For to every one who has will be given more, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
Matthew 25:29, RSV
While I may have come across it before, the first time I can recollect coming across the Matthew effect was in Alex Quigley’s work on literacy, in which he described that reading and vocabulary building were also subject to the Matthew effect. Those who are word rich find it easier to access more texts, which in turn exposes them to more vocabulary which then becomes a positive feedback loop.
Beyond literacy, knowledge is general follows this pattern. In most disciplines, the greater the body of knowledge we have, the more we can further deepen our knowledge through able to access more concepts. The degree to which prior knowledge shapes future learning may vary from discipline to discipline, with some more vertically organised and requiring a linear progression. For example, you may need to understand a bunch of concepts in maths before being able to access a more complicated concept. In horizontally organised disciplines, like history and geography, there is still a degree of Matthew effect, where we can apply ideas from one context to another.
The origin of the phrase though relates to social inequalities, or rather the cause of social inequalities. Wealth affords further opportunities for wealth creation. I was reading Oxfam’s 2023 inequality report and they described the existence of billionaires as a ‘policy failure’. This struck me as an interesting thought. Their argument was basically that there is no justification for the concentration of wealth and that a fairer distribution would solve many problems. If this were the case, why has the situation arisen? Perhaps too simplistically, it is a case of stories. The stories we (society) tell and are told about aspiration, rewarding entrepreneurship and effort, trickle down economics and so on. Even if we start to disprove some of these stories, there is still a question of political will to reshape the status quo and overcoming the many powerful interests who don’t want that status quo to be reshaped.
Commonplace 