Power Laws In Unions, Churches, and Street Gangs

Abstract

Power law distributions, in which one quantity varies in proportion to another by some constant, are ubiquitous in nature, but they are also remarkably prevalent in human society. In this paper I demonstrate that labor union, church, and street gang memberships tend towards a power law distribution, lending support for the thesis that group membership is driven by interpersonal connections that place an upper bound on the number of connections any one person may have. If so, then the rise, and decline, of human groups may be successfully modeled.

Keywords: Power Law Distribution, Street Gangs, Labor Unions, Churches, Rodney Stark, Peter Turchin