{"id":223116,"date":"2025-10-08T20:14:41","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T01:14:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/ladislaus-bortkiewicz"},"modified":"2025-10-08T20:14:41","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T01:14:41","slug":"ladislaus-bortkiewicz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/ladislaus-bortkiewicz","title":{"rendered":"Ladislaus Bortkiewicz"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ladislaus-bortkiewicz.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Ladislaus Bortkiewicz was born in <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Saint_Petersburg\" title=\"Saint Petersburg\">Saint Petersburg<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Imperial_Russia\" title=\"Imperial Russia\">Imperial Russia<\/a>, to two ethnic Polish parents: J\u00f3zef Bortkiewicz and Helena Bortkiewicz (n\u00e9e Rokicka). His father was a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Szlachta\" title=\"Szlachta\">Polish nobleman<\/a> who served in the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Imperial_Russian_Army\" title=\"Imperial Russian Army\">Russian Imperial Army<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Bortkiewicz graduated from the Law Faculty in 1890. In 1898 he published a book about the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Poisson_distribution\" title=\"Poisson distribution\">Poisson distribution<\/a>, titled The Law of Small Numbers.<sup id=\u201d cite_ref-1\u201d class=\u201d reference\u201d><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ladislaus_Bortkiewicz#cite_note-1\"> [ 1 ]<\/a> <\/sup> In this book he first noted that events with low frequency in a large population follow a Poisson distribution even when the probabilities of the events varied. It was that book that made the Prussian horse-kicking data famous. The data gave the number of soldiers killed by being kicked by a horse each year in each of 14 cavalry corps over a 20-year period. Bortkiewicz showed that those numbers followed a Poisson distribution. The book also examined data on child-suicides. Some<sup id=\u201d cite_ref-2\u201d class=\u201d reference\u201d><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ladislaus_Bortkiewicz#cite_note-2\"> [ 2 ]<\/a> <\/sup> have suggested that the Poisson distribution should have been named the \u201cBortkiewicz distribution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In political economy, Bortkiewicz is important for his analysis of Karl Marx\u2019s reproduction schema in the last two volumes of <i>Capital<\/i>. Bortkiewicz identified a transformation problem in Marx\u2019s work. Making use of Dmitriev\u2019s analysis of Ricardo, Bortkiewicz proved that the data used by Marx was sufficient to calculate the general profit rate and relative prices. Though Marx\u2019s transformation procedure was not correct\u2014because it did not calculate prices and profit rate simultaneously, but sequentially\u2014Bortkiewicz has shown that it is possible to get the correct results using the Marxian framework, i.e. using the Marxian variables constant capital and variable capital it is possible to obtain the profit rate and the relative prices in a three-sector model. This \u201ccorrection of the Marxian system\u201d has been the great contribution of Bortkiewicz to classical and Marxian economics but it was completely unnoticed until Paul Sweezy\u2019s 1942 book \u201cTheory of <i>Capital <\/i>ist Development\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ladislaus Bortkiewicz was born in Saint Petersburg, Imperial Russia, to two ethnic Polish parents: J\u00f3zef Bortkiewicz and Helena Bortkiewicz (n\u00e9e Rokicka). His father was a Polish nobleman who served in the Russian Imperial Army. Bortkiewicz graduated from the Law Faculty in 1890. In 1898 he published a book about the Poisson distribution, titled The Law [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,1496],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-law"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}