Vilfredo Pareto was born in Paris to Italian exiles and studied mathematics and literature at the Polytechnic Institute in Turin. In 1893 he was named chair of economics at the University of Lausanne. He did not begin studying economics until the age of 42, and in later years turned his interest to sociology. Pareto was often called "the ideological precurser of fascism." he did income studies of many different countries and found what he thought to be a fundamental natural law, which was later n amed Pareto's Law. This law states that there exists an inevitable tendency for income to be distributed in the same way, regardless of social and political institutions and taxation. This was later refuted.
Pareto is best known for the concept of "Pareto optimality". An economic outcome is a Pareto optimum if, and only if no one can be made better off without making somebody else worse off. Pareto also showed that the standard results derived from consum er theory can be repeated even if the assumption of a measureable utility of goods is dropped.
Works by Vilfredo Pareto:
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