The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
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"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a catchphrase and proverb, frequently used (with variations in wording) in discussing economic inequality.

Predecessors

Andrew Jackson, 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.^[1][2]

William Henry Harrison said, in an October 1, 1840 speech,

I believe and I say 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.^[3][4]

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.^[5]

The phrase resembles the Bible verse

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.^[6]

However, in this verse Jesus is not referring to economic inequality at all. Rather it is part of his answer to the question "Why speakest thou unto them in parables?" Jesus says his parables give fresh understanding only to those who already have accepted his message.

"Ain't We Got Fun"

A version of the phrase was popularized in 1921 in the wildly successful song Ain't We Got Fun, and the phrase sometimes attributed to the song's lyricists, Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan. Oddly, the lyrics never actually say that the poor get "poorer;" instead it takes off from or alludes to the line, showing that it was already proverbial. They cue the listener to expect the word "poorer," but instead say

There's nothing surer: The rich get rich and the poor get—children;

and, later:

There's nothing surer: The rich get rich and the poor get laid off;

Note too that the Kahn and Egan lyrics say "the rich get rich," not richer.^[7][8][9]

The line is sometimes mistakenly attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald. It appears in The Great Gatsby, as

the rich get richer[sic] 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 Klipsprinter breaks into the Kahn and Egan song.^[10]

In political and economic rhetoric

The line is often cited by opponents of capitalism as a statement of fact (or an article of faith) and by supporters of capitalism as an example of an erroneous belief. Thus,

The modern-day statistical work of Stanley Lebergott and Michael Cox confirms this Smithian view and disputes the commonly held criticism that under a free market the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.^[11]

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."^[12] 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.^[13]

A use of the phrase by a free market advocates disputing the claim is:

Relative cohort inequity decreased markedly, with the poor improving their position much faster than the rich. Relative percentile inequity increased slightly. In terms of buying power, both the poor cohort and the poor percentile became significantly wealthier. These data indicate that the view that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer is clearly over-generalised.^[14]

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.^[15][16][17] Defenders of the Reagan policies characterize this claim as inciting class warfare.^[18]

Commentators refer to the idea as a cliché in discussions of economic inequality, but one that they argue to be accurate nonetheless:

It's a cliché, perhaps, to say that "the rich get rich and the poor get poorer". But in the 1980s and 1990s, cliché or not, that is what took place in some regions of the world, particularly in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.^[19]

References

Further reading

• Brian Hayes (September 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, Pcia. de Buenos Aires. OCLC 44260846. 
• S. Ispolatov, P.L. Krapivsky, and S. Redner (March 1998). "Wealth distributions in asset exchange models". The European Physical Journal B — Condensed Matter and Complex Systems 2 (2): 267–276. Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer. doi:10.1007/s100510050249. ISSN 1434-6028/1434-6036.  — Ispolatov, Krapivsky, and Redner analyze the wealth distributions that occur under a variety of exchange rules in a system of economically interacting people.
• Kee H. Chung and Raymond A. K. Cox (March 1990). "Patterns of Productivity in the Finance Literature: A Study of the Bibliometric Distributions". Journal of Finance 45 (1): 301–309. doi:10.2307/2328824.  — 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".