ABSTRACT
More than a hundred years ago, in 1905, two relevant scientific events took place: (i) Corrado Gini defended his outstanding doctoral thesis on the statistical analysis of birth by gender at the University of Bologna (Italy) and (ii) Max Otto Lorenz, a year after having been awarded a Ph. D. in Economics at the University of Wisconsin (USA), published a remarkable paper on methods of measuring the concentration of income and wealth, in the former series of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, two events, strictly independent but capable of influencing socio-economic sciences the world over in a permanent way. In fact, the Lorenz paper has greatly influenced further development in probability theory, stochastic dominance and economic analysis, while Gini’s interest in income inequality started with criticism of the Pareto inequality parameter (in the sense of its reinterpretation and mathematical proof as an equality and not an inequality parameter) and continued with his proposition of the famous income inequality ratio published in 1914.
