. Without leaving his studies, he began his professional career as a research economist at the Institute for World Economy at the University of Kiel, studying the derivative of the statistical demand and the supply curve. In 1928, Leontiev received a doctorate in science. The depth of economic thinking was combined with Leontiev's strong mathematical background. In the late twenties and early thirties, he conducted a series of original studies on the study of the elasticity of supply and demand, the statistical measurement of industrial concentration, the use of indifference curves to explain some of the patterns of international trade. One of the first scientific articles by Leontiev was devoted to the analysis of the balance of the national economy of the USSR for 1923-1924, which was the first attempt in the economic practice of those years to present in figures the production and distribution of the social product in order to obtain a general picture of the cycle of economic life. The balance was the prototype of the "input-output" method developed later by the scientist. The article was written in German and published in October 1925. A translation into Russian entitled "Balance of the National Economy of the USSR. A Methodological Analysis of the Work of the CSB" appeared two months later in the December issue of the magazine "Planned Economy". To earn money, the scientist had to write articles in commercial journals. A year earlier, his father had arrived in Berlin on a business trip, having by that time replaced the university with the People's Commissariat of Finance. Yes, in the same place, in Berlin, he stayed: the Cheka was already approaching him. Somehow, during a break, the scientist met over coffee with Chinese merchants who somehow ended up in Kiel. Word for word, and the Chinese offered him a year of contract work in ... Nanjing, the then capital of China! This made him a specialist in the economic planners of developing countries. So in 1929 he went to Asia as an economic adviser to the Ministry of Railways in the Chinese government. After returning to Germany, he continued to work at the Institute of World Economy. In 1931, the director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (USA), a well-known American statistician, specialist in the field of analysis of economic cycles and market conditions, W. Mitchell, invited Leontiev to work in the bureau, and he moved to the USA. Then Leontiev turned to Harvard University. Professor Gay responded from there, offering Leontiev a professorship on the condition that he would do the statistical calculations he needed. In response, the applicant proposed his own topic for research on economic planning. Then Gay wrote that, according to the decision of the department, the proposed topic was not very interesting, but Leontiev could still be given a tiny one-year grant for a scientific position and the right to give a lecture. You need to know the manners and customs of this super-prestigious university in order to understand: it was a victory for a young scientist, albeit a small one. In cozy Cambridge, a suburb of Boston, where Harvard University is located, Leontiev went with new hopes and a new wife, the poetess Estelle Hellen Marx, whom he married already in America. Since 1932, Leontiev began teaching political economy at Harvard University. Soon, Leontiev's parents also moved to America. The fate of this family was dedicated to the memoirs "Zhenya and Vasily" by the mother of Vasily Vasilyevich, who lived to an advanced age and died in the early seventies. In the same year, Leontief organized a research team at Harvard called the Harvard Economic Research Project and headed it until its closure in 1973. This team became the center for research on economic processes using the input-output method. At the same time, all these years, Leontiev remained a professor at Harvard University, and from 1953 to 1975 he was also the head of the Department of Political Economy. Henry Lee. In the thirties, Leontiev studied the role of aggregate economic indicators of output and the general price level. In 1937, in the Political Economy Quarterly, he published an article "Blind Theorizing. A Methodological Critique of the Neo-Cambridge School", which received a wide response. In it, he analyzed the methodology of the Cambridge school founded at the end of the XNUMXth century by the English economist A. Marshall, a characteristic feature of which was a subjective-psychological approach to the definition of economic categories and the predominance of mathematical methods in explaining economic processes. In March 1938, in the appendix to the American Economic Review, Leontiev placed the work "The Modern Significance of the Economic Theory of K. Marx", which contained an attempt to objectively analyze the economic theory of Marx from the standpoint of science of the thirties. Noting that Marx was a great connoisseur of the nature of the capitalist system and had his own rational theories, although not always consistent, the scientist concluded that the internal weakness of Marx's theory "appears immediately as soon as other economists, not endowed with Marx's exceptional common sense, try to the basis of his projects to develop Marxist theory". Leontiev's research talent was most fully revealed in his main scientific achievement - the development of the input-output method. The basis of Leontiev's approach to planning was laid by the French "physiocrats" in the XNUMXth century, led by Francois Quesne. Although they proceeded from the incorrect thesis that only agricultural activity makes economic sense, and all other industries only consume resources, they proposed a correct methodological approach to the problem of economic planning. The Physiocrats used "technological tables" to take into account everything that any economic system produces and consumes. This approach was developed in mathematical form in the XNUMXth century by the French economist Léon Walras. Recognizing the Walrasian system of interdependencies, Leontiev was the first to put into practice the analysis of general equilibrium as a tool in the formation of economic policy. The algebraic theory of input-output analysis proposed by Leontiev is reduced to a system of linear equations, in which the parameters are the coefficients of production costs. The realistic hypothesis and the relative ease of measurement determined the great analytical and predictive capabilities of the input-output method. Leontiev showed that the coefficients expressing the relationship between sectors of the economy (coefficients of current material costs) can be estimated statistically, that they are quite stable and that they can be predicted. Moreover, Leontiev showed the existence of the most important coefficients, the changes of which must be monitored in the first place. Calculations according to the Leontiev method (in our science they began to be called economic and mathematical methods of interbranch balance) required modern computer technology, without which the solution of linear equations turned out to be beyond the limits of the possible. Beginning in 1933, Leontief focused on overcoming these difficulties by collecting coefficients for a 44-industry input-output table (about 2000 coefficients). Since the solution of a system consisting of 44 linear equations was impossible at that time, he combined 44 industries into 10 for calculation purposes. To check the stability of the coefficients of current material costs in the United States, inter-industry balances were compiled for 1919-1929. The result of this study, titled "A Quantitative Analysis of Input-Output Relationships in the US Economic System", was published in 1936. The central place in it was occupied by a table of coefficients compiled for the US economy in 1919, with a dimension of 41x41. Around this time, Leontief worked closely with MIT professor John B. Wilbur, the inventor of a computer capable of solving systems of nine linear equations. Leontiev reduced the 41-dimensional matrix to a 10-dimensional one and used the Wilbur computer to obtain the coefficients of the total costs of gross output for the production of a unit of final output. He may have been the first to use the computer in the study of economic systems. In 1941, a 41-dimensional table of interindustry flows was compiled, calculated for 1929, which was then also aggregated into a 10-dimensional table. On its basis, Leontiev calculated the volumes of gross output required to meet final demand (gross capital formation, current consumption, government purchases). Both cross-industry tables were published in the monograph The Structure of the American Economy 1919-1929: An Empirical Application of Equilibrium Analysis. Comparison of tables by Leontiev made it possible to check the stability of the coefficients of material costs and find out the possibilities of effective forecasting. However, it did not allow to come to an unambiguous conclusion, partly due to the lack of sufficiently clear criteria for the stability of the estimated coefficients. Nevertheless, cross-industry tables were considered quite appropriate, and their creator was invited to the US Bureau of Employment Statistics as a consultant. Using the input-output method, the bureau produced a table of four hundred industries that was used to predict employment in the post-war period. In 1944, Leontiev compiled a table of coefficients for current material costs for 1939 and, comparing it with the previous ones, found a sufficient degree of stability of most of the coefficients over two decades. Using the latter table, he published in 1944-1946 three articles in the Political Economy Quarterly, where, using his method, he estimated the impact of employment, wages and prices on the gross output of individual branches of American industry. Since the late 1919s, after the founding of the Harvard Economic Research Project with the aim of applying and spreading the input-output method, Leontiev paid special attention to the development of inter-regional input-output analysis and the compilation of a matrix of investment coefficients with which one could judge the consequences changes in the final demand for investment. This was the beginning of the dynamic input-output method, on the basis of which it became possible to analyze economic growth. The results of the research were published in Leontief's The Structure of the American Economy, 1939-1951: An Empirical Application of Equilibrium Analysis (1953) and Studies in the Structure of the American Economy (XNUMX). One of the most important results of these studies was the so-called. "paradox", or "Leontief effect", which consists in the fact that if we take into account direct and indirect costs in the process of reproduction, then exports for the United States turn out to be more labor-intensive and less capital-intensive than imports. This means that although the US has a very strong investment environment and high wages, it imports capital and exports labor. During the fifties and sixties, Leontiev perfected his system. With the advent of more sophisticated computers, he increased the number of sectors of the economy to be analyzed, freed himself from some simplifying assumptions, primarily from the condition that technical coefficients remain unchanged despite price changes and technical progress. Based on the input-output method, Leontief and the staff of the Harvard Economic Research Project assessed the inflationary impact in wage regulation, calculated the cost of armaments and their impact on various sectors of the economy, forecasted the growth rate of sectors of the economy and the capital investments required for this. Since the input-output method proved its usefulness as an analytical tool in the field of regional economics, Leontief chess balance sheets began to be compiled for the economy of individual American cities. Gradually, the preparation of such balance sheets became a standard operation. The Office of Interindustry Economics within the US Department of Commerce, for example, has begun publishing such balance sheets every five years. The UN, the World Bank and most of the governments of various countries of the world, including the USSR, adopted the Leontief method as the most important method of economic planning and budgetary policy. It has become the main component of the systems of national accounts of most countries of the world, is still used and improved by government and international organizations and research institutions around the world. Input-output analysis is recognized as a classic tool of economic analysis, and its author is considered the scientist who made the largest contribution to economic science of the XNUMXth century. Throughout his entire scientific activity, Leontiev strictly followed the principle that economic concepts are meaningless and can only be misleading if the relevant processes cannot be realistically assessed, with the help of economic practice. He views modern economics as applied, empirical, the real benefit of which is evaluated depending on how economic theories are applied in real life. Theorizing, according to Leontiev, requires inspiration and technical skills, and the collection of facts - in particular, to develop complex models - is much more sweat and tears and an ever-increasing amount of time and cost. Not surprisingly, he notes, we are faced with an overabundance of theoretical models and a paucity of the data needed to keep those models alive. Leontiev recommended to treat the use of mathematical models in economic analysis with particular caution, believing that complex mathematical constructions of a formal nature do little to comprehend the structure and principles of functioning of a real economic system. He devoted his speech to the relationship between economic theory and applied research after he was elected president of the American Economic Association in 1970. In his presidential address to the Detroit Economic Association, he declared that "the vice of modern economics is not indifference to practical problems, as many practitioners believed, but the complete unsuitability of the scientific methods with which they are trying to solve them." And perhaps the most striking example of this unsuitability was the failure of economists to foresee the economic collapse of communism. Leontiev was not a Keynesian in principle, since he did not share the approach of the English economist John Keynes, according to which, in order to manage the economic system, it is enough to choose two or three or four main, aggregated indicators with which you can control the entire economic system without managing each of the products. Apparently, in an effective system of control levers there should be few, but still more than two. However, Leontiev believed that Keynes's approach could help stabilize the economy, prevent the failures that occurred in the twenties and thirties in the form of world crises. In his practical assessments, Leontiev was able to correctly assess a number of trends in the global economy of the United States, Japan, Germany and other countries, as well as in the behavior of the markets for goods and services and the market position of individual companies. In 1969, Leontiev visited Cuba and gave a skeptical assessment of Fidel Castro's plans to boost the country's economy. Reality showed that this assessment was close to reality. The scientist has also visited China, and the recent recovery of the Chinese economy contains elements of his recommendations. His contribution is also in the Japanese "economic miracle". In 1973, Leontief was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics "for his development of the input-output method and its application to the solution of important economic problems." Being one of the first economists concerned with the impact of human economic activity on the environment, Leontief, in his Nobel lecture entitled "The Structure of the World Economy. Fundamentals of a simple formulation of the input-output method", outlined the input-output model in relation to the world ecology, where environmental pollution figured as an independent sector. In 1975, Leontiev went to work at New York University. Three years later, he organized the Institute of Economic Analysis at the university and until 1986 was its director. And leaving an administrative post at the age of eighty, Vasily Vasilyevich continued active research work. In recent decades, Leontiev increasingly turned to the problems of the growth of the world economy, its impact on the environment, the analysis of the need for natural resources, and the study of relations between developed and developing countries. Within the framework of the United Nations, in the mid-seventies, he led a global research project, the task of which was to forecast the development of the world economy until the year 2000. The results of this work were published in the book "The Future of the World Economy" (1977). Recently, Leontiev lived in New York. The only daughter of the Leontiefs, Svetlana Alpers is a professor of art history at the University of California at Berkeley. In recent years, Vasily Vasilyevich has established a close relationship with his homeland, he and his relatives have repeatedly come to his native city of St. Petersburg. Leontiev died on February 5, 1999 in New York. Author: Samin D.K.
▪ Lavoisier Antoine Laurent. Biography ▪ Kolmogorov Andrei. Biography
Machine for thinning flowers in gardens
02.05.2024 Advanced Infrared Microscope
02.05.2024 Air trap for insects
01.05.2024
▪ Free-to-air 3D channel launched in China ▪ DaVinci for High Definition Video Applications ▪ New Microchip Instruments for Smart Sensors ▪ Chromebook with invisible pixels ▪ Solar panels by leaps and bounds
▪ site section Electrician's tool. Article selection ▪ article Better sing well as a goldfinch than badly as a nightingale. Popular expression ▪ article How many times do we change teeth? Detailed answer ▪ article Treatment of open wounds. Tourist tips ▪ article Save light bulbs. Encyclopedia of radio electronics and electrical engineering ▪ article Water is not wet. Focus Secret
Home page | Library | Articles | Website map | Site Reviews
www.diagram.com.ua |
We recommend interesting articles Section 
See other articles Section 
Latest news of science and technology, new electronics:
All languages of this page