The Matthew effect. The Matthew effect of accumulated advantage. This concept is described in sociology. The idea is, "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer."The concept is applicable to matters of fame or status, but may also be applied literally to cumulative advantage of economic capital.
The term was first used by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968. it takes its name from the parable of the talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. Merton has his collaborator and second wife, sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, as co-author of the concept of the Matthew effect.
In education, the term "Matthew effect" has been adopted by psychologist Keith Stanovich to describe a phenomenon observed in research on how new readers acquire the skills to read: early success in acquiring reading skills usually leads to later successes in reading as the learner grows, while failing to learn to read before the third or fourth year of schooling may be indicative of lifelong problems in learning new skills.
This is because children who fall behind in reading would read less, increasing the gap between them and their peers. Later, when students need to "read to learn" (where before they were learning to read), their reading difficulty creates difficulty in most other subjects. In this way they fall further and further behind in school, dropping out at a much higher rate than their peers.
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