Enrico Barone
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Enrico Barone (b. December 22, 1859, Naples, Italy, d. May 14, 1924, Rome) was an Italian economist. He studied the classics and mathematics before becoming an army officer. He taught military history for eight years from 1894 at the Officers' Training School. There he wrote a series of influential historical military works. In these he employed a method of successive approximations to which his study in economics had introduced him. In 1902, he became head of the historical office of the General Staff. He resigned his commission in 1906. From 1894 he collaborated with Maffeo Pantaleoni and Vilfredo Pareto on the Giornale degli Economisti (F. Caffé, 1987, p. 195).
Barone's accomplishments as an economist, discussed by Samuelson (1947, pp. 213-18), include these. He demonstrated the production-efficiency properties of perfect competition under different assumptions and the relevance of those properties to collectivist planning. This, despite his being out of sympathy with Socialism. His mathematical analysis of a theoretical socialist economy in the early 20th century fueled analysis of the economic calculation problem in the 1930s. He pioneered the economic theory of index numbers. All this was without mention of utility or even indifference curves. He expanded on Pareto efficiency, deducing that not all losers could be compensated for deviations from conditions of perfect competition. His method and analyis anticipated Abram Bergson's social welfare function. He extended conditions of general equilibrium in Walrasian theory and suggested the feasibility of trial-and-error movement to market equilibrium.
[edit] Major Works
- 1895, "Sopra un Libro del Wicksell", Giornale degli Economisti
- 1896, "Studie sulla Distribuzione", Giornale degli Economisti
- 1908, "Il Ministro della Produzione nello Stato Collettivista", Giornale degli Economisti, first translated and reprinted as "The Ministry of Production in the Collectivist State," F.A. Hayek, ed., 1935, Collectivist Economic Planning, pp. 245-90
- 1912, "Studi di economia finanziaria", Giornale degli Economisti
- 1937, Le Opera Economiche
[edit] References
- F. Caffé (1987). "Barone, Enrico," The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics, v. 1, pp. 195-96.
- Paul A. Samuelson, 1947, Enlarged ed. 1983, Foundations of Economic Analysis
- Enrico Barone, 1859-1924 at the New School
- The ‘Pareto School’ and the Giornale Degli Economisiti, details of Barone's wide-ranging contributions
