World's economies show similarities in economic inequality  Apr
06, 2007 By Lisa Zyga feature  Economists who yearn for the
redistribution of wealth in an ideal society are up against
history. According to a recent study, the uneven distribution of
wealth in a society appears to be a universal law that holds
true for economies in many different societies, from ancient
Egypt to modern Japan and the U.S. This distribution may reflect
a simple natural law analogous to a 100-year-old theory
describing the distribution of energy in a gas.  Scientists
Arnab Chatterjee and Bikas Chakrabarti from the Saha Institute
of Nuclear Physics, along with Sitabhra Sinha of the Institute
of Mathematical Sciences, both in India, have analyzed a variety
models explaining different sets of data, and found striking
similarities. The results show that the poorer majority of the
population follows one distribution, while a small proportion of
the wealthiest people veers off in a tail following a power-law
distribution, in essence ref