Yang kaya semakin kaya dan yang miskin semakin miskin

"Yang kaya semakin kaya dan yang miskin semakin miskin" adalah pepatah yang kemungkinan pertama kali diungkapkan oleh Percy Bysshe Shelley dalam esainya A Defence of Poetry (1821, tidak diterbitkan sampai tahun 1840). Dalam esai tersebut dia menulis: "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."

"To him that hath" dst. adalah referensi ke Matius 25:29 (perumpamaan talenta, lihat juga efek Matius). Pepatah tersebut umumnya diungkapkan dengan berbagai variasi kata-kata, untuk merujuk pada efek kapitalisme pasar bebas yang menghasilkan kesenjangan berlebih.

Bacaan lanjutan

• 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 . Bibcode:1998EPJB....2..267I. 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 productivity to the maxim that "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer", and equating it to the maxim that "success breeds success".