Vilfredo Pareto’s lesson: not just theory, a knowledge never separated from reality
The Marquis Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (Paris 1848 – Geneva 1923) invented a term that today seems very relevant today: that term is " ophelimity ". With this phrase, Pareto indicated that particular type of utility that each of us attributes to something, according to our desires and only in line with our personal conditions. In classical political economy, the term indicates exactly “that relationship of convenience, which causes something to satisfy a need or a desire, legitimate or not”.
As often happened in the past for other giants of history, Pareto was an eclectic character, whose experience of work and study was absolutely multiform and varied. Graduated in engineering at the Polytechnic of Turin, where he lived after his childhood spent in France, he had great success as a technical manager in the railway and steel sector, which saw him first director of the railways of S. Giovanni Valdarno and then general manager of the Italian Ferriere ( the first Italian steel center). But what makes Vilfredo Pareto famous is his work as an economist, as an enthusiastic, and then authoritative, proponent of the theory of free trade, as opposed to the dominant protectionist current he tended to favor – only then? – large industrial groups and concentrations of power. A cultured, refined person dedicated to frequenting the "good salons", the first political agon and the main communicative environment of his first dissemination phase, he never ceased to remain an industrialist and a technician, one who knew well how factories work and what they need to make railway wagons and steel artifacts. Everything can be blamed on the naturalized Italian French economist, except for having been a mere theorist, one of those we still abound with and from whom we are told how to do this or that. Pareto belonged to the period in which, usually, those who spoke in public or wrote books, knew well what they were saying, with deep knowledge of the facts. He devoted many years to the very careful study of political economy before giving his opinion, training at the school of the Giornale degli Economisti , then directed by Maffeo Pantaleoni, and also contributing, and also to a decisive extent, to the formation of the doctrine of mathematical economics. One could therefore think of a life made up of ever greater successes, of a cursus honorum without setbacks and without problems. But there were problems and disappointments, as when he was denied the chair in economics in Italy, due to the vibrant protest of the academics of the time, who considered him too "technical" and too little "professor", referring to him contemptuously, with the nickname "the engineer" .
As still happens today in the disputes fought with a knife between the teeth and with no holds barred of the academic environment, we fell into the contradiction of believing Pareto, on the one hand, too tied to the practical aspects of industrial production and, at the same time, too turned to sociological aspects more than coldly cheap ones. To put it bluntly, we can well affirm that already in the early twentieth century the university elite did not miss an opportunity to strike curare arrows against those who dared to join without the consent of the first trombones who conducted the orchestra. Like all talented people, however, the Marquis Pareto immediately found the chair abroad, in Lausanne where he taught the economic giant Walras, of which, to the enormous scorn of his Italic colleagues, Vilfredo Pareto became the successor in 1893 . Even if we could neglect the enormous weight in modern economics of free trade theory, then literally exploded through the work of John Maynard Keynes, curiously also a nobleman, who was ten years old when Pareto took the chair of economics in Lausanne. years, the life of the Marquis Vilfredo teaches us something that is worth remembering as an example of passion, consistency and eclecticism, never separated from the complete knowledge of the harsh reality, the one that makes factories work and builds progress ingot after ingot.
We pundits of the third millennium are used to repeating the phrase " the wealth of the world is owned by twenty percent of the population ", sometimes also expressed with the formula " eighty percent of the results are produced by twenty percent of the work ”, Which, in itself, would seem the bitter consideration of those who have critically observed the political transformations of civilization produced by the industrial revolution, world wars, the rebirth of the economic boom and today's growing world crisis. Not at all. Pareto wrote it in 1897, while he was in London to study the mechanisms of the English industrial structure. I conclude with some other quotations from the same author: " For many socialists, any trouble, big or small, that can affect man is a sure consequence of capitalism ". And again: " The moral precepts are often aimed at establishing the power of the ruling class, very often at tempering it ", to conclude with this: " We note that European civilization is the result of endless wars and the very widespread destruction of the weak by the strong; with those sufferings the present prosperity was bought; Is this good or is it bad? ". I like to conclude with this quote from Pareto, above all because it ends with a doubt, what should always harbor in every rational person. The invitation to a more in-depth reading of Vilfredo Pareto's work, I assure you, will never be boring and too dense with abstruse economic formulas, on the contrary, it could be an extraordinary opportunity for reflection on many very current social issues; the work of a great professor, to whom the aforementioned first trombones with the obligation of the second trumpet, of the boring and opinionated Italian academic orchestra denied the chair, considering him little more than a fool. Their.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/la-lezione-di-vilfredo-pareto-non-solo-teoria-una-conoscenza-mai-disgiunta-dalla-realta/ on Sat, 29 Aug 2020 03:58:00 +0000.