Vilfredo Pareto

Italian polymath who introduced Pareto efficiency and the Pareto principle.

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian polymath born in Paris on 15 July 1848 who worked in sociology, economics, and engineering.^[1][2] He is known for the Pareto principle, the 80–20 rule, and for developing the concept of Pareto optimality in welfare economics.^[3][4] Pareto died in Geneva, Switzerland on 19 August 1923.^[2]

Quick Facts

Birth name: Wilfried Fritz Pareto
Born: 15 July 1848
Birthplace: Paris, France
Died: 19 August 1923
Place of death: Céligny, Switzerland
Field: Microeconomics; Socioeconomics
Institutions: University of Lausanne
Alma mater: Polytechnic University of Turin

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

Pareto earned a doctorate in engineering from the Polytechnic University of Turin in 1869 with a dissertation on equilibrium in solid bodies.^[5] He worked as a civil engineer for the Italian Railway Company and later managed the Iron Works of San Giovanni Valdarno.^[6] He published a textbook in 1896–1897 containing the Pareto distribution of wealth.^[3] He argued that history is driven by the struggle between elites, becoming “a graveyard of aristocracies”.^[7]

At the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, Pareto took over the Political Economy chair from Léon Walras in 1893.^[3] Pareto's well-known observation from 1906 was that in Italy, 80% of the property belonged to 20% of the population.^[3] The work for which Pareto is most famous, the Trattato di sociologia generale, came out in 1916.^[7] According to Pareto's classification, society consists of the mass and the elite, with the elite further split into governing and non-governing segments.^[7]

What the cited sources add

A 2026 Jacobin article by Barrow notes that Pareto’s Treatise on General Sociology first appeared in French between 1917 and 1919, with a second Italian edition in 1923.^[8] The same source states that a “Pareto vogue” in the United States reached its peak in the late 1930s when his work was translated into English as The Mind and Society.^[8] Barrow also reports that Pareto’s 2,033-page tome is now rarely read, though it continues to influence political science and sociology.^[8]

References

Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Geoffrey Duncan Mitchell. A Hundred Years of Sociology. Transaction Publishers, 1968. p. 115.; ; Boccara, "Modeling Complex Systems", Springer Science & Business Media, 9 September 2010, p. 372 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "The Encyclopedia Sponsored by Statistics and Probability Societies", StatProb, 19 August 1923 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Amoroso, "Vilfredo Pareto", Econometrica, January 1938, p. 1–21; Amoroso, "Vilfredo Pareto", Econometrica, January 1938, p. 1–21 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Mathur, "How Well Do We Know Pareto Optimality?", The Journal of Economic Education, 2014, p. 172–178 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Giacalone-Monaco, "Ricerche intorno alla giovinezza di Vilfredo Pareto", Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, 1966, p. 97–104; Amoroso, "Vilfredo Pareto", Econometrica, January 1938, p. 1–21 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Amoroso, "Vilfredo Pareto", Econometrica, January 1938, p. 1–21 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Vilfredo Pareto" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Rossides, Daniel W. (1998) Social Theory: Its Origins, History, and Contemporary Relevance. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 203. . (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Barrow, "Vilfredo Pareto’s Sociology of a Ruling Class in Decline", Jacobin, 2026-03-17. facts only, no text reused. jacobin.com

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Vilfredo Pareto (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.