Wassily Leontief

Wassily Leontief was a cool dude. As a Russian-American economist, he devoted his life work to studying inputs and outputs in the economic system. Leontief really wanted to know how inputs in one area affect the output in other areas via input-output analysis.

Some of his work covered factor inputs: the inputs that companies need to make outputs for the economy. His foundational work was used post-WWII to help the world get back to regular production after war production, and helped us understand how the flow of imports and exports affected economies as the world became increasingly globalized.

Leontief couldn’t say enough about not making assumptions; he was a man who preferred observing reality over playing with theory. Leontief’s work was so impressive that it won him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in the '70s. Not too shabby.