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Biographical Memoirs Volume 84 (2004) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 23-36

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From page 23...
... When Bergson died at age 89, he was the last survivor of Harvard's age of Frank Taussig, and had been a young star in the new age of Joseph Schumpeter, youthful Wassily Leontief, eclectic Gottfried Haberler, and after 1937 Alvin Hansen, the "American Keynesian." As Leontief's second protégé I am proud to have been preceded by Abram Bergson, his first protégé. I would be honored to be known as Bergson's first protégé, for much of my own work in welfare economics owes virtually everything to his classic 1938 Quarterly Journal of Economics article that for the first time clarified this subject.
From page 24...
... 24 B I O G R A P H I C A L M E M O I R S under the authorship of Abram Burk. Burk was indeed the name he had been born with.
From page 25...
... thesis. Thereafter at the wartime Office of Strategic Services, at Columbia, at the RAND think tank in Santa Monica, and after 1956 as tenured Harvard professor, Abram Bergson divided his time and energies between pure economic theory and the Soviet economics specialty.
From page 26...
... 26 B I O G R A P H I C A L M E M O I R S Vickery, and Little could be given coherent interpretation in light of Burk-Bergson (1938)
From page 27...
... My spies reported that, nevertheless, commuting to daily work he revealed a preference for the longer route over the lights-free shorter router: His gut knew more about the algebraic pluses and minuses of the calculus of "liberty" than his conscious mind did.) Abram Bergson was a realist par excellence.
From page 28...
... On the basis of all the known evidence, perhaps no firm answer can be given to this question." No biographer of Abram Bergson could be in doubt about his personal attitudes and modesty. I have made stronger claims on his behalf than he ever made in print.
From page 29...
... Those who knew Abram Bergson and knew his informed views on Smith, Marx, Franklin D Roosevelt, Lenin, and Stalin will judge him to have been a man of the center with a personal preference toward less economic inequality.
From page 30...
... Abram Bergson over a long career earned from teachers, pupils, colleagues, and friends much affection and ad
From page 31...
... A B R A M B E R G S O N 31 miration. His wife, Rita Macht Bergson, herself from an academic Baltimore background, played an important role in their family and professional lives.
From page 32...
... 32 B I O G R A P H I C A L M E M O I R S S E L E C T E D B I B L I O G R A P H Y 1936 Real Income, expenditure, proportionality and Frisch's new meth ods .
From page 33...
... A B R A M B E R G S O N 33 1968 The economic organization of Communism. In International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol.
From page 34...
... 34 B I O G R A P H I C A L M E M O I R S 1981 Consumer's and producer's surplus and income redistribution.

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  • abram bergson


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