Corrado Gini

File:Corrado Gini.jpg

Corrado Gini

Corrado Gini (23 May 1884 – 13 March 1965) was an Italian statistician, demographer and sociologist who developed the Gini coefficient, a measure of the income inequality in a society. Gini was a proponent of organicism and applied it to nations.

Biography

Corrado Gini descended from an old landed family. He was born in Motta di Livenza, near Treviso, the son of Luciano Gini and his wife Lavinia (née Locatelli). He graduated with honors in law in 1905 at the University of Bologna, where in addition to law he studied mathematics, economics, and biology.

His first published work was Il sesso dal punto di vista statistico (1908). This work is a thorough review of the natal sex ratio, looking at past theories and at how new hypothesis fit the statistical data. In particular, it presents evidence that the tendency to produce one or the other sex of child is, to some extent, heritable.

The following year, he obtained the teaching position in statistics in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cagliari. Gini became full professor there in 1910. In 1913, he moved to the same chair at the University of Padua, where he founded and directed the Institute of Statistics. He founded the statistical journal Metron in 1920, directing it until his death; it only accepted articles with practical applications.

In 1925, he was called to the chair of politics and economic statistics at the University of Rome, where, from 1927 onwards, he held the chair of statistics until his retirement. He was appointed professor emeritus in 1955. In 1936, he established the Faculty of Statistical, Demographic and Actuarial Sciences, of which he was Dean until 1954.

From 1911 to 1926, he was a member of the Superior Council of Statistics, while in 1926 he founded the Central Institute of Statistics, later the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT), of which he was also president until 1932, renewing and reorganizing it, despite the obstacles and the various oppositions, both at administrative and technical-functional level (equipping it with tools for automatic calculation).

In 1929, he also created the "Italian Committee for the study of population problems" (CISP), which later merged into the "International Union for the Scientific Study of Population" (UIESP). From 1941 until his death, he was also president of the Italian Statistical Society (SIS), and founded and directed several scientific journals including Genus (1934), Indici del movimento economico italiano (1926) and La vita economica italiana (1925).

Gini belonged to several Italian and foreign institutions and scientific societies. He was an honorary member of the Royal Statistical Society (1920), vice-president (1933) and then president (1950) of the International Society of Sociology (which he helped to reactivate), president of the Italian Society of Genetics and Eugenics (1934), member of the Italian Society of Sociology (1937) and honorary member of the International Statistical Institute (1939). He was also a national member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and an honorary member since 1962, which had already awarded him in 1919 with the Royal Prize for Social Sciences.

Founder of the Italian school of statistics, with important political and institutional appointments, he received several honors, including several honorary degrees from Italian and foreign universities and some national awards. Gini has been one of the most important scholars and researchers of pure and applied statistics.

Italian Unionist Movement

On October 12, 1944, Gini joined with the Calabrian activist Santi Paladino, and fellow-statistician Ugo Damiani to found the Italian Unionist Movement, for which the emblem was the Stars and Stripes, the Italian flag and a world map. According to the three men, the Government of the United States should annex all free and democratic nations worldwide, thereby transforming itself into a world government, and allowing Washington, D.C. to maintain Earth in a perpetual condition of peace. The party existed up to 1948 but had little success and its aims were not supported by the United States.

Scientific activities

A scholar and a tireless researcher, with a wide culture, he considered statistics from an interdisciplinary point of view, relating it in particular to biology, sociology, anthropology and economics, and this on the basis of the basic idea that saw man as a complex organism subject to phenomena of various kinds (biological, socio-anthropological, economic, etc.). Therefore, he tried to concretely apply his studies and the results of his research through his civil, political and social commitment.

From a strictly scientific point of view, Gini's major contributions were mainly in statistical methodology, descriptive statistics (in particular, statistical averages and index theory in which he introduced, among other things, an indicator called the Mean absolute difference for measuring the statistical variability of data) economic statistics (where he established a remarkable relationship, called Gini identity, linking statistical theory and economics, concerning price indexes), statistics applied to demography (differential fertility, migration, studies on population evolution), calculus of probability applied to biology (biometrics), macroeconomics (in particular, business cycles).

In economic statistics, in studying problems of distribution (such as, for example, that of the distribution of the global income of a nation among its components), he reached such results as to bring him to international fame, with assignments and consultancies from several foreign countries; in particular, he introduced an important index, called Gini coefficient (or ratio), which allowed, in addition to the clarification of the problems related to the distribution of incomes and the related social inequalities, the evolution of modern standards of welfare of societies. The index became popular also for its possible graphical representation through the Lorenz curve.

Gini was a proponent of organicism and saw nations as organic in nature. Gini shared the view held by Oswald Spengler that populations go through a cycle of birth, growth, and decay. Gini stated that nations at a primitive level have a high birth rate, but, as they evolve, the upper classes birth rate drops while the lower classes birth rate, while higher, will inevitably deplete as their stronger members emigrate, die in war, or enter into the upper classes. If a nation continues on this path without resistance, Gini believed the nation would enter a final decadent stage where the nation would degenerate as noted by decreasing birth rate, decreasing cultural output, and the lack of imperial conquest. At this point, the decadent nation with its aging population can be overrun by a more youthful and vigorous nation. Gini's organicist theories of nations and natality are believed to have influenced policies of Italian Fascism.

Author of more than 800 publications, Corrado Gini's private archives and library were purchased by the Soprintendenza archivistica del Lazio at the antiquarian bookstore "I Quaderni di Capestrano" in Rome, and then destined to the Central Archives of the State in 1999.

He also contributed to the Enciclopedia delle Matematiche elementari e complementi.

Major Works

• Il Sesso dal Punto di Vista Statistico: Le Leggi della Produzione dei Sessi (1908)
• I Fattori Demografici dell'evoluzione delle Nazioni (1912)
• L'ammontare e la Composizione della Ricchezza delle Nazioni (1914)
• Appunti di Statistica (1917)
• Problemi di Sociologia della Guerra (1921)
• Sociologia (1927)
• Nascita, Evoluzione e Morte delle Nazioni: La Teoria Ciclica della Popolazione e i Vari Sistemi di Politica Demografica (1930)
• Demografia, Antropometria, Statistica Sanitaria, Dinamica delle Popolazioni (1930)
• Le Basi Scientifiche della Politica della Popolazione (1931)
• Le Rivelazioni Statistiche tra le Popolazioni Primitive (1942)
• Appunti di Statistica Metodologica e Statistica Economica (1942)
• Teorie della Popolazione (1945)
• Metodologia Statistica: Integrazione e Comparazione dei Dati (with G. Pompilj; 1951)
• Corso di Statistica (1953)
• Patologia Economica (1954)
• Appunti di Sociologia Generale e Coloniale (1956)
• Economia Lavorista: Problemi del Lavoro (1956)
• Corso di Sociologia (1957)
• Memorie di Metodologia Statistica
  • Vol. I: Variabilità e Concentrazione (1955)
  • Vol. II: Transvariazione (1959)
• Le Medie (with G. Barbensi; 1958)
• Ricchezza e Reddito (1959)
• La Logica nella Statistica (1962)
• Questioni Fondamentali di Probabilità e Statistica (2 vol.; 1968)
• Statistica e Induzione (2001)

Selected publications

• "Contributo alle applicazioni statistiche del calcolo delle probabilità", Giornale degli Economisti, Vol. XXXV (1907)
• "Il diverso accrescimento delle classi sociali e la concentrazione della ricchezza", Giornale degli Economisti, Vol. XXXVII (1909), pp. 27-83.
• "Sulla misura della concentrazione e della variabilità dei caratteri", Premiate Officine Grafiche C. Ferrari, Venezia, 1913-14.
• "Patologia economica, un’interpretazione della politica economica di guerra e di dopo la guerra", Rivista Internazionale di Scienze Sociali e Discipline ausiliarie, 97 (369) (1923) pp. 59-61.
• "Quelques considérations au sujet de la construction des nombres indices des prix et des questions analogues", Metron, 4 (1924) pp. 1-162.
• "Di una applicazione del metodo rappresentativo all'ultimo censimento italiano della popolazione" (con Luigi Galvani), Annali di Statistica, Roma, Provveditorato generale dello Stato, 1929.
• "La politica demografica delle democrazie", Genus, 4 (3-4) (1940) pp. 117-124.
• "La théorie des migrations adaptatives", Etudes Européennes de Population, INED, Paris, 1954.
• "Progresso o decadenza? Il dominio della tecnica", Rivista di politica economica, 49 (3) (1959) pp. 923-939.

External links

• Works by Corrado Gini at JSTOR
• Works by Corrado Gini at Hathi Trust
• Works by Corrado Gini at Gallica
• Biography Of Corrado Gini at the Metron, the statistics journal he founded.
• Paper on "Corrado Gini and Italian Statistics under Fascism" by Giovanni Favero June 2002
• A. Forcina and G. M. Giorgi "Early Gini’s Contributions to Inequality Measurement and Statistical Inference." JEHPS mars 2005
• Statistica Applicata: Special issue dedicated to Gini