> The distribution of income seems so unnatural Actually, what's striking to my mind is how mysteriously consistent the income distribution is with the same fa

> The distribution of income seems so unnatural Actually, what's striking to my mind is how mysteriously consistent the income distribution is with the same family of power law distributions (Zipf-Mandelbrot, Pareto, etc.) that describes such other, disparate, natural phenomena as the frequencies of words in natural languages [1], the sizes of cities [2], the sizes of asteroids [3], the abundances of species [4], the sizes of grains of sand on a beach [5], the magnitudes of earthquakes and avalanches [6], and many other things in the world. Anyway, my point is simply that the shape of the income distribution should not be so surprising, or strike us as "unnatural", given how often we observe the same shape of distribution for all kinds of things, both in economics and in the natural world. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%E2%80%93Mandelbrot_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%E2%80%93Mandelbrot_law [2] http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/zipf.pdf http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~xgabaix/papers/zipf.pdf [3] http://250words.com/2014/07/the-mathematics-of-asteroids-earthquakes-and-literature-3-ways-power-laws-impact-life/ http://250words.com/2014/07/the-mathematics-of-asteroids-ear... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_abundance_distribution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_abundance_distributio... [5] http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0412004.pdf http://arxiv.org/pdf/cond-mat/0412004.pdf [6] https://books.google.com/books?id=x8nSBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA57&lpg=PA57&dq=%28%22zipf%22+OR+%22zipf-mandelbrot%22%29+grains+sand&source=bl&ots=wV4dBlO4ny&sig=91Mpei81vhas9ktZL5FxZzKrb9A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiqrbmCs-TKAhXD6x4KHf8SCuAQ6AEIGzAA#v=onepage&q=%28%22zipf%22%20OR%20%22zipf-mandelbrot%22%29%20grains%20sand&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=x8nSBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA57&lpg=P...