Vilfredo Pareto
Italian economist and sociologist (1848-1923)
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (; Italian: [paˈreːto]; born Wilfried Fritz Pareto; 15 July 1848 – 19 August 1923) was an Italian polymath, whose areas of interest included sociology, civil engineering, economics, political science, and philosophy. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices, and was one of the minds behind the Lausanne School of economics. He was also responsible for popularising the use of the term elite in social analysis and contributed to elite theory. He has been described as "one of the last Renaissance scholars. Trained in physics and mathematics, he became a polymath whose genius radiated into nearly all other major fields of knowledge."
He introduced the concept of Pareto efficiency and helped develop the field of microeconomics. He was also the first to claim 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 his observations that 80% of the wealth in Italy belonged to about 20% of the population. He also contributed to the fields of mathematics and sociology.
Biography
Pareto was born of an exiled noble Genoese family on 15 July 1848 in Paris, the centre of the popular revolutions of that year. His father, Raffaele Pareto (1812–1882), was an Italian civil engineer and Ligurian marquis who had left Italy much as Giuseppe Mazzini and other Italian nationalists had.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q11031. VIAF identifies the subject as 2475156. The Library of Congress control number is n79018804. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1848, 1923, 1812 and 1882.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vilfredo Pareto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.