Intelligent Quotes

Home | Topics | Authors | Works | News | About | Random Quote

Cours d'économie politique

Cours d'économie politique (En: Course on Political Economy), based on Pareto’s lectures at the University of Lausanne, presents a mathematical analysis of economic equilibrium and contains his landmark study of wealth and income distribution.

More about Vilfredo Pareto →

Book summary

The book introduced what is now known as the Pareto distribution, demonstrating that wealth concentration follows a consistent, skewed pattern across societies and time periods. His most famous observation was that approximately 80% of land in Italy was owned by about 20% of the population, but he found similar patterns elsewhere—his data on British income taxes, for instance, showed that about 30% of the population received roughly 70% of the income. The exact ratios varied, but the underlying skewed shape of the distribution held. The book has never, to the best of our knowledge, been fully translated into English, though its key ideas were later refined in his Manual of Political Economy (1906), which is available in English.

Details

Title: Cours d'économie politique

Author: Vilfredo Pareto

Type: Book

Publisher: n/a

Publication time: 1896-97

Publication place: Italy

People are also viewing

Nineteen Eighty-Four

by George Orwell (1949)

Nineteen Eighty-Four is George Orwell’s dystopian novel set in a totalitarian superstate known as Oceania, ruled by the omnipresent Party and its figurehead leader, Big Brother—whose very existence the novel deliberately leaves ambiguous, suggesting that power itself, rather than any individual, is the true ruler.

A Moveable Feast (December, 1964)
Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea (September 1, 1952)
Ernest Hemingway

The Open Door (1957)
Helen Keller


Random quote Back to frontpage