Virtually thumbing through old Johns Hopkins yearbooks (the Hullabaloo) that have been digitized by the Johns Hopkins archives, I was hoping to find a college yearbook photo of the economist Abram Bergson, but I could not find him in the Hullabaloo for the class of 1933 or earlier.
While at Johns Hopkins and then in grad school at Harvard, Bergson was still going by the American version of his father’s name, “Burk”. This was the name he used for the original publication of his justly famous Quarterly Journal of Economics article that introduced the “social welfare function” into the economist’s box of tools : “A Reformulation of Certain Aspects of Welfare Economics“, QJE, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Feb. 1938), pp. 310-334.
Abram Bergson was born April 21, 1914 and graduated from Johns Hopkins in June 1933…you can do the math. Fortunately I searched other Johns Hopkins archival websites and struck gold. According to the Johns Hopkins archive data for this photo, the portrait below was taken approximately in 1930. It is certainly the face of a teenager. I have taken the liberty of cropping the photo and cleaning some of the dust and scratches. Here is a link to the original, it is, alas, just as unfocused as what you see here. Visitors to Economics in the Rear-View Mirror can compare and contrast the young and old faces to confirm for themselves.
Portrait of the teenage Abram Burk: Johns Hopkins graphic and pictorial collection.
Portrait of Professor Abram Bergson. See Paul A. Samuelson, “Abram Bergson, 1914-2003: A Biographical Memoir”, in National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, Volume 84 (Washington, D.C.: 2004).