Max Otto Lorenz (1880 - 1962) was an American economist who developed the Lorenz curve in 1905 to describe income inequalities. He published this paper while a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His doctorate (1906) was on 'The Economic Theory of Railroad Rates' and made no reference to perhaps his most famous paper. He was active in both publishing and teaching and was at various times employed by the U.S. Census Bureau, the U.S. Bureau of Railways Economics, the U.S. Bureau of Statistics and the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission. The term Lorenz curve seems first to have been used in 1912 in a textbook The Elements of Statistical Method.
References
- Lorenz, M. O. (1905). Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth Publications of the American Statistical Association. 9: 209-219.
- Ely, Richard T., Thomas A. Adams, Max O. Lorenz, and Allyn Young (1908). Outlines of Economics. New York: Macmillan.
- King, W.I. (1912). The Elements of Statistical Method. New York: Macmillan
- A discussion of generalised Lorenz curves [1]
- Some history of economists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison school around John R. Commons [2]
