40 Facts About Vilfredo Pareto

Vilfredo Pareto made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices, and was one of the minds behind the Lausanne School of economics.

Vilfredo Pareto was responsible for popularising the use of the term elite in social analysis.

Vilfredo Pareto introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics.

Vilfredo Pareto was the first to claim that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution.

Vilfredo Pareto contributed to the fields of mathematics and sociology.

Vilfredo Pareto was born of an exiled noble Genoese family on 15 July 1848 in Paris, the centre of the popular revolutions of that year.

Vilfredo Pareto's father, Raffaele Pareto, was an Italian civil engineer and Ligurian marquis who had left Italy much as Giuseppe Mazzini and other Italian nationalists had.

Vilfredo Pareto was among the contributors to the Rome-based magazine La Ronda between 1919 and 1922.

For some years after graduation, Vilfredo Pareto worked as a civil engineer, first for the state-owned Italian Railway Company and later in private industry.

Vilfredo Pareto was manager of the Iron Works of San Giovanni Valdarno and later general manager of Italian Iron Works.

Vilfredo Pareto did not begin serious work in economics until his mid-forties.

Vilfredo Pareto started his career as a fiery advocate of classical liberalism, besetting the most ardent British liberals with his attacks on any form of government intervention in the free market.

Vilfredo Pareto's stay in Florence was marked by political activity, much of it fueled by his own frustrations with government regulators.

In 1889, after the death of his parents, Vilfredo Pareto changed his lifestyle, quitting his job and marrying a Russian woman, Alessandrina Bakunina.

In 1893, Vilfredo Pareto succeeded Leon Walras to the chair of Political Economy at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland where he remained for the rest of his life.

Vilfredo Pareto maintained cordial personal relationships with individual socialists but always thought their economic ideas were severely flawed.

Vilfredo Pareto later became suspicious of their motives and denounced socialist leaders as an "aristocracy of brigands" who threatened to despoil the country and criticized the government of the Italian statesman Giovanni Giolitti for not taking a tougher stance against worker strikes.

Vilfredo Pareto's attitude towards Italian fascism in his last years is a matter of controversy.

The story of Vilfredo Pareto is part of the multidisciplinary research of a scientific model that privileges sociology as a critique of cumulative models of knowledge as well as a discipline tending to the affirmation of relational models of science.

Vilfredo Pareto left him in 1902 for a young servant.

Vilfredo Pareto is famous for saying "history is a graveyard of aristocracies".

Vilfredo Pareto might have turned to sociology for an understanding of why his mathematical economic theories did not always predict actions of individuals in practice, in the belief that unforeseen or uncontrollable social factors intervened.

Vilfredo Pareto's sociology holds that much social action is nonlogical and that much personal action is designed to give spurious logicality to non-rational actions.

Renato Cirillo wrote that Vilfredo Pareto had frequently been considered a predecessor of fascism as a result of his support for the movement when it began.

Cirillo disagreed with this interpretation, suggesting that Vilfredo Pareto was critical of fascism in his private letters.

Vilfredo Pareto argued that democracy was an illusion and that a ruling class always emerged and enriched itself.

Vilfredo Pareto turned his interest to economic matters, and he became an advocate of free trade, finding himself in conflict with the Italian government.

Vilfredo Pareto's writings reflected the ideas of Leon Walras that economics is essentially a mathematical and natural science.

Vilfredo Pareto tried to sketch economics in analogy to mechanics, explicitly linking pure economics to pure mechanics, presenting a concordance table relating the two sciences.

Vilfredo Pareto was a leader of the "Lausanne School" and represents the second generation of the Neoclassical Revolution.

Vilfredo Pareto used the indifference curve of Edgeworth extensively, for the theory of the consumer and, another great novelty, in his theory of the producer.

Vilfredo Pareto gave the first presentation of the trade-off box now known as the "Edgeworth-Bowley" box.

Vilfredo Pareto was the first to realize that cardinal utility could be dispensed with, and economic equilibrium thought of in terms of ordinal utility, that is, it was not necessary to know how much a person valued this or that, only that he preferred X of this to Y of that.

Vilfredo Pareto replaced it with the notion of Pareto-optimality, the idea that a system is enjoying maximum economic satisfaction when no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.

Vilfredo Pareto optimality is widely used in welfare economics and game theory.

The Vilfredo Pareto chart is a special type of histogram, used to view the causes of a problem in order of severity from largest to smallest.

The Vilfredo Pareto index is a measure of the inequality of income distribution.

Vilfredo Pareto argued that in all countries and times the distribution of income and wealth is highly skewed, with a few holding most of the wealth.

Vilfredo Pareto argued that all observed societies follow a regular logarithmic pattern: where N is the number of people with wealth higher than x, and A and m are constants.

The Vilfredo Pareto efficiency is generally not very discriminating while the concept of potential Vilfredo Pareto-efficiency, known as Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, is more discriminating and is widely used in economics.