1848-1923. Italian economist and political
philosopher, born in Paris. He produced the
first account of society as a self-regulating
and interdependent system that operates
independently of human attempts at voluntary
control. A vigorous opponent of socialism and
liberalism, Pareto justified inequality of
income on the grounds of his empirical
observation (Pareto's law) that income
distribution remained constant whatever
efforts were made to change it. A founder of
welfare economics, he put forward a concept
of `optimality' which contends that optimum
conditions exist in an economic system if
no-one can be made better off without at
least one other person becoming worse off.