Leontief’s “Stuff”

Abstract

At a time when most economic research consisted of solitary “thought experiments”, Leontief’s input-output research called for teamwork, for data assembly and computing. Indeed, it may well be that his input-output computations were the earliest applications of computers in the social sciences. Thus, input-output research was uniquely “capital intensive”. Furthermore, since computing technology was changing very rapidly, input-output research capital was subject to very rapid obsolescence. This short essay chronicles the accumulation and successive relocations of the hardware that supported Leontief’s research from the late 1940’s to the early 1970’s. Its relocation from Brandeis to Japan took place many years later, long after he transferred his research activities to a new center at New York University.

Keywords

• input-output analysis
• scientific research capital
• obsolescence
• research hardware
• Leontief (Wassily)