  A brief overview of the models and data analyses of income, wealth,
consumption distributions by the physicists, are presented here. It has been
found empirically that the distributions of income and wealth possess fairly
robust features, like the bulk of both the income and wealth distributions seem
to reasonably fit both the log-normal and Gamma distributions, while the tail
of the distribution fits well to a power law (as first observed by sociologist
Pareto). We also present our recent studies of the unit-level expenditure on
consumption across multiple countries and multiple years, where it was found
that there exist invariant features of consumption distribution: the bulk is
log-normally distributed, followed by a power law tail at the limit. The
mechanisms leading to such inequalities and invariant features for the
distributions of socio-economic variables are not well-understood. We also
present some simple models from physics and demonstrate how they can be used to
explain some of these findings and their consequences.
