You are maybe thinking that it is difficult to identify powerlaws? (EDIT: s/identify/statistically verify/; s/powerlaws/TRUE powerlaws/)

But look: http://globalrichlist.com/how.html The bulk is indeed powerlaw.

Maybe you are thinking that a sufficiently winsorised US income distribution is lognormal.

To the contrary I think people are too eager to find scale free and power law phenomena.

There are several papers discussing log-normal bulk and then power law tail.

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2002/feb/26/the-phy...

http://fmwww.bc.edu/ec-p/wp671.pdf and more

For what it's worth my initial statement was meant to hold beyond income and wealth and generalize to say achievement and productivity and so a lognormal assumption was fitting as the distribution to pick. It also chimed well with grandalf's statement on how advantages multiply.