Why does Benford's Law (or Zipf's Law) hold? Both Benford's Law (if you take a list of values, the distribution of the most significant digit is rougly proportional to the logarithm of the digit) and Zipf's Law (given a corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table) are not theorems in a mathematical sense, but they work quite good in the real life. 
Does anyone have an idea why this happens?
(see also this question)
 A: For the case of Bendford's Law, of course scale invariance is a necessary condition; it the law must be true either if we measure things in meters or in feet or in furlongs, thus multiplying given data for a constant, the only distribution which allows this is the logarithmic one. But its being necessary does not mean that it is the answer, of course.
Scale invariance is not relevant for Zipf's Law, however, since we have an absolute rank.
A: Benford's law is easy to prove, but a little harder to explain.  The easiest way to understand why it works is to think a a random set of number as not one number but two: you have the number itself and the highest possible number that it could be.  Therefore, you have a potential range of possible numbers for every random number.  Also, for you to have a good data set the potential range should be random for each random number.  If the potential range is the same for each random number, then Benford's law will not correctly predict the leading number.  
For example, if you set a computer to randomly pick 15 numbers from a potential range of numbers 1 - 300 each time, the odds that the leading number will be a 1 or a 2 would be the exact same. The chance that the leading number would be a $3 - 9$ would be significantly less and therefore, the random numbers would not line up very well with Benford's law.
In order for Benford's law to work, each random number must have an equally random potential: n = random number; d = highest possible number on a range $1$ through $d$.  For example, the first random number is picked out of 25, the next random number is picked out of 1679, the next random number is picked out of 500, the next out of 12478, the next out of 20, the next out of 36 etc. etc.  The sort of random set is more likely to lead with a 1 followed by a 2 consistant with Benford's law.   
A: In fact Benford's law and also Zipf law are special cases of Planck's 1901 distribution. Planck calculated the maximum entropy distribution of particles in boxes (as a part of his famous solution of Blackbody radiation).If we take the limit of Planck distribution to many more particles than boxes we obtain the zipf law. Benford's law is a bit more complicated as it requires to put a constraint on the number of particles in the boxes (9 at most). I recommend the book "Entropy God's Dice Game". In the book there are derivations of all these distributions in the appendixes. The book itself is popular and it is almost equations free. By the way Benford's law is called the first digit law. Nevertheless is true for any digit in a numerical file that is in the Shannon limit (a compressed file).     
A: As a rough/somewhat-intuitive explanation of why Benford's Law makes sense, consider it with respect to amounts of money.  The amount of time(/effort/work) needed to get from \$1000 to \$2000 (100% increase) is a lot greater than the amount of time needed to get from \$8000 to \$9000 (12.5% increase)--increasing money is usually done in proportion to the money one has.  Thought about in the other direction, it should take a fixed amount of time to, say, double one's money, so going from \$1000 to \$2000 takes as long as from \$2000 to \$4000 and \$4000 to \$8000, so the leading digit spends more time at lower values than at higher values.  Because the value growth is exponential, the time spent at each leading digit is roughly logarithmic.
A: As mau mentioned, scale invariance is the key assumption in Benford's Law.  I'll fill in the mathematical details on how that gets you to Benford's results for the probabilities (for more details see my "proof" in this article).  Imagine writing all numbers in scientific notation, like $x\cdot10^y$.   The $x$ is the only part we care about for Benford's law.  If x has some probability density function, $f(x)$, that is unchanged if we switch to a different unit of measure (from dollars to yen, or from inches to meters), since such units are just arbitrary constructions, then the integral of $f(x)$ must be unchanged if we multiply both the upper and lower limit of integration by some arbitrary factor (equivalent to changing the unit of measure).  For example, integrating from $1$ to $2$ to get the probability of the leading digit being $1$ in one set of units should give the same result as integrating from $2$ to $4$ for units that are half as large (so values are multiplied by $2$ when switching to the new units, causing numbers that started with $1$ in the old units to start with $2$ or $3$ in the new units).  The $f(x)$ that satisfies this requirement is $A/x$ where $A$ is a constant, and A must be $1/\ln(10)$ for $f(x)$ to have correct normalization.  The probability of starting with a particular digit or sequence of digits is given by integrating $f(x)$, so you get a logarithm minus a logarithm.
A: Recently learned about Benford's law.  Here are my thoughts.
At first glance, this doesn't make sense because we want to assume that the datasets to which it applies are random numbers. But, they are not random numbers. These are numbers of things that are being accumulated, and numbers that accumulate always start at zero and move upward.
A random dart thrown at a randomly distributed set of numbers (having the same number of numbers starting with each digit) would certainly not follow Benford's law because the number can go from 0 to 75483 with a single throw of a dart, then to 35, then to 8203.
So, if you notice, as you are counting, every time you get to a new order of magnitude (10, 100, 10000, ... 1,000,000), you encounter a block of numberst starting with 1 that is as large as the entire block of numbers that you have already counted through. In other words - to avoid a number starting with 1 you have to double the count thus far. Then you get to the twos and you encounter a block of 2s that are 1/2 the size of the block counted so far. The 3s are 1/3 the size, 4's 1/5 the size and eventually the 9's are 1/9 the size of the count so far. So, to avoid the 9s you only have to increase the count by 11% to avoid them, and then you get back to a block of 1s that requires a 100% increase to be avoided.
One person above said this applies to things that are growing exponentially. This is not correct. It applies to anything that is accumulating at any rate.
Another said it is due to a second-order distribution where you have selected an upper limit first, then selected a random number below that upper limit. If this were the case, then accumulated counts with upper limits starting with 9 would follow one law and accumulated counts with upper limits starting with 1 would follow a different law.
It has to do be the path of numbers through which an accumulated count has to travel - always through a big block of 1s to get to a block of 2s. And the higher the first digit, the less of a percentage increase is needed to bypass it.
A: Zipf's law is just a consequence of Principle of least effort- the tendency of things to follow the path of least resistance.  As languages developed in our species, speakers preferred to use as few words as possible to communicate their thoughts.  But listeners preferred more specificity with larger vocabularies in order to understand what the speaker is saying so that they had to do less work in understanding.  So the compromise between listening and speaking has led to this kind of distribution- A few words are used many many times and many words are used rarely.  
Recent research suggests that using a few short, often used predictable words helps dissipate information load density on listeners, so that the information rate is more constant.
A: I have a mathematics background but was not familiar with Ben ford's Law until I saw an excellent documentary by Lateef Hussein. When I thought why it occurs I immediately thought range would bias to earlier numbers. So the lead digit is not randomly selected but selected from a range of numbers. This could be $1-9$ or it could be $1-5$ or $1-3$ and so forth hence we would actually expect a bias towards lower numbers. The law and the probability curve now makes sense. This is only my opinion at an informal answer.
A: My explanation comes from a storage perspective: Uniformly distributed high-precision numbers that range over many powers are very expensive to store. For example, storing 9.9999989 and 99999989  is much more expensive than storing 10^1 and 10^8 assuming "they" are okay with the anomaly. The "they" refers to our simulators ;-) Yes, I'm referring to the possibility that we are in a simulation. Instead of truly random numbers, using small randomness just around whole powers might result in huge cost savings. This type of pseudo-precision probably works really well in producing "realistic" simulations while keeping storage costs to a minimum.
A: Let's take two quantities that we're counting:

*

*Quantity L grows linearly. It starts at 100 and grows by 1 unit per day

*Quantity E grows exponentially. It starts at 100 and grows by 1% per day

If we record these quantities every day for a long time, we'd see that it takes L as much time to go from 1000 -> 2000 as it does to go from 8000 -> 9000 whereas for E, it will take longer to go from 1000 -> 2000 than it would to go from 8000 -> 9000. This remains true for all orders of magnitude. This generalises to all quantities that grow exponentially and thus all processes that grow exponentially will spend longer with their leading digit as 1 than 2 and longer at 2 than 3 and .....
As most processes in nature grow exponentially (size of a settlement, number of trees in a forest, salaries, number of covid cases, ....), we see that the leading number of things we measure will disproportionately be 1
Note: As a previous poster pointed out, this applies to anything growing at a 'rate'. Not just growing exponentially.
