Profile Major Works Resources

Abram Bergson, 1914-2003

Photo of A.Bergson

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.

 

  

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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

HET

 
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Resources on Abram Bergson

 

 
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