Economics Expert, Head of Russian Center Dies

Abram Bergson, an acclaimed economist who put aside plans to become a professional artist and went on to revolutionize the way the West understood Soviet economics, died last Wednesday in Cambridge. He was 89.

Bergson, who became the head of Harvard’s Russian Research Center in 1956, was a particularly influential consultant for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services during the Cold War years, when he analyzed what many assumed to be inflated Soviet economic statistics to try to accurately determine that nation’s Gross National Product.

His mastery of Soviet economics garnered Bergson top advisory positions, impressed colleagues and sometimes intimidated students.

“Especially at the beginning of the study of the Soviet economy, Abe Bergson was sort of an oracle. He knew more about it than anyone else,” said Robert M. Solow ’44-’47, a Nobel laureate and emeritus professor of economics at MIT who worked closely with Bergson.

James S. Duesenberry, a professor emeritus of economics at Harvard who had lunch with Bergson once a week for many years, said Bergson also stood out in more human ways.

“He was a very modest person, never tooted his own horn,” Duesenberry said. “He was the kind of person who asked you your opinion before he started giving his—which is unusual in our profession.”

Though many referred to Bergson as “Honest Abe” behind his back, Marshall I. Goldman, a former student, recalled a bet among his fellow graduate students about who would be the first to call the esteemed professor “Abe” in person.

Goldman said he still found Bergson “intimidating,” even after he went on to become the associate director of the research center once directed by Bergson, which was renamed the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies last year.

“You are always his former student, something you never graduate from,” Goldman said.

But he added that during his student days, Bergson was more accessible than most professors at the time, hosting open houses and a weekly Russian table.

“In those days a professor didn’t normally provide you with much face time,” Goldman said.

Bergson entertained ambitions of becoming a professional artist until a gamble by his brother helped him win a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University, according to his daughter, Judith Bergson.

Gus Bergson, then an undergraduate at Hopkins, sometimes played poker with the university’s faculty members, she said. In one game, he staked his hand on a promise from a professor to tutor Abram, then 16. Gus Bergson won, and the tutoring helped Bergson win the only scholarship Hopkins offered that year. He graduated in three years and went on to earn his masters degree and doctorate from Harvard.

Though the admission to Hopkins forced Bergson to put aside his artistic aspirations, he never lost his passion for art—particularly Vincent Van Gogh—Judith Bergson said.

“He had this amazing color sense,” she said. “He’s different from other economists in that he really took an interest in his environment.”

Before he established himself at the forefront of the study of Soviet economics, Bergson won acclaim for the “Bergson social welfare function,” according to Paul A. Samuelson, an MIT professor emeritus of economics and Nobel laureate who described Bergson as his “oldest and dearest friend at Harvard.”

Though Bergson’s work probably placed him on many Nobel “short lists,” Samuelson said, a misunderstanding perpetuated in the economics literature may have cost him the prize.

But Samuelson, himself a Nobel Laureate, added that the fact that Bergson never won a Nobel doesn’t mean he was undeserving.

“People who don’t get the Nobel Prize are just as good as the people who do get it,” he said. “There’s a lot of luck in those things.”

Bergson leaves behind his wife, three daughters, a sister and three grandchildren.