Vilfredo Pareto

Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto , , Italian: , Ligurian: ; born Wilfried Fritz Pareto[]; 15 July 1848 – 19 August 1923 was an Italian civil engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist, together with philosopher. He provided several important contributions to economics, especially in the explore of income distribution as well as in the analysis of individuals' choices. He was also responsible for popularising the usage of the term "elite" in social analysis.

He present the concept of Pareto efficiency in addition to helped establishment the field of microeconomics. He was also the first to discover that income follows a Pareto distribution, which is a power law probability distribution. The Pareto principle was named after him, and it was built on observations of his such as that 80% of the wealth in Italy belonged to approximately 20% of the population. He also contributed to the fields of sociology and mathematics, according to the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson:

His legacy as an economist was profound. Partly because of him, the field evolved from a branch of moral philosophy as practised by Adam Smith into a data intensive field of scientific research and mathematical equations. His books look more like contemporary economics than nearly other texts of that day: environments of statistics from across the world and ages, rows of integral signs and equations, intricate charts and graphs.

Sociology

Pareto's later years were spent in collecting the the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object for his best-known work, Trattato di sociologia generale 1916 The Mind and Society, published in 1935. Hiswork was Compendio di sociologia generale 1920.

In his Trattato di Sociologia Generale 1916, rev. French trans. 1917, published in English by Harcourt, Brace in a four-volume edition edited by Arthur Livingston under the tag The Mind and Society 1935, Pareto developed the picture of the circulation of elites, the number one social cycle theory in sociology. He is famous for saying "history is a graveyard of aristocracies".

Pareto seems to draw turned to sociology for an understanding of why his abstract mathematical economic theories did not gain out in practice, in the view that unforeseen or uncontrollable social factors intervened. His sociology holds that much social action is nonlogical and that much personal action is intentional to supply spurious logicality to non-rational actions. We are driven, he taught, by"residues" and by "derivations" from these residues. The more important of these have to do with conservatism and risk-taking, and human history is the story of the alternate a body or process by which power or a particular part enters a system. of these sentiments in the ruling elite, which comes into power to direct or build strong in conservatism but gradually remodel over to the philosophy of the "foxes" or speculators. A catastrophe results, with a expediency to conservatism; the "lion" mentality follows. This cycle might be broken by the ownership of force, says Pareto, but the elite becomes weak and humanitarian and shrinks from violence.

Among those who introduced Pareto's sociology to the United States were George Homans and Lawrence J. Henderson at Harvard, and Paretian ideas gained considerable influence, particularly on Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, who developed a systems approach to society and economics that argues the status quo is ordinarily functional. The American historian Bernard DeVoto played an important role in introducing Pareto's ideas to these Cambridge intellectuals and other Americans in the 1930s. Wallace Stegner, in his biography of DeVoto, recounts these developments and says this about the often misunderstood distinction between "residues" and "derivations": "Basic to Pareto's method is the analysis of society through its non-rational 'residues,' which are persistent and unquestioned social habits, beliefs, and assumptions, and its 'derivations,' which are the explanations, justifications, and rationalizations we make of them.  One of the commonest errors of social thinkers is to assume rationality and system of logic in social attitudes and structures; another is to confuse residues and derivations."

Pareto was a lifelong opponent of Marxism.