Why does Benford’s Law work? This law says numbers in a data set are more likely to start with low digits (1, 2) than high digits (8, 9), but there are exactly as many numbers in existence beginning with each digit.

Question

Why does Benford’s Law work? This law says numbers in a data set are more likely to start with low digits (1, 2) than high digits (8, 9), but there are exactly as many numbers in existence beginning with each digit.

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

I heard it explained that the units we use for any set of data tends to group them that way.

Charts look weird with lots of decimals or zeroes, so the creators of the charts use some unit that shortens the displayed data.

And THAT last conversion ends up putting a lot of numbers in the situation where they start with “1” or “2”.

In short, it’s anthropogenic… caused by human intervention.