[seasoup]

Seems to me that when you have a group of somethings that are constantly increasing in size it would be natural for the number 1 to come up in the first digit more often because in order to get to 2, you need to pass through 1 first and in order to get to 9 you need to pass 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 first. Therefore, you should get the distribution predicted by Benford's law. The way to test this theory, would be to run the numbers on values that are constantly decreasing. I'd expect the distribution would reverse itself.

If it proves itself true, then you could use it to test if a group of things is increasing or decreasing.

[verycleanteeth]

It depends on where you start decreasing from. If you start at 0 and subtract 1 at a time you'll still follow Benford's Law. If you start at 999 and go down, you'll see a reverse curve that begins the process of righting itself again once it goes into the negatives.

[seasoup]

True, I was considering things like decreasing populations. Example, if you take all cities/countries on the planet with declining population and plot their current population, I would expect the reverse of Benford's law. Wish I had time to test this hypotheses :)