Quantitative and empirical demonstration of the Matthew effect in a study of career longevity
Abstract
The Matthew effect refers to the adage written some two-thousand years ago in the Gospel of St. Matthew: "For to all those who have, more will be given". Even two millennia later, this idiom is used by sociologists to qualitatively describe individual progress and the interplay between status and reward. Quantitative studies of professional careers are traditionally limited by the difficulty in measuring progress and the lack of data on individual careers. However, in some professions, there are well-defined metrics that quantify career longevity, success, and prowess, which together contribute to the overall success rating for an individual employee. Here we demonstrate testable evidence, inherent in the remarkable statistical regularity of career longevity distributions, of the age-old Matthew "rich get richer" effect, in which longevity and past success lead to contemporaneous competitive advantage. We develop an exactly solvable stochastic model that quantitatively incorporates the Matthew effect such that it can be validated in competitive professions. These results demonstrate that statistical laws can exist at even the microscopic social level, where the collective behavior of individuals can lead to emergent phenomena. We test our model on the careers of 400,000 scientists using data from six high-impact journals. We further confirm our findings by testing the model on the careers of more than 20,000 athletes in four sports leagues.Keywords
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