Skip to main content



Literally, How Do the Rich Get Richer?

The Rich Get Richer, or Matthew Effect as it is also known, is a quantification of the notion on accelerating growth proportional to the accumulated advantage.  Robert K. Merton first used the term in relative popularity in 1986 in reference to a biblical verse from the gospel of Matthew. There are lots of examples of this phenomena for instance:

Career development and its augmentation due to early career success and experience as found in a study by, Alexander M. Petersen,Woo-Sung Jung,Jae-Suk Yang, and H. Eugene Stanley in their study of scientific and athletic careers . The main point of the study shows the difference between careers with early development and experience which explode compared to others which are stunted due to lack of initial experience.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/1/18.full

Popularity of media and its fragile, random accumulation of advantage as tested by Matthew J. Salganik, Peter Sheridan Dodds, and Duncan J. Watts, when they developed a set of 8 parallel music providing websites and showed that different musics near randomly moved up and down in popularity between websites by a large order. The important point of this test shows that popularity in a market is largely random and delicate, and a product’s popularity is only partly determined by quality and very largely controlled by the initial and early state of the market.

https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full.pdf

Or for it’s most commonly attributed and understood subject, wealth. Russ Alan Prince an economic advisor on personal wealth of the affluent explains wealth generates opportunity to establish more wealth.This is different from stating that wealth in itself generates wealth. His thesis explains that wealth allows opportunity for higher advancement which allows for the accumulation of more wealth which begins the lucrative cycle all over again.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/russalanprince/2015/04/08/how-the-rich-get-very-rich-leveraging-the-matthew-effect/

All of these explain how early success is fickle, universal, multifaceted and very key to personal economic and career advancement thanks to the sociological rich get richer effect.

“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.”

Matthew 25:29

Comments

Leave a Reply

Blogging Calendar

November 2015
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  

Archives