VOA Special English

This is the VOA Special English Economics Report.

Recently the business world lost a leader in quality control. Joseph Juran died at the age of one hundred and three. He developed ideas that are still important today to improving the quality of products.
Joseph Juran


Joseph Juran was born in Braila, Romania. His family came to the United States in nineteen twelve when he was eight. They settled in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

He studied electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota. He was also the school champion at the game of chess. After college, the Western Electric Company put him to work on mathematical methods of quality control.

He became interested in the idea he termed "vital few and trivial many." This idea is popularly known as the "eighty-twenty rule." It could mean, for example, that eighty percent of manufacturing problems result from twenty percent of the causes.

He named it the "Pareto principle," for the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. A century ago, Pareto observed that eighty percent of the wealth in Italy went to twenty percent of the population.

But Joseph Juran came to recognize that he had misnamed this principle. He knew that unequal distribution had long been observed in other areas, not just wealth.

Yet he gave Pareto credit for identifying it as "universal" when, it seemed, he could have taken the credit himself. He could have called it, he said, the Juran principle.

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