Abram Bergson, born Abram Burk (April 21, 1914, New York City - April 23, 2003), was an American economist. April 21 is the 111th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (112th in leap years). ... 1914 (MCMXIV) was a common year starting on Thursday. ... Flag Seal Nickname: The Big Apple, The Capital of the World[1], Gotham [2], Metropolis Location Location in the state of New York Government Counties (Boroughs) Bronx (The Bronx) New York (Manhattan) Queens (Queens) Kings (Brooklyn) Richmond (Staten Island) Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) Geographical characteristics Area     City 1,214. ... April 23 is the 113th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (114th in leap years). ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... An economist is an individual who studies, develops, and applies theories and concepts from economics, and writes about economic policy. ...

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: A social welfare function, in welfare economics, is a function which gives a measure of the material welfare of society, given a number of economic variables as inputs. ... Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an important notion in economics with broad applications in game theory, engineering and the social sciences. ...

• 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 agggregate, with no loss of behavioral significance. An indifference curve is a graph showing combinations of goods for which a consumer is indifferent, that is, it has no preference for one combination versus another, as they render the same level of satisfaction for the consumer. ... Consumer theory is a theory of economics. ... Welfare economics is a branch of economics that uses microeconomic techniques to simultaneously determine the allocational efficiency of a macroeconomy and the income distribution consequences associated with it. ... Cardinal utility theory states that the utility (satisfaction) gained from a particular good or service can be measured in the same way as distance, temperature and time can. ...

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 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 U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Columbia University is a private university in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. ... Harvard University campus (old map) Harvard University (incorporated as The President and Fellows of Harvard College) is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...

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.

Literary works

• "A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics," Quarterly Jounal of Economics, 52(2), February 1938, 310-34
• Structure of Soviet Wages, 1944
• Soviet National Income and Product in 1937, 1950
• Essays in Normative Economics, 1966

Soviet redirects here. ... Measures of national income and output are used in economics to estimate the value of goods and services produced in an economy. ... 1937 (MCMXXXVII) was a common year starting on Friday (link will take you to calendar). ...

References

• M. Ellman, "Bergson, Abram," 1987, The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics," v. 1, 229-30
• Paul A. Samuelson, 2004, "Abram Bergson 1914-2003: A Biographical Memoir"

Paul Samuelson (born May 15, 1915) is an American economist known for his work in many fields of economics. ...

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 (Japanese)