Brazilian Underdevelopment and the Case of the Missing American Jewish Economist

In the late 1960s, the economic historian Nathaniel Leff began publishing articles explaining why, since the 19th century, Brazil had exhibited slow economic growth and wide discrepancies between rich and poor. His explanations upended what was then, and largely remains, the widely held consensus of Brazilian economists. A devout Orthodox Jew who spent most of his career as a professor at Columbia University, Leff abruptly disappeared from view in the 1990s. Rafael Cariello explains the significance of Leff’s work, recounts his biography, and describes his own personal quest to discover the economist’s fate: