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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.

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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.

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First Inaugural Address

by Abraham Lincoln (1861)

Abraham Lincoln delivered his First Inaugural Address as the 16th president of the United States on March 4, 1861, at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., at a moment when seven Southern states had already declared secession from the Union.

Topics: Politics American Civil War America

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