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. 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.

Career Gini was born on 23 May 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 hypotheses 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 . 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, directing it until his death; it only accepted articles with practical applications.

In 1920 became honorary member of the Royal Statistical Society.

In 1926, he also founded the journal "Italian economic life" , which was published until 1943.

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.

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.

Italian Unionist Movement

On 12 October 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 At this point, the decadent nation with its ageing 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.

Honours The following honorary degrees were conferred upon him: 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)