Comment by hirundo

These are natural examples of ecosystems evolving toward a pareto distribution after a punctuated equalibrium. Think of it as another example of the great winnowing of variations that followed the Cambrian explosion. The cultural explosions were the invention of books, radio, television, internet, etc. Those disrupted the prior pareto distributions, and it took time to reestablish them.

It's a general feature of complex ecologies rather than a specialty of cultural or economic ecologies.