The Distribution

I found these figures, cited in Doug Mataconis’s post about the fallout from the second round of Democratic presidential candidates’ debates at Outside the Beltway, amusing:

In the candidate preference part of the poll, the numbers break down like this:

1. Joe Biden — 33%
2. Bernie Sanders — 19%
3. Elizabeth Warren — 14%
4. Kamala Harris — 9%
5. Pete Buttigieg — 6%
6. Beto O’Rourke — 3%
7. Cory Booker — 3%
8. Andrew Yang — 2%
9. All other candidates under 2%

for a couple of reaons. First, that’s a clear illustration of the “long tail phenomenon”. Second, as I learned back in the graduate level microeconomics course I took all those years ago, that sort of power law distribution is the same distribution as generally emerges in the distribution of market share among the members of a cartel.