Читать книгу Wealth - Yuval Elmelech - Страница 35

Observing substantial inequality in the publication records of renowned scientists and their less credited colleagues, sociologist Robert Merton coined the term “the Matthew effect” to describe a systematic and self-amplifying process of cumulative advantage (CA):

By way of orientation, I should report that what I described as “the Matthew effect” (after Matthew 13:12 and 25:29)¹ consists in the accruing of greater recognition by peers for particular scientific or scholarly contributions to scholars of great repute and the withholding of such recognition from [their collaborating] scholars who have not made their mark. (Merton 1995: 394)

As mentioned in the previous section, Mills’s (1956) early work had identified among the wealthy an accumulation of advantage stage, “in which the initial stage of access to meaningful resources is translated into cumulative advantage that results in great wealth.” Mills highlighted the importance of this process for amassing wealth and concluded that the accumulation of advantages is “the major economic fact about the rich … those who have great wealth are in a dozen strategic positions to make it yield further wealth” (Mills 1956: 115).

The CA framework posits that, once initial economic advantages are gained, they become self-perpetuating and tend to augment with time, causing a widening of the gap between the wealthy and those with fewer economic resources. As Rigney (2010: 2) notes, “[n]o theory of stratification is complete without attention to such processes.”

The emphasis on cumulative advantages presents only one dimension of stratification processes, however, while generally overlooking the other end of the wealth distribution and the consequences of cumulative disadvantages over the life course. More specifically, wealth holding is often affected by experiences that are detrimental to the process of wealth attainment, such as job loss, home eviction, incarceration, disability, or divorce. These life-course events have a cumulative component that results in the gradual depletion of wealth over time. Such a component is best described as cumulative disadvantage (CD) (see Blank 2005; Pager and Shepherd 2008). An inevitable outcome of wealth accumulation based on CA/D processes is the increasing inequality within the population, an outcome known as cumulative inequality (Ferraro and Shippee 2009).

A union of the (revised) LCH with the CA/D framework yields a particularly relevant model for wealth analysis. Indeed, longitudinal studies of life-course changes carried out with various social, health, and economic measures among members of the same age cohort have shown cumulative processes of amassing advantages and disadvantages that result in increasing disparities as the members of the cohort grow older (Dannefer 2003). Among the older population, the term “two worlds of aging” was coined to describe the correlation between aging and increasing wealth inequality due to CA/D processes (Crystal 2016: 43). Although CA/D processes have been a major focus in both social stratification scholarship (Merton 1995; Mills 1956; DiPrete and Eirich 2006) and gerontology (Dannefer 2003; Crystal 2016), these two lines of study have rarely intersected, perhaps because social mobility and stratification research has traditionally focused on the young population of working-age individuals (25–65-year-olds).

Shifting the locus of analysis from individual labor market remunerations to household wealth holdings calls for the merging of these two parallel lines of research. Not only is wealth mobility unconstrained by age, but the “biography” of wealth accumulation stretches across multiple generations, from the provision of initial endowments to future generations to ongoing opportunities for accumulating and dispersing wealth over the life course.