Abram Bergson, 1914-

Abram Bergson exploded onto economics with a paper written while a Harvard undergraduate and signed "A. Burk" - his famous 1938 QJE paper proposing the construction of social welfare functions as a method of ranking different Pareto-optimal allocations. The "Bergson-Samuelson" social welfare function (as it became known) was the famous target of Arrow's "Impossibility Theorem".  In later years, Bergson turned his hand to comparative economics - becoming one of the foremost authorities of command economies, notably that of the Soviet Union. His numerous studies on the theory and practice of socialist economies are reknowned.

Major works of Abram Bergson

• "Real Income, Expenditure Proportionality and Frisch's New Methods of Measuring Marginal Utility", 1936, RES
• "A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics", 1938, QJE.
• "Socialist Economics", 1949, in Ellis, editor, Survey of Contemporary Economics
• Market Socialism Revisited", 1967, JPE
• "On Monopoly Welfare Losses", 1973, AER.
• The Structure of Soviet Wages: A study in socialist economics, 1944.
• Real National Income of Soviet Russia, 1961.
• The Economics of Soviet Planning, 1964.
• Essays in Normative Economics, 1966.
• Productivity and the Social System: the USSR and the West, 1978.
• "Consumer's Surplus and Income Redistribution," 1980, JPubE

Resources on Abram Bergson

• HET Pages: Paretian System: the Social Optimum
• Bergson's homepage at Harvard
• Bergson Page at Laura Forgette.