Abram Bergson (April 21, 1914 – April 23, 2003), born
Abram Burk, was an American
economistAn economist is an expert in the social science of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
. He was born in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
.
In a 1938 paper Bergson defined and discussed the notion of an individualistic
social welfare functionIn economics, a social welfare function is a real-valued function that ranks conceivable social states from lowest to highest. Inputs of the function include any variables considered to affect welfare of the society...
. The paper delineated necessary marginal conditions for
economic efficiencyPareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an important concept in economics with broad applications in game theory, engineering and the social sciences. The term is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution...
, relative to:
- real-valued ordinal utility
In microeconomic theory, an indifference curve is a graph showing different bundles of goods, each measured as to quantity, between which a consumer is indifferent. That is, at each point on the curve, the consumer has no preference for one bundle over another. In other words, they are all equally...
functions of individuals (illustrated by indifference-curve mapsConsumer theory is a theory of microeconomics that relates preferences to consumer demand curves. The link between personal preferences, consumption, and the demand curve is one of the most complex relations in economics...
) for commodities
- labor supplied
- other resource constraints.
In so doing, it showed how
welfare economicsWelfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to simultaneously determine allocative efficiency within an economy and the income distribution associated with it. It analyzes social welfare, however measured, in terms of economic activities of the individuals that...
could dispense with interpersonally-comparable
cardinal utilityIn economics, cardinal utility is a theory of utility under which the utility gained from a particular good or service can be measured and that the magnitude of the measurement is meaningful. Under cardinal utility theory, the util is a unit of measurement much like the metre or second...
(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.
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Abram Bergson (April 21, 1914 – April 23, 2003), born
Abram Burk, was an American
economistAn economist is an expert in the social science of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
. He was born in
New York CityNew York is the most populous city in the United States, and the center of the New York metropolitan area, which is among the most populous urban areas in the world. A leading global city, New York exerts a powerful influence over worldwide commerce, finance, culture, fashion and entertainment...
.
In a 1938 paper Bergson defined and discussed the notion of an individualistic
social welfare functionIn economics, a social welfare function is a real-valued function that ranks conceivable social states from lowest to highest. Inputs of the function include any variables considered to affect welfare of the society...
. The paper delineated necessary marginal conditions for
economic efficiencyPareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an important concept in economics with broad applications in game theory, engineering and the social sciences. The term is named after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution...
, relative to:
- real-valued ordinal utility
In microeconomic theory, an indifference curve is a graph showing different bundles of goods, each measured as to quantity, between which a consumer is indifferent. That is, at each point on the curve, the consumer has no preference for one bundle over another. In other words, they are all equally...
functions of individuals (illustrated by indifference-curve mapsConsumer theory is a theory of microeconomics that relates preferences to consumer demand curves. The link between personal preferences, consumption, and the demand curve is one of the most complex relations in economics...
) for commodities
- labor supplied
- other resource constraints.
In so doing, it showed how
welfare economicsWelfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to simultaneously determine allocative efficiency within an economy and the income distribution associated with it. It analyzes social welfare, however measured, in terms of economic activities of the individuals that...
could dispense with interpersonally-comparable
cardinal utilityIn economics, cardinal utility is a theory of utility under which the utility gained from a particular good or service can be measured and that the magnitude of the measurement is meaningful. Under cardinal utility theory, the util is a unit of measurement much like the metre or second...
(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 UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private university in the United States and a member of the Ivy League. Columbia's main campus lies in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan, in New York City...
and
Harvard UniversityHarvard University is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1636 by the colonial Massachusetts legislature, Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and currently comprises ten separate academic units...
. 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
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, or QJE, is an economics journal published by the MIT Press and edited at Harvard University's Department of Economics. Its current editors are Robert J. Barro, Elhanan Helpman and Lawrence F. Katz...
, 52(2), February 1938, 310-34
- Structure of Soviet Wages, 1944
- Soviet National Income and Product in 1937, 1950
- Essays in Normative Economics, 1966
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