Abram Bergson, EconomistApril 21, 1914 – April 23, 2003
本文是阿布拉姆·伯格森的悼念文章，回顾了他作为数理经济学家和苏联研究学者的贡献，特别是他1938年澄清福利经济学的经典论文。
Over the last two-thirds of the twentieth century, Abram Bergson was a leading American and world mathematical economist. He was a creative theorist, both literary and statistical. Also Bergson was a careful empiricist who, from a bully pulpit at Harvard, earned a reputation as the dean of Soviet studies and teacher of that subject’s major scholars over two generations. At a young age in 1933 Abram came to the Harvard Graduate School in economics, after undergraduate training at Johns Hopkins. Adolph Hitler was responsible for new foreign blood arriving in Cambridge to trigger an overdue prewar Harvard renaissance in economics. When Bergson died at age 89, he was the last survivor of Harvard’s age of Frank Taussig, as well as being 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 protege, I am proud to have been preceded by Abram Bergson, his first protege. I would be honoured to be known as Bergson’s first protege, 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 as treated by Lionel Robbins, Abba Lerner, John Hicks, Nicholas Kaldor, Tibor Scitovsky and, of course, earlier by Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, F.Y. Edgeworth, and A.C. Pigou. Two of Bergson’s most cited papers actually appeared under the authorship of Abram Burk. Burk was indeed the name he had been born with. How A. Burk became A. Bergson is a tale worth telling, both as a reflection of what American academic and ordinary life was like 70 years ago, and for what it tells about his own straight-arrow character. Having already by 1937 achieved wide respect as a mathematical economist, serious Abram decided he would add a second string to his bow. Accordingly he learned the Russian language, and made a lengthy research visit to Moscow. 1937 was the precise year when Stalin was liquidating, on a large scale, dissidents and innocents as enemies of the revolution. In later reflection, Bergson reported how astonishing it had been that none of the many scholars he talked to – most of whom must have known family members and neighbours who were imprisoned or killed – communicated complaints to a naive American visitor. By 1940 Bergson had written for publication his Harvard Ph.D. thesis. Thereafter, at the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), at Columbia, at the Rand think tank in Santa Monica and, after 1956, as tenured Harvard professor, Abram Bergson The Economic Journal, 115 (February), F130–F133. Royal Economic Society 2005. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.