The rich get richer and the poor get poorer

"The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is a catchphrase and aphorism sometimes evoked, with variations in wording, when discussing economic inequality. Its most common use is as a synopsis of a socialist criticism of the free market system (capitalism), implying the perceived inevitability of what Karl Marx called the Law of Increasing Poverty.

Andrew Jackson, the seventh President of the U.S. (1829–1837), in his 1832 bank veto, said that

William Henry Harrison, the ninth President of the U.S. (1841), said in an October 1, 1840 speech,

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

The phrase resembles the Bible verse

The phrase was popularized in 1921 in the wildly successful song "Ain't We Got Fun?", and the phrase is sometimes attributed to the song's lyricists, Gus Kahn and Raymond B. Egan. The line is sometimes mistakenly attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald. It appears in The Great Gatsby, as

The character Gatsby orders the character Klipspringer, sitting at the piano, "Don't talk so much, old sport... Play!" and Klipspringer breaks into the Whiting, Kahn and Egan song.

Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) presents a body of empirical data spanning several hundred years that supports his central thesis that the owners of capital accumulate wealth more quickly than those who provide labour, a phenomenon widely described with the term "the rich-get-richer".

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