Citation
Cours d'économie politique
TL;DR
80% of Italy's land owned by 20% of population
Original observation that approximately 80% of Italy's land was owned by 20% of the population. Pareto proposed the mathematical formula for income distribution that would become known as the Pareto distribution, founding the study of power law distributions in economics.
This work established that extreme inequality isn't anomaly but mathematical regularity, appearing across countries and asset types. The 80/20 pattern has since been found in countless systems from earthquake magnitudes to product sales.
Key Findings from Pareto (1897)
- 80% of Italy's land owned by 20% of population
- Similar patterns across European countries
- Mathematical formula describing income distribution
- Scale-invariant inequality patterns