Abram Bergson (born Abram Burk, April 21, 1914 in

Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore ( , locally: or ) is the List of municipalities in Maryland, most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, fourth most populous city in the Mid-Atlantic (United States), Mid-Atlantic, and List of United States cities by popula ...

– April 23, 2003 in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As part of the Boston metropolitan area, the cities population of the 2020 U.S. census was 118,403, making it the fourth most populous city in the state, behind Boston ...

) was an American

economist An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this field there are ...

, academician, and professor in the Harvard Economics Department since 1956.

Early life and education

He graduated with an A.B. degree from

Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...

in 1933 and his A.M. and Ph.D. from

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

in 1935 and 1940, respectively.Gewirtz, Ken.
"Abram Bergson Dies at 89"
''

The Harvard Gazette Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

'', May 2, 2003.

Career

In a 1938 paper Bergson defined and discussed the notion of an individualistic

social welfare function In welfare economics, a social welfare function is a function that ranks social states (alternative complete descriptions of the society) as less desirable, more desirable, or indifferent for every possible pair of social states. Inputs of the f ...

. The paper delineated necessary marginal conditions for economic efficiency, relative to: * real-valued

ordinal utility In economics, an ordinal utility function is a function representing the preferences of an agent on an ordinal scale. Ordinal utility theory claims that it is only meaningful to ask which option is better than the other, but it is meaningless to a ...

functions of individuals (illustrated by indifference-curve maps) for commodities * labor supplied * other resource constraints. In so doing, it showed how

welfare economics Welfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to evaluate well-being (welfare) at the aggregate (economy-wide) level. Attempting to apply the principles of welfare economics gives rise to the field of public ec ...

could dispense with interpersonally-comparable

cardinal utility In economics, a cardinal utility function or scale is a utility index that preserves preference orderings uniquely up to positive affine transformations. Two utility indices are related by an affine transformation if for the value u(x_i) of one i ...

(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 Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

and

. He was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

in 1963. 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. He was elected to the

American Philosophical Society The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...

in 1965. 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. In 1960 Bergson (wrongly) predicted that the USSR would overtake the US economically by the 1980s. He was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1980.

Literary works

* 1938. "A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics," 1938. ''Quarterly Journal of Economics'', 52(2), pp
310
334. * 1954. "On the Concept of Social Welfare," ''Quarterly Journal of Economics'', 68(2), pp.
233
252. * '' Structure of Soviet Wages'', 1944 * ''

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

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

External links

* https://web.archive.org/web/20060619182023/http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/bergson.htm * http://cruel.org/econthought/profiles/bergson.html
Paul A. Samuelson, "Abram Bergson", Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences (2004)
1914 births 2003 deaths Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the Econometric Society 20th-century American economists Columbia University faculty Harvard University faculty Harvard University alumni Johns Hopkins University alumni Distinguished Fellows of the American Economic Association {{US-economist-stub Members of the American Philosophical Society