Corrado Gini

Template:Short description Template:Infobox scientist 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.<ref name="pp40">Aaron Gillette. Racial theories in fascist Italy. London, England, UK; New York, New York, USA. Pp. 40.</ref> Gini was a eugenicist, and prior to and during World War II, he was an advocate of Italian Fascism. Following the war, he founded the Italian Unionist Movement, which advocated for the annexation of Italy by the United States.<ref name="Favero-2017">Template:Cite journal</ref>

Career

Gini was born on May 23, 1884, in Motta di Livenza, near Treviso, into an old landed family. He entered the Faculty of Law at the University of Bologna, where in addition to law he studied mathematics, economics, and biology.

Gini's scientific work ran in two directions: towards the social sciences and towards statistics. His interests ranged well beyond the formal aspects of statistics—to the laws that govern biological and social phenomena.

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.

He published the Gini coefficient in the 1912 paper Variability and Mutability (Template:Langx).<ref>Gini, C. (1909). "Concentration and dependency ratios" (in Italian). English translation in Rivista di Politica Economica, 87 (1997), 769–789.</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Also called the Gini index and the Gini ratio, it is a measure of statistical dispersion intended to represent the income inequality within a nation or other group.

In 1910, he acceded to the Chair of Statistics in the University of Cagliari and then at Padua in 1913.

He founded the international journal of statistics Metron in 1920,<ref name="Giorgi-2017">Template:Cite journal</ref> directing it until his death; it only accepted articles with practical applications.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1920 became honorary member of the Royal Statistical Society.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />

He became a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome in 1925. At the University, he founded a lecture course on sociology, maintaining it until his retirement. He also set up the School of Statistics in 1928, and, in 1936, the Faculty of Statistical, Demographic and Actuarial Sciences.

Under fascism

Template:Fascism sidebar In 1926, he was appointed President of the Central Institute of Statistics in Rome. This he organised as a single centre for Italian statistical services. He was a close intimate of Mussolini throughout the 20s. He resigned from his position within the institute in 1932.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>

In 1926, he also founded the journal "Italian economic life" (Template:Lang), which was issued until 1943.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />

In 1927 he published a treatise entitled The Scientific Basis of Fascism.<ref>"The Scientific Basis of Fascism", Political Science Quarterly Vol.42, No 1, March 1927 pp. 99-115.</ref>

In 1929, Gini founded the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems (Comitato italiano per lo studio dei problemi della popolazione) which, two years later, organised the first Population Congress in Rome.

A eugenicist apart from being a demographer, Gini led an expedition to survey Polish populations, among them the Karaites. Gini was throughout the 20s a supporter of fascism, and expressed his hope that Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy would emerge as victors in WW2. However, he never supported any measure of exclusion of the Jews.<ref>Mikhail Kizilov, The Karaites of Galicia: An Ethnoreligious Minority Among the Ashkenazim, the Turks, and the Slavs, 1772-1945, BRILL, 2009 pp.278ff.</ref><ref>Riccardo Calimani, Storia degli ebrei italiani, vol.3, Mondadori 2015 p.583.</ref>

His role in the racial and anti-Jewish policies of the regime are more sinister, according to what is explained in detail in the book Scienza e razza nell'Italia fascista by Giorgio Israel and Pietro Nastasi published by Il Mulino in Bologna in 1998. Milestones during the rest of his career include:

• In 1933 – vice president of the International Institute of Sociology.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1934 – president of the Italian Genetics and Eugenics Society.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1935 – president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies in Latin-language Countries.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1937 – president of the Italian Society of Sociology.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1937 – honorary member of the International Statistical Institute.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1937 – founded the journal Genus, which was focused on studying the population issues.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1941 and 1949 – president of the Italian Statistical Society.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1950 – president of the International Institute of Sociology.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />
• In 1957 – Gold Medal for outstanding service to the Italian School.
• In 1962 – National Member of the Accademia dei Lincei.<ref name="Giorgi-2017" /><ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Italian Unionist Movement

Template:Main On October 12, 1944, Gini joined with the Calabrian activist Santi Paladino,<ref name="Wilson-2016">Template:Cite journal</ref> 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<ref name="Favero-2017" /> and its aims were not supported by the United States.

Organicism and nations

Gini was a proponent of organicism and saw nations as organic in nature.<ref name="pp40"/> Gini shared the view held by Oswald Spengler that populations go through a cycle of birth, growth, and decay.<ref name="pp40"/> Gini claimed that nations at a primitive level have a high birth rate, but, as they evolve, the upper classes birth rate drops while the lower class birth rate, while higher, will inevitably deplete as their stronger members emigrate, die in war, or enter into the upper classes.<ref name="pp40"/> If a nation continues on this path without resistance, Gini claimed 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.<ref name="pp41">Aaron Gillette. Racial theories in fascist Italy. London, England, UK; New York, New York, USA. Pp. 41.</ref> At this point, the decadent nation with its aging population can be overrun by a more youthful and vigorous nation.<ref name="pp41"/> Gini's organicist theories of nations and natality are believed to have influenced policies of Italian Fascism.<ref name="pp40"/>

Honours

The following honorary degrees were conferred upon him:<ref name="Giorgi-2017" />

• Economics by the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan (1932),
• Sociology by the University of Geneva (1934),
• Sciences by Harvard University (1936),
• Social Sciences by the University of Cordoba, Argentina (1963).

Partial bibliography

• Il sesso dal punto di vista statistica: le leggi della produzione dei sessi (1908)
• Sulla misura della concentrazione e della variabilità dei caratteri (1914)
• Quelques considérations au sujet de la construction des nombres indices des prix et des questions analogues (1924)
• Memorie di metodologia statistica. Vol.1: Variabilità e Concentrazione (1955)
• Memorie di metodologia statistica. Vol.2: Transvariazione (1960)
• Template:Cite journal

External links

• 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
• Another photograph