Max Otto Lorenz

Max Otto Lorenz (born September 19, 1876 in Burlington, Iowa , † July 1, 1959 in Sunnyvale, California ) was an American statistician and economist . In 1905 he published an article on the distribution of income in which he introduced the Lorenz curve named after him .

Lorenz was born as one of three children of German emigrants. His father was a successful businessman. Lorenz earned a BA from the University of Iowa in 1899 . In 1906 he received his doctorate in economics from the University of Wisconsin . The title of his dissertation was Economic Theory of Railroad Rates .

He then worked for a few years as a statistician in authorities in Wisconsin, for the census bureau, later for the railway authority in Washington, DC and finally, from 1911, for the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC). From 1920 was the director of the local office for statistics. In 1916/17 Lorenz was chairman of the “eight-hour commission”, which checked the implementation of the eight-hour day legislation in the USA.

In 1911 Lorenz married Nellie Florence Sheets, the daughter of a lawyer from Columbus, Ohio . He had three children with her.

Lorenz's work in the ICC consisted primarily of collecting and analyzing data on transport by bus, train and ship, which was used to set tariffs and improve operations. He was the author of a popular textbook with three other economists.

Today, however, he is mainly known for his essay on income distribution, which he wrote during his doctorate.

Works

• Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth. In: Publications of the American Statistical Association. Vol. 9 = New Series No. 70, 1905, OCLC 5555781699 , pp. 209-219.
• with Richard Th. Ely, Thomas A. Adams and Allyn A. Young: Outlines of Economics . Macmillan, New York NY 1908.

literature

• Christian Kleiber, Samuel Kotz: Statistical Size Distributions in Economics and Actuarial Sciences . Wiley, Hoboken NJ et al. 2003, ISBN 0-471-15064-9 , pp. 263 ff ., doi : 10.1002 / 0471457175 (English, PDF [accessed on March 14, 2011]).