The Pareto Principle, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto who developed the “80/20” rule in the late 1800s, specifies that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. During the past century, researchers focused on business, product consumption, medicine, and the behavioral sciences have observed the same basic persistent pattern regarding the “vital few and trivial many” (Juran, 1954). N...

En este artículo destacamos la influencia profunda y duradera de Pareto en el análisis económico moderno. Ponemos énfasis su teoría del valor, basada utilidad. Este autor, torno a 1900, inicia giro hacia una utilidad ordinal objetiva. El principal objetivo nuestro trabajo consiste trazar hilo conductor ideas económicas que consideramos muy relevantes: desde hasta economía ortodoxa actual; Benth...

The economic world is full of patterns, and one of the most controversial is the distribution of wealth. You might expect the balance between rich and poor to vary widely from country to country. But back in 1897, Vilfredo Pareto discovered a pattern of wealth distribution that appears to be universal. Whenever you double the amount of wealth within a country, the number of people in each succe...

The connection between aesthetics and numbers dates back to pre-Socratic times. Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle worked on quantitative expressions of proportion and beauty such as the golden ratio. Pythagoreans, for instance, quantified " harmonious " musical intervals in terms of proportions (ratios) of the first few whole numbers: a unison is 1:1, octave is 2:1, perfect fifth is 3:2, perfect...

– We show that income distribution in the USA has a well-defined two-class structure. The majority of population (97–99%) belongs to the lower class characterized by the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs (“thermal”) distribution. The upper class (1–3% of population) has a Pareto power-law (“superthermal”) distribution, whose parameters change in time with the rise and fall of stock market. We also di...

– Personal income distribution in the USA has a well-defined two-class structure. The majority of population (97–99%) belongs to the lower class characterized by the exponential Boltzmann-Gibbs (“thermal”) distribution, whereas the upper class (1–3% of population) has a Pareto power-law (“superthermal”) distribution. By analyzing income data for 1983–2001, we show that the “thermal” part is sta...

I. If a symbolic date were to be chosen for the birth of mathematical economics, our profession, in rare unanimous agreement, would select 1838, the year in which Augustin Cournot published his Recherches sur les Principes Mathématiques de la Théorie des Richesses. Students of the history of economic analysis could point out contributions made to mathematical economics as early as the beginning...