Happy 80/20 Day!
Italian economist, engineer and political activist Vilfredo Pareto was born on July 15, 1848, in Paris, where his father had fled due to political difficulties.
Pareto should be more famous, for his explanation of the 80/20 rule, and for his contribution to making better things, the Pareto chart. Many economic texts ignore his work almost completely.
Vilfredo Pareto, from the Duke University William J. Samuels Portrait Collection
His contributions, as accounted at Wikipedia:
A few economic rules are based on his work:
- The Pareto index is a measure of the inequality of income distribution.
- The Pareto chart is a special type of histogram, used to view causes of a problem in order of severity from largest to smallest. It is a statistical tool that graphically demonstrates the Pareto principle or the 80-20 rule.
- Pareto’s law concerns the distribution of income.
- The Pareto distribution is a probability distribution used, among other things, as a mathematical realization of Pareto’s law.
Resources:
- Biography at the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, at the Library of Economics and Liberty
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