Benford's law observes that in many real-world collections of numbers, the leading digit is more often small. The digit 1 leads about 30% of the time, while 9 leads less than 5% of the time, compared with 11.1% if digits were uniform. It appears in electricity bills, street addresses, stock prices, populations, river lengths and many physical constants. The law holds best when values span several orders of magnitude, especially when they come from processes that follow a power law. Simon Newcomb noticed it in 1881 from wear on logarithm tables, and Frank Benford popularised it in 1938.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.