Abram Bergson

Background

Bergson, Abram was born on April 21, 1914 in Baltimore. Son of Issac Burk and Sophia (Rabinovich) Bergson.

Education

Bachelor of Arts, Johns Hopkins University, 1933; Doctor of Philosophy, Harvard University, 1940; Doctor of Laws, University Windsor, 1979; Doctor of Hebrew Literature, Brandeis U., 1985.

Career

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 World War 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 United States. 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.

Achievements

• Abram Bergson has been listed as a noteworthy Economist, educator by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Welfare, Planning, and Employment: Selected Essays in Economic Theory (MIT Press)

    ( Abram Bergson has been making significant contributions...)

  • Welfare, Planning, and Employment: Selected Essays in Economic

    (Abram Bergson has been making significant contributions t...)

  • The Economics of Soviet Planning (Studies in Comparative Economics, 5).

    (Soviet Union -- Economic policy -- 1959-1965. Industrial ...)

  • Productivity and the Social System-The USSR and the West

    (Book by Bergson, Abram)

  • The Structure of Soviet Wages: A Study in Socialist Economics (Harvard Economic Studies)

    (Book by Bergson, Abram)

  • Structure of Soviet Wages a Study in Soc
  • Essays in Normative Economics
  • Productivity and the Social System-The USSR and the West by Abram Bergson (1978-01-01)
  • Bergson: Planning and Productivity Under Soviet Socialism (Cloth)
  • The Economics of Soviet Planning
  • Economics of Soviet Planning
  • Welfare, Planning, and Employment: Selected Essays in Economic Theory (MIT Press) by Abram Bergson (2003-03-17)
  • Essays in normative economics
  • Welfare, Planning and Employment: Selected Essays in Economic Theory (MIT Press Classics) by Abram Bergson (2003-03-17)
  • Soviet Economy : Causes of Slowdown in Soviet Defense; Comments of Richard Kaufman's Article; Slowdown in Soviet Industry, 1976 -1982; Mathamatical Programming Approaches to the Planning of Siberian Regional Economic Development

Views

Welfare Economics: An early (1936, reprinted 1966, 1982) article analysed the implications, for the individual’s indifference map and utility function, of the conditions that Ragnar Frisch imposed in order to measure utility. A utility function of the sort since referred to as Certificate in Superior Studies emerged, and some of its properties were delineated. Another essay, also early (1938, reprinted 1966,1982) introduced the concept of a social welfare function into welfare economics, and used it in order to make explicit the value premises underlying different formulations.

More recently (1973,1979 and 1980, all reprinted 1982), a series of essays sought to clarify consumers’ and producers’ surplus in a general equilibrium context, and presented on that basis an alternative to the widely-held view of the unimportance of monopoly welfare losses. Socialist planning theory and public enterprise pricing: Two essays (1948, reprinted 1966, 1982. 1967, reprinted 1982) surveying theoretic literature on socialist planning, among other things, considered at an early stage the possibility that incentives of enterprise managers could result in inefficient actions. Two subsequent (1972, reprinted 1982.

1978, reprinted 1982) essays deal with public enterprise: one re-examining the question of the second-best optimum price for a public enterprise and the other exploring how to reward public enterprise management in order to induce it to take an appropriate attitude towards risk. Comparative systems: An early (1944) monograph represents an effort to clarify the principles of relative wage determination in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Another volume (1961) brought to a conclusion over a decade of research by myself and others attempting systematically to compile measures of Soviet real national income that conform to Western national income methodology. More recently, a short volume (1968) and a number of essays (reprinted 1978) seek to clarify the ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ efficiency of the Soviet and East European economies. The Soviet planning process is also examined from the standpoint of efficiency in my Economics of Soviet Planning (1964).

Membership

Staff, Office of Strategic Services, Washington, District of Columbia, then Chief, Russian Economics Subdiv. 1944-1945; American Reparations Delegate Moscow 1945, Social Science Advisory Board, United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency 1966-1973. National Academy, of Sciences, American Philosophical Society.

Council, Institute Economics Association 1974-1977.

Interests

• 024 Welfare Theory; 027 Economics of Centrally Planned Economies. 052 Socialist and Communist Economic Systems.

Connections

Married Rita S. Macht, November 5, 1939. Children: Judith, Emily, Lucy.

Father:

Issac Burk Bergson

Mother:

Sophia (Rabinovich) Bergson

Spouse:

Rita S. Macht

child:

Emily Bergson

child:

Lucy Bergson

child:

Judith Bergson