Abram Bergson

Abram Bergson (April 21, 1914 – April 23, 2003), born Abram Burk, was an American economist. He was born in New York City.

In a 1938 paper Bergson defined and discussed the notion of an individualistic social welfare function. The paper delineated necessary marginal conditions for economic efficiency, relative to:

• real-valued ordinal utility functions of individuals (illustrated by indifference-curve maps) for commodities
• labor supplied
• other resource constraints.

In so doing, it showed how welfare economics could dispense with interpersonally-comparable cardinal utility (say measured by money income), either individually or in the aggregate, with no loss of behavioral significance.

Bergson was chief of the Russian Economic subdivision of the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. After the war he taught at Columbia University and Harvard University. From 1964, he was director of the Harvard Russian Research Center and became chairman of the Social Sciences Advisory Board of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

His main contribution to the study of the Soviet Union was the development and implementation of a method for the calculation of national output and economic growth in the absence of market valuation. The calculation is based on factor price.

Literary works

• "A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 52(2), February 1938, 310-34
• Structure of Soviet Wages, 1944
• Soviet National Income and Product in 1937, 1950
• Essays in Normative Economics, 1966

References

• M. Ellman, "Bergson, Abram," 1987, The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics," v. 1, 229-30
• Paul A. Samuelson, 2004, "Abram Bergson 1914-2003: A Biographical Memoir"

External links

• http://fermat.nap.edu/html/biomems/abergson.html
• http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/bergson.htm
• http://cruel.org/econthought/profiles/bergson.html (Japanese)

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