New evidence for the power-law distribution of wealth

We present a non-conventional approach for studying the distribution of wealth in society. We analyze data from the 1996 Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the US. Our results confirm that wealth is distributed according to a power law. The measured exponent of the power-law is 1.36. As theoretically predicted, this value is in close agreement with the exponent of the Lévy distribution of stock market fluctuations.