Abram Bergson [Abram Burk] (1914-2003)
Abram Bergson (21 April 1914-23 April 2003) has been famous both for welfare economics and for Soviet economics. It is worth noticing that two of his most well-known papers, published in 1936 and 1938, are authored by Burk while referred to as Bergson’s.
At a time when being a Jew was not easy in Europe and being Russian was not popular in the US, his older brother Gus Burk and himself, Abram Burk, were both students in Harvard. They voluntarily decided to change their surname into Bergson in order to assert themselves as sons of Russian immigrant Jews. This is just one story about the change from Burk to Bergson as it is described by his great friend Paul A. Samuelson. The latter recalls that Abram Bergson was known as “Honest Abe” in Harvard; he describes him as very modest yet not shy, straight arrow, upright, and as “a man of the center with a personal preference toward less economic inequality” (2004: 27, 29).Abram Bergson spent his youth in Baltimore. He was married to Rita Macht Bergson, herself trained in Baltimore, with whom he had three daughters Judy, Mimi and Lucy. After an undergraduate training at Johns Hopkins University, he studied economics at the Harvard Graduate School. He started to learn the Russian language and he made a lengthy visit to Moscow in 1937. He published his Harvard PhD thesis in 1940, by which time he had already gained a wide recognition as a mathematical economist. During World War II, he worked between 1940 and 1942 at the University of Texas, Austin. He then became head of the Russian desk at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). He played a major role in establishing and maintaining close links between US academic studies of the Soviet economy and the intelligence community of the Federal government. After the end of the war, he had an economics chair at Columbia, and worked in the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica.
He became a Harvard Professor in 1956, where he was the director of the Harvard Russian Research centre from 1964 to 1968 and during 1969-70. He was also chairman of the Social Science Advisory Board of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, consultant to various federal agencies, the President of the Association for Comparative Studies, and he several times gave testimony before the US Congress.His contributions to economics are numerous, important and diverse. In economic theory, his famous 1936 article discusses techniques to measure marginal utility and its importance for the general index number theory. He found an earliest formulation of the constant elasticity of substitution function, which outside consumer utility analysis, became widely used in production theory and in modern finance theory, for instance, in case optimal portfolio ratios are independent to wealth.
In welfare economics, Bergson’s uncontroversial celebrity derives from his 1938 Quarterly Journal of Economics article in which he defines and discusses individualistic social welfare function, as a method of ranking different Pareto-optimal allocations. Social welfare is expressed as a function of the amounts of commodities allocated to individuals as well as the allocation of factor services, the latter defined with reference to the particular uses of labour services and of particular industries in which labour was employed. With such an individualistic social welfare function, Pareto optimality conditions are derived as necessary but not sufficient conditions for defining interpersonal normative equity. Besides providing a representation of social welfare and a framework for welfare economics, this social welfare function notably provides a sound answer to Robbins’s critics according to which value judgements should be thrown out of economics, for interpersonal comparisons of utility are not testable empirical relations. Such function should indeed provide coherent interpretations of ethical value judgements.
Samuelson considerably simplified Bergson’s presentation by adding further postulates in his 1947 book. Even though the now so called Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function in its actual shape is due to Samuelson, the latter has always been very cautious to attribute its actual origin to Bergson.For the history of welfare economic thought, we should recall Bergson’s strong statements as whether we should use the word “Pareto optimality” since it appeared before, however vaguely, in Mill, Smith and Edgeworth. In a critical approach, he has also contributed to the analysis of compensation variations and consumer surplus. He introduced the concept of marginal rate of income substitution (MRIS), which amounts to a distributional weight; he showed that any results based on that framework depend on the price structure that hence require a general equilibrium context. He also points out its redundancy by establishing a connection between the analysis of variations and index number theory.
In comparative economics, he is often considered to be the father of the US economic Sovietology. His works on the Soviet economy include description and analysis of the Soviet economic institutions, measurement of economic growth, and a deep knowledge of the Soviet statistics. One of his main contributions concerns the measurement of economic growth in Soviet systems. Such advances made it possible to compare growth rates between USSR and other economic systems. It was indeed a difficult task: no market prices are obviously available, and the methods of evaluation used in Soviet economies at this time made Soviet growth appear unrealistically high. Bergson fostered dependable comparisons by applying the adjusted factor cost method for the USSR for 1928-55, which consisted in adjusting actual Soviet transactions prices to what they would be according to the neoclassical theory. These prices are used as weights to aggregate the physical outputs in each branch and economic sector.
Such data are then comparable to aggregates from systems of national accounts (SNAs), and, as argued by Bergson, provide possible welfare interpretations. Here again, Bergson’s results have been undoubtedly influential, yet controversial.In both domains of research, whether Sovietology or welfare economics, Bergson has always put forward that any evaluation of social states or any assessment of the superiority of one system should mainly rest on value judgements rather than on objective quantitative economic data. Comparisons indeed induce weighting different activities into an index, and eventually rely on ethical values.
Antoinette Baujard
See also:
Paul Anthony Samuelson (I); Welfare economics (III).
References and further reading
Bergson, A. (1948), ‘Socialist economics’, in H.S. Ellis (ed.), A Survey of Contemporary Economics, Philadelphia, PA: Blakiston, pp. 412-48.
Bergson, A. (1961), Real National Income of Soviet Russia, Since 1928, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bergson, A. (1966), Essays in Normative Economics, London: Oxford University Press.
Bergson, A. (1967), ‘Market socialism revisited’, Journal of Political Economy, 75 (5), 655-73.
Bergson, A. (1973), ‘On monopoly welfare losses’, American Economic Review, 63 (5), 853-70.
Bergson, A. (1976), ‘Social choice and welfare economics under representative government’, Journal of Public Economics, 6 (3), 171-90.
Bergson, A. (1978), Productivity and the Social System: The USSR and the West, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bergson, A. (1980), ‘Consumer’s surplus and income redistribution’, Journal of Public Economics, 14 (1), 31-47.
Bergson, A. (1982), Welfare, Planning, and Employment: Selected Essays in Economic Theory, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Burk [Bergson], A. (1936), ‘Real income, expenditure proportionality, and Frisch’s “new methods of measuring marginal utility”’, Review of Economic Studies, 4 (1), 33-52.
Burk [Bergson], A. (1938), ‘A reformulation of certain aspects of welfare economics’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 52 (2), 310-34.
Samuelson, P.A. (1947), Foundations of Economic Analysis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Samuelson, P.A. (2004), ‘Abram Bergson, 1914-2003’, in National Academy of Sciences (ed.), Bibliographical Memoirs, vol. 84, Washington, DC: National Academies Press, pp. 21-34.