When More Is Not Better

Chapter 1

The American Economy as an Efficient Machine

Professor Wassily Leontief and I almost overlapped at Harvard University. Leontief, who won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Economics, left Harvard in July 1975 to join the faculty of New York University, and I arrived at Harvard two months later, in September 1975, as a freshman in the undergraduate college. In point of fact, I had no idea at the time that Leontief existed, or that he had won the Nobel two years earlier, or that I would go on to study economics, something he had done a half a century earlier.

The son of a Russian economics professor at the University of Saint Petersburg, Leontief entered his father’s university, renamed the University of Leningrad in the wake of the Russian Revolution, ...