Introduction
Abram Bergson (April 21, 1914 in New York City – April 23, 2003 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) (born Abram Burk) was an American economist.
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. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 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.
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.
He graduated with an A.B. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1933 and his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1935 and 1940, respectively.
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 National Income and Product in 1937, 1950
- Essays in Normative Economics, 1966