Yang kaya semakin kaya dan yang miskin semakin miskin itu apa sih?

"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.

— 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."

— Ispolatov, Krapivsky, and Redner analyze the wealth distributions that occur under a variety of exchange rules in a system of economically interacting people.

— 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".