Vilfredo Pareto Quotes

When it is useful to them, men can believe a theory of which they know nothing more than its name.

An idea is nothing more or less than a new combination of old elements (Quoted from Vilfredo Pareto)

Give me the fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth for yourself.

For many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

It is a know fact that almost all revolutions have been the work, not of the common people, but of the aristocracy, and especially of the decayed part of the aristocracy.

Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical. If that theory could be demolished scientifically, the only result would be that another theory would be substituted for the first one, and for the same purpose.

Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.

History is the graveyard of aristocracies.

People reasoning on essences may sometimes substitute certitude for probability, even very great probability. But we know nothing about essences and accordingly lose our certitude.

The diverse natures of men, combined with the necessity to satisfy in some manner the sentiment which desires them to be equal, has had the result that in the democracies they have endeavored to provide the appearance of power in the people and the reality of power in an elite.

The world has always belonged to the stronger, and will belong to them for many years to come. Men only respect those who make themselves respected. Whoever becomes a lamb will find a wolf to eat him.

Assume that the new elite were clearly and simply to proclaim its intentions which are to supplant the old elite; no one would come to its assistance, it would be defeated before having fought a battle. On the contrary, it appears to be asking nothing for itself, well knowing that without asking anything in advance it will obtain what it wants as a consequence of its victory.

For a very long time, and among a large number of peoples, political power has belonged to the owners of the land.

80% of results come from 20% of effort/time

Increase in the wealth per capita fosters democracy; but the latter, at least according to what we have been able to observe up to now, entails great destruction of wealth and even eventually dries up the sources of it. Hence it is its own grave-digger, it destroys what gave it birth.

Men follow their sentiments and their self-interest, but it pleases them to imagine that they follow reason. And so they look for, and always find, some theory which, a posteriori, makes their actions appear to be logical.

There is not a reactionary, however extreme, who dares speak ill of the god People. It took an eccentric like Nietzsche to dare such a thing, and it makes him look like the exception that proves the rule.

Working hard is important. But more effort does not necessarily yield more results. “Less but better” does. Ferran Adrià, arguably the world’s greatest chef, who has led El Bulli to become the world’s most famous restaurant, epitomizes the principle of “less but better” in at least two ways. First, his specialty is reducing traditional dishes to their absolute essence and then re-imagining them in ways people have never thought of before. Second, while El Bulli has somewhere in the range of 2 million requests for dinner reservations each year, it serves only fifty people per night and closes for six months of the year. In fact, at the time of writing, Ferran had stopped serving food altogether and had instead turned El Bulli into a full-time food laboratory of sorts where he was continuing to pursue nothing but the essence of his craft.1 Getting used to the idea of “less but better” may prove harder than it sounds, especially when we have been rewarded in the past for doing more … and more and more. Yet at a certain point, more effort causes our progress to plateau and even stall. It’s true that the idea of a direct correlation between results and effort is appealing. It seems fair. Yet research across many fields paints a very different picture. Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channeled toward improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

Human behaviour reveals uniformities which constitute natural laws. If these uniformities did not exist, then there would be neither social science nor political economy, and even the study of history would largely be useless. In effect, if the future actions of men having nothing in common with their past actions, our knowledge of them, although possibly satisfying our curiosity by way of an interesting story, would be entirely useless to us as a guide in life

The sentiment that is very inappropriately named quality is fresh, strong, alert, precisely because it is not, in fact, a sentiment of equality and is not related to any abstraction, as a few naive “intellectuals” still believe; but because it is related to the direct interests of individuals who are bent on escaping certain inequalities not in their favour, and setting up new inequalities that will be in their favour, that latter being their chief concern.

Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 per cent of our efforts produce 80 per cent of results. Much later, in 1951, in his Quality-Control Handbook, Joseph Moses Juran, one of the fathers of the quality movement, expanded on this idea and called it “the Law of the Vital Few.”2 His observation was that you could massively improve the quality of a product by resolving a tiny fraction of the problems. He found a willing test audience for this idea in Japan, which at the time had developed a rather poor reputation for producing low-cost, low-quality goods. By adopting a process in which a high percentage of effort and attention was channelled towards improving just those few things that were truly vital, he made the phrase “made in Japan” take on a totally new meaning. And gradually, the quality revolution led to Japan’s rise as a global economic power.3

This principle is sometimes known as Price’s law, after Derek J. de Solla Price,13 the researcher who discovered its application in science in 1963. It can be modelled using an approximately L-shaped graph, with number of people on the vertical axis, and productivity or resources on the horizontal. The basic principle had been discovered much earlier. Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), an Italian polymath, noticed its applicability to wealth distribution in the early twentieth century, and it appears true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form. It also applies to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words), among many other things. Sometimes it is known as the Matthew Principle (Matthew 25:29), derived from what might be the harshest statement ever attributed to Christ: “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.

The art of government lies in finding ways to take advantage of such sentiments, not wasting one’s energy in futile efforts to destroy them; very frequently the sole effect of the latter course is to strengthen them. The person capable of freeing himself from the blind domination of his own sentiments will be able to utilize the sentiments of other people for his own ends … This may be said in general of the relation between ruler and ruled. The statesman who is of greatest service to himself and to his party is the man without prejudice who knows how to profit by the prejudices of others.

Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 per cent of our efforts produce 80 per cent of results. Much later,

the Pareto Principle predicts that 80% of effects come from 20% of causes. Maybe it’s just my laziness talking but this gets me seriously excited. It’s often said that necessity is the mother of invention but I’d argue that laziness is, and my friend Vilfredo is my mentor in that pursuit. So essentially, you can cut out 80% of the stuff you’re doing, sit on the couch eating nachos instead and you’ll still get most of the results you’re getting. If you don’t want to sit on the couch chowing down on nachos 80% of the time, then doing more of the 20% stuff is your fast track to success.

This harmonious outcome is known as a Pareto improvement, after Italian economist and political scientist Vilfredo Pareto.

By the early 1900s, however, Italian liberal economist Vilfredo Pareto argued that 80 per cent of wealth was concentrated in 20 per cent of the population (from today’s perspective, this would be an underestimate). He also saw true representative democracy as an illusion; in the end, a ruling elite would always emerge.67 Pareto’s democracy is a democracy of the elites for the elites.

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, was the brainchild of Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist. In 1896, he noted that 80% of the property and wealth in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. No one is surprised by this notion today, but it was a heady proclamation at the time. Pareto didn’t stop with property and wealth distribution. He later showed the 80/20 rule could be applied to other phenomena. For example

We consider it useful to see where this path ends up, which, beginning with State monopolies and keeping on with obligatory unions, obligatory insurance, collective organization of production and the constitution of a welfare state, is leading to the destruction of every individual initiative, the annihilation of all human dignity, and the reduction of men to the level of a flock of sheep.

The problem to resolve is the following: first of all, are there some means to diminish, reduce to a minimum, the number of birth of individuals unfit to the conditions of social life? Following from this, if it is not possible to decrease these births, if the increase of the number of these individuals becomes a danger for society, how can we eliminate them, with a minimum of error in their choice and in the suffering inflicted on them, and without overly upsetting the humanitarian sentiments, which it is useful to develop?

Itaalia majandusteadlase Vilfredo Pareto 80-20% reegel on imbunud pea kõikidesse valdkondadesse. Ajajuhtimise kontekstis tähendab see seda, et 20% meie tegevustest annab 80% lisaväärtusest. Ehk siis näiteks 20% minu poolt tööpäevas kulutatud ajast annab 80% selle päeva töö tulemusest. Seega on minu ülesandeks leida igas päevas üles need 1.5 tundi tööülesandeid, mis on absoluutselt kriitilised oma tööalaste eesmärkide saavutamiseks. Just need ülesanded on prioriteetsemad. Ma tegelen nendega endale hästi sobival ajal päevast, kus olen vaimselt aktiivne ja kus on võimalikult vähe segajaid. Seejärel võtan kätte ka ülejäänud 80% tegevusi, aga kui mõni neist jääb tegemata, ei juhtu midagi hullu. Perfektsionist kasutab tihti 80-20% reeglit tagurpidi! Kui reegel ütleb et 20% tegevust annab 80% tulemust, siis perfektsionist tegeleb eelkõige selle 80% osaga, mis annab ainult 20% tulemust. Seetõttu on oluline alustada õigest otsast – tegevustest, mis võtavad 20% ajast, aga annavad 80% tulemusest. Ja kui siis jääb aega üle ja see on piisavalt oluline, võib tegeleda ülejäänud 80% asjadega, mis annavad 20% tulemusest. Alusta õigest otsast ja ülejäänu läheb kõik ise paika!

El economista italiano del siglo Diecinueve Vilfredo Pareto introdujo un concepto poderoso conocido como el principio Pareto, el cual afirma que el 80% de tus resultados vienen de solamente el 20% de tus esfuerzos.

Vilfredo Pareto’s original study in 1906 found that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

The 80/20 rule was the brainchild of economist and mathematician Vilfredo Pareto, who in 1906 observed that 80 percent of the land wealth in Italy was owned by just 20 percent of the population. This distribution has often been described as a universal law that is as predictable and provable as the law of gravity. The rule states that 20 percent of inputs tend to produce 80 percent of the outputs.

Once experience is admitted within the theological edifice, the latter begins to crumble – such portion of it, of course, as stands within the experimental domain, for the other wings are safe from any attack by experience. So years, centuries, go by; peoples, governments, manners and systems of living, pass away; and all along new theologies, new systems of metaphysics, keep replacing the old, and each new one is reputed more “true” or much “better” that its predecessors. And in certain cases they may really be better, if by “better” we means more helpful to society; but more “true”, no, if by the term we mean accord with experimental reality. One faith cannot be more scientific than another, and experimental reality is equally overreached by polytheism, Islamism, and Christianity (whether Catholic, Protestant, Liberal, Modernist, or of any other variety); by the innumerable metaphysical sects, including the Kantian, the Hegelian, the Bergsonian, and not excluding the positivistic sects of Comte, Spencer, and other eminent writers too numerous to mention; by the faiths of solidaristes, humanitarians, anti-clericals, and worshippers of Progress; and by as many other faiths as have existed, exist, or can be imagined.

In politics all ruling classes have at all times identified their own interests with the “interests of the country.” When politicians are afraid of a too rapid increase in the number of proletarians, they are for birth-control and show that Malthusianism is to the interests of public and country. If, instead, they are afraid a population may prove inadequate for their designs, they are against birth-control, and show just as conclusively that their interest is the interest of public and country. And all that is accepted as long as residues remain favourable. The situation changes as residues change never in view of arguments pro or contra.

As regards the subject class, we gets the following relations: 1. When the subject class contains a number of indviduals desposed to use force and with capable leaders to guide them, the governing class is, in many cases, overthrown and another takes its place. That is easily the ase where governing class are inspired by humanitarian sentiments primarily and very easily if they do not find ways to assimilate the exceptional individuals who come to the front in the subject classes. A humanitarian aristocracy that is closed of stiffly exclusive represents the maximum of insecurity. 2. It is far more difficult to overthrow a governing class that is adept in the shrewd use of chicanery, fraud, corruption; and in the highest degree difficult to overthrow such a class when it successfully assimilates most of the individuals in the subject class who show those same talents, are adept in those same arts, and might therefore become the leaders of such plebeians as are disposed to use violence. Thus left without leadership, without talent, disorganized, the subject class is almost always powerless to set up any lasting regime. 3. So the combination residues (Class I) become to some extent enfeebled in the subject class.

Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who theorised that a society would grow wealthy to the extent that its members forfeited general knowledge in favour of fostering individual ability in narrowly constricted fields.

The efforts of men are utilized in two different ways. They are directed to the production or transformation of economic goods, or else to the appropriation of goods produced by others.

The parties hostile to "the bourgeoisie" are constantly declaring in their books, pamphlets, and newspapers that it is their intention to annihilate said bourgeoisie root and branch. But show me a single "bourgeois" who in a fit of pique or even in jest dares reply: "You say you want to destroy us? Come aheadand we will do some destroying too." The God of the Christians has blasphemers among His faithful. The god People counts not a one, let alone among his faithful, not even among those who take no stock in him. Humanity has its "misanthropes," but "the People" has no "misodemes." There is no one bold enough to display hatred, or antipathy, or repugnance, or even mere indifference, to it. And all that seems so obvious, so natural, that no one ever gives a thought to it. Indeed to mention it seems as useless as to say that a human being walks on two legs.

Most people have heard of the “Pareto Principle,” the idea, introduced as far back as the 1790s by Vilfredo Pareto, that 20 percent of our efforts produce 80 percent of results.

Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who “created” fascism. One such fear was the collapse of community under the corrosive influences of free individualism. Rousseau had already worried about this before the French Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century and after, the fear of social disintegration was mostly a conservative concern. After the turbulent 1840s in England, the Victorian polemicist Thomas Carlyle worried about what force would discipline “the masses, full of beer and nonsense,” as more and more of them received the right to vote. Carlyle’s remedy was a militarized welfare dictatorship, administered not by the existing ruling class but by a new elite composed of selfless captains of industry and other natural heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. The Nazis later claimed Carlyle as a forerunner. Fear of the collapse of community solidarity intensified in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century, under the impact of urban sprawl, industrial conflict, and immigration. Diagnosing the ills of community was a central project in the creation of the new discipline of sociology. Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the first French holder of a chair in sociology, diagnosed modern society as afflicted with “anomie”—the purposeless drift of people without social ties—and reflected on the replacement of “organic” solidarity, the ties formed within natural communities of villages, families, and churches, with “mechanical” solidarity, the ties formed by modern propaganda and media such as fascists (and advertisers) would later perfect. The German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies regretted the supplanting of traditional, natural societies (Gemeinschaften) by more differentiated and impersonal modern societies (Gesellschaften) in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), and the Nazis borrowed his term for the “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) they wanted to form. The early twentieth-century sociologists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Roberto Michels contributed more directly to fascist ideas.

Ele é um agente de mudança – O líder criativo sabe que toda crise é uma oportunidade para mudar. Ele é a faísca que dá a ignição às transformações. Vê soluções onde outros só enxergam problemas. E pensa rabiscando, usando ferramentas visuais e técnicas para criar, conceber e comunicar planos e projetos. 2. Usa a intuição (e não apenas a razão) – Esse “novo líder” gosta mais de pessoas do que de coisas. Porque está atento aos detalhes e é um ótimo observador. Em uma conversa, ele não fica olhando para o relógio ou conferindo a todo momento o celular. Ele está presente, olho no olho, por isso confia tanto na intuição quanto na razão. 3. Desenvolve uma inteligência social – Cultiva redes de relacionamento – isso não significa apenas trocar cartões em eventos, mas importar-se de fato. E não aparecer apenas para pedir favor ou quando precisa de algo. Ele acredita na força da rede e se esforça não só para ampliar seu networking, mas principalmente para fortalecer os laços já existentes. 4. Aceita riscos controlados – Permite-se errar porque sabe que toda a inovação vem da experimentação, do aprendizado por meio de sucessivos testes. Por isso, ele prefere cometer falhas pequenas e ganhar musculatura para quando precisar resolver grandes obstáculos. Além disso, sabe que experimentar não significa arriscar-se à toa. 5. Faz acontecer – O líder criativo usa constantemente a regra de Pareto (80/20), princípio criado pelo economista italiano Vilfredo Pareto que reconhece que, para muitos eventos, aproximadamente 80% dos efeitos vêm de 20% das causas. Pareto desenvolveu o princípio ao observar que, em seu jardim, 20% das vagens continham 80% das ervilhas. Ou seja, o líder criativo sabe priorizar e trabalhar nos 20% que são mais importantes. Gerencia sua lista de tarefas e cumpre prazos. Não espera, faz acontecer e cria suas oportunidades. 6. Tem pensamento sistêmico – Sabe que pequenas decisões e atitudes fazem parte de sistemas complexos e interdependentes. Por isso, o líder criativo está mais interessado no “porquê” do que no “como”. Ele conecta os pontos e aprende sobre influências e motivações.

One might ask how the French government became anti-French (and the U.S. Government became anti-American). The Italian political scientist, Vilfredo Pareto, had the answer. Pareto said that society is always ruled by an elite made up of two types: Lions and foxes. The lions are brave and the foxes are cunning. Everything goes well if the elite contains both types. However, if the lions are ostracized and the foxes begin dictating policy, everything becomes tainted with dishonesty, trickery, corruption, and cowardice; that is, the negative traits of the fox come into play and the system falls out of balance. That is, in fact, what has happened in the West.