I don't think I've actually heard of Pareto's Multipliers... I think that's just a term I've been using when I see Pareto mention in the context of LaGrange multipliers.
Which begs me to wonder, just who is this Mr. Pareto... and how did he discover everything?
As it turns out, WIKIPEDIA, thank you, Vilfredo was an industrialist and economist enjoying the reign of "our good friend" Mussolini. Vilfredo was the paean of fascist economists and the father of power laws in relation to income distribution. And... I would explain more, but my view of the wiki link to Pareto Distribution exposed me to my favorite Greek symbol that I do not understand, also known as the "squiggle." So I will leave the explaining of Pareto's math to those who are not currently explaining a simple exponential function for 200 thesis pages and get back to my work. Meanwhile... I am sure you are glad to know about Vilfredo and the original context of his existence.
On a side note, Pareto Optimality is considered a main goal of natural resource economists today. Ah, it seems like all my favorite economic theorists have been associated with a rather unfortunate period and culture of history-- Ezra Pound's La Economiste, anyone? Brilliant work... bad timing.
Pareto was the first person (if I recall correctly) to study empirical power law distributions -- if you look at the probability density function on wikipedia, you'll notice that the "Pareto distribution" is a power law!
ReplyDelete:) I know!! Hence why I decided to post about him here... Lots of love for Power Laws over here.
ReplyDeleteHere's some more goodness: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music)
Yes, it shows how to relate the tones to math!! Ah, WIKI!
Haha, the ironic thing is that (if you believe Aaron Clauset's statistical arguments) the original motivation for the Pareto distribution, the fat-tailed distribution of wealth, is actually not a power law, after all! (I think Clauset argued that it was a better fit to a log-normal distribution than a power law.)
ReplyDeleteI would agree with that-- I think even without Clauset's arguement most economists would use Pareto optimality to look at situations that would be considered logarithmic by standard analysis.
ReplyDeleteOn a not so important note-- is it a strange thing that when I begin to "TXT" a word that starts with "p" in my cellular phone the first guess that it comes up with is "power law"?
ReplyDeleteThat means that I say "power law" more than I say "pine"!! And "pine" is part of my daily diction!!