Zipf, Power-laws, and Pareto

It is of my observation the (wealth, ... anything) distributions in our society follow a power-law curve similar to Zipf's law [1] or Pareto distribution [4]. Such effect, in a simplified language, contribute to top 1% of households in America owned 34.6% of all privately held wealth and 20% of the people owned 85% of the wealth [2], "...also discusses the “rich-get-richer” effect..

Yet it is not clear to me if the distribution only occurs human society. In one occasion, I realized a simplest experiment takes the same effect and appears in power-law distribution. This can be done easily by performing an experiment with paperclips, where you pick out a paperclip out of a pile, link it to another paperclip, and place that chain back into the pile. You repeat the process, and obtain a histogram of paperclips representing a power function... " [3]. Since time and paperclips are lacking, I put the simulated result (of 20000 paperclips and 15000 operations) below. Take politics away, I consider such mathematical model describing nature of intrinsic interesting. Read more detailed information in ref. [4].