The Discovery of the Gini Coefficient

This article traces the development of the methods of representing the degree of income inequality that were developed in the early twentieth century by Max Otto Lorenz and Corrado Gini. It suggests that Gini’s efforts to perfect the Lorenz curve may well have facilitated his discovery of what came to be known as the Gini coefficient and argues that this coefficient is an important example of a multiple (or chain multiple) discovery.

PER IL CENTESIMO ANNIVERSARIO DELLA TEORIA DELLE RELAZIONI STATISTICHE DI CORRADO GINI

This Note aims at highlighting Gini’s contributions to denition and measurement of the intensity of a statistical relationship, on the occcasion of the centennial anniversary of the publication of his early papers on that topic. The Note stresses the precursory value of those contributions and mentions some of their most signicant developments apropos of metrization of spaces of probability distributions and anaysis of monotone dependence.

Mexican Indigenismo and the International Fraternity of Science

Mexican racial science developed in close relation to foreign scholars and institutions including Corrado Gini of Italy, a proponent of Latin eugenics, Franz Boas, the Carnegie Institution in Washington, the international eugenics movement, and the Pan-American child welfare movement. Along with the mobilization of rural peoples during the Mexican Revolution, growing international interest in Mexico and the international eugenics movement galvanized Mexican indigenismo, the state-sponsored movement championing the nation’s indigenous heritage. This chapter focuses on Manuel Gamio, who founded Mexico’s Dirección de Antropología and worked in the powerful Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). Gamio conveyed Mexican social science abroad and foreign social science to Mexico. He attempted to create a social science that was both “Mexican” and modern, but found it hard to delineate a modernity that could accommodate Mexico’s demographic heterogeneity. Gamio creatively reconciled Mexico’s demographic characteristics with liberal universalism and scientific rationality, yet still suffered the intellectual imperialism and condescension of his U.S. counterparts.

A laboratory for Latin eugenics: the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems and the international circulation of eugenic knowledge, 1920s-1940s

The aim of this article is to shed light on the rise to international prominence of the Italian statistician and eugenicist Corrado Gini and his appointment as the inaugural president of the Latin International Federation of Eugenic Societies in October 1935. It explores the numerous pioneering, still little known, investigations he undertook with a few Italian scientists and some foreign scholars, in order to analyze the role played by “isolation,” and “racial hybridization” in the formation and degeneration of human races. After outlining Gini’s professional and political trajectory, the article focuses on the scientific expeditions launched by the Italian Committee for the Study of Population Problems between 1933 and 1940 under his stewardship.