"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a catchphrase and aphorism sometimes evoked, with variations in wording, when discussing economic inequality. Its most common use is as a synopsis of a socialist criticism of the free market system (capitalism), implying the perceived inevitability of what Karl Marx called the Law of Increasing Poverty.
Video The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
Predecessors
Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the U.S. (1829-1837), in his 1832 bank veto, said that
- when the laws undertake... to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society... have a right to complain of the injustice to their Government.
William Henry Harrison, the ninth President of the U.S. (1841), said in an October 1, 1840 speech,
- It is true democratic feeling, that all the measures of the government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.
In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley argued, in A Defence of Poetry (not published until 1840), that in his England, "the promoters of utility" had managed
- to exasperate at once the extremes of luxury and want. They have exemplified the saying, "To him that hath, more shall be given; and from him that hath not, the little that he hath shall be taken away." The rich have become richer, and the poor have become poorer; and the vessel of the State is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism. Such are the effects which must ever flow from an unmitigated exercise of the calculating faculty.
The phrase also resembles two Bible verses from the Gospel of Matthew:
- For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.
- For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.
Maps The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
"Ain't We Got Fun"
The phrase was popularized in 1921 in the wildly successful song "Ain't We Got Fun?", and the phrase is sometimes attributed to the song's lyricists, Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan. The line is sometimes mistakenly attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald. It appears in The Great Gatsby, as
- the rich get richer and the poor get--children!
The character Gatsby orders the character Klipspringer, sitting at the piano, "Don't talk so much, old sport... Play!" and Klipspringer breaks into the Whiting, Kahn and Egan song.
In political and economic rhetoric
Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) presents a body of empirical data spanning several hundred years that supports his central thesis that the owners of capital accumulate wealth more quickly than those who provide labour, a phenomenon widely described with the term "the rich-get-richer".
According to Marx, capitalism will inevitably lead to ruin in accordance with certain laws of economic movement. These laws are "the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall", "the Law of Increasing Poverty", and "the Law of Centralization of Capital". Small capitalists go bankrupt, and their production means are absorbed by large capitalists. During the process of bankruptcy and absorption, capital is gradually centralized by a few large capitalists, and the entire middle class declines. Thus, two major classes, a small minority of large capitalists, and a large proletarian majority are formed.
In the United States, the phrase has been used frequently (in the past tense) to describe alleged socioeconomic trends under the Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush presidencies and in the United Kingdom to refer to the Thatcher era. Thatcher famously retorted to a question posed by the Lib Dem MP Simon Hughes about wealth inequality in the United Kingdom by saying "he would rather that the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. ... What a policy. Yes, he would rather have the poor poorer, provided that the rich were less rich. That is the Liberal policy." It has also been used in the UK to refer to the 2010-2015 coalition and 2015-2016 governments led by David Cameron.
Other uses
In statistics, the phrase "the rich get richer" is often used as an informal description of the behavior of Chinese restaurant processes and other preferential attachment processes, where the probability of the next outcome in a series taking on a particular value is proportional to the number of outcomes already having that particular value. This is useful for modeling many real-world processes that are akin to "popularity contests", where the popularity of a particular choice causes new participants to adopt the same choice (which can lead to the outsized influence of the first few participants).
Product recommendations and information about past purchases have been shown to influence consumers choices significantly whether it is for music, movie, book, technological, and other type of products. Social influence often induces a rich-get-richer phenomenon (Matthew effect) where popular products tend to become even more popular.
See also
- Capital accumulation
- Internal contradictions of capital accumulation
- Matthew effect
- Preferential attachment
- Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor
References
Further reading
- Hayes, Brian (2002). "Follow the Money". American Scientist. 90 (5): 400. doi:10.1511/2002.5.400. -- Hayes analyzes several computer models of market economies, applying statistical mechanics to questions in economic theory in the same way that it is applied in computational fluid dynamics, concluding that "If some mechanism like that of the yard-sale model is truly at work, then markets might very well be free and fair, and the playing field perfectly level, and yet the outcome would almost surely be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
- Rieman, J. (1979). The Rich Get Rich and The Poor Get Poorer. New York: Wiley.
- David Hapgood (1974). The Screwing of the Average Man -- How The Rich Get Richer and You Get Poorer. Bantom Books. ISBN 0-553-12913-9.
- Rolf R Mantel (1995). Why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Universidad de San Andrés: Victoria, prov. de Buenos Aires. OCLC 44260846.
- Ispolatov, S.; Krapivsky, P.L.; Redner, S. (1998). "Wealth distributions in asset exchange models". The European Physical Journal B. 2 (2): 267-76. arXiv:1006.4595 . doi:10.1007/s100510050249. -- Ispolatov, Krapivsky, and Redner analyze the wealth distributions that occur under a variety of exchange rules in a system of economically interacting people.
- Chung, Kee H.; Cox, Raymond A. K. (1990). "Patterns of Productivity in the Finance Literature: A Study of the Bibliometric Distributions". The Journal of Finance. 45 (1): 301-9. doi:10.2307/2328824. JSTOR 2328824. -- Chung and Cox analyze a bibliometric regularity in finance literature, relating Lotka's law of scientific prductivity to the maxim that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", and equating it to the maxim that "success breeds success".
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