On The Distribution Of Money And Ability
Data on the distribution of wealth is apparently hard to come by directly, but inheritance tax data from the UK for some years is available. This data, it turns out, can be well-fit by an exponential function, over most of the UK population [1]. That is, the probability of having w amount of wealth appeared to be proportional to exp(-w/T), for some constant T. Income tax data from the US from 1983 through 2005 [1-5], the UK from 1994 through 1999 [1], and Australia from 1989 through 2000 [4] also followed an exponential curve.
