Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editor's preface
- Introduction
- Part I Soviet socialism
- Part II Economic welfare
- 9 Bergsonian welfare economics
- 10 Optimal and voluntary income distribution
- 11 A note on production structure and aggregate growth
- 12 Optimal education, occupation, and income distribution in a simplist model
- 13 The welfare economics of product quality under socialism
- Abram Bergson: Biographical sketch and bibliography
- Index
9 - Bergsonian welfare economics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editor's preface
- Introduction
- Part I Soviet socialism
- Part II Economic welfare
- 9 Bergsonian welfare economics
- 10 Optimal and voluntary income distribution
- 11 A note on production structure and aggregate growth
- 12 Optimal education, occupation, and income distribution in a simplist model
- 13 The welfare economics of product quality under socialism
- Abram Bergson: Biographical sketch and bibliography
- Index
Summary
As I write, the new welfare economics is just over four decades old. This subject, in its essentials as we know it today, was born when the 24-year-old Abram Bergson – then still a Harvard graduate student – wrote his classic 1938 Quarterly Journal of Economics article. To one like myself, who before 1938 knew all the relevant literature on welfare economics and just could not make coherent sense of it, Bergson's work came like a flash of lightning, describable only in the words of the pontifical poet:
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
King Alphonse claimed that if he had been in on the Creation, he could have done a better job. By sheer good luck, as a fellow graduate student and comrade at arms, I was in on Bergson's creation: but time has shown that I have not been able to do a better job of it; nor, I believe, has anyone else – and this despite the quite confused rumors that Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem rendered Bergson's “social welfare function” somehow nonexistent or self-contradictory.
Here I hope to set the record straight as only a living witness and participant can. After a few introductory sections that sketch the historical setting of modern welfare economics, I provide under the heading “Existence and Property of a Bergsonian Social Welfare Function” an analytical exposition of some of the fundamentals of the Bergsonian welfare economics.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Economic Welfare and the Economics of Soviet SocialismEssays in honor of Abram Bergson, pp. 223 - 266Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1981
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