Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The rich get richer and the poor get poorer


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result was keep after the rewrites, the consensus seems to have changed. - Bobet 09:38, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer
Doesn't make it at all clear what the subject of this personal essay is, or why it should be in article space at all--172.147.153.86 02:21, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. Them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose, so the Bible says, and it still is news ... and rambling OR essay. Fan-1967 02:26, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The title made me immediately think of "Everybody Knows". Uncle G 13:32, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I was always a bigger fan of Lady Day. Fan-1967 18:20, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete Just an essay. Not a scientific, historical or economic fact. Some of the rich do become poor. For eg. Bill Gates had a wealth of $80 billion in 1997 but now has only $43 billion. Many become bankrupt as well. the article is unencyclopedic but not original research.--Ageo020 02:31, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep Since it is a catchphrase, I change my vote to keep. But I still say it is not an economic fact.--Ageo020 21:42, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom - rambling unfinished essay, give it and F and be done with it. Vsmith 02:49, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete. Unencyclopedic.  I got a chuckle out of Ageo020's definition of poor.  --דניאל talk  contribs   Email 03:39, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep per rewrite. I still don't think that it's written very well, but at least now it can be cleaned up fairly easily.  --דניאל  Danielrocks123 talk  contribs   Email 21:45, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete, redirect to Economic inequality just in case. Gazpacho 04:22, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep, rewrite about the slogan. A source from 1912 rather than 1992? clearly there's something here to write about. Gazpacho 21:17, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * With the help of the folks at alt.quotations, it can now be pushed back to William Henry Harrison, 1840, who said "I believe and I say it is true Democratic feeling, that all the measures of the government are directed to the purpose of making the rich richer and the poor poorer." Dpbsmith (talk) 23:20, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom. --Chris Griswold 06:51, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete —  per all above. Kalani  [talk] 06:51, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete per nom Konman72 11:10, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep, mark as needing source citations and expansions, and hope for a substantial rewrite. Borderline, but I think this is a legitimate topic because is a catchphrase that is frequently alluded to (making it more than just Wikiquote material). "As we get older there's nothing surer/The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is in a sixties Harold Rome song from I Can Get It for You Wholesale. More significantly, the very famous 1921 song Ain't We Got Fun does a takeoff on the phrase, showing that the phrase itself was proverbial at the time: "In the winter, in the summer/Don't we have fun/Times are bum and getting bummer/Still we have fun/There's nothing surer/The rich get rich and the poor get... children." Oddly enough, when you Google on this, many sources attribute it to The Great Gatsby. I say oddly, because it is perfectly clear from the context that he is quoting the song... in other words, Fitzgerald's novel proves that the song was wildly popular, and the popularity of the song shows that the phrase was really proverbial. I really think there's enough here for a legitimate short article. Dpbsmith (talk) 17:59, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment "rich get richer and the poor get poorer" gets 847 hits on the exact phrase in Google Books, which if you know Google Books is an extremely high number. One of the references is from 1912.
 * Comment I said it should be kept as a frequently alluded-to catchphrase, but now I'm going further. Although the present article reads as unsupported opinion, if you glance over the Google hits, I'm convinced that much of the present content can be properly supported by source citations. E.g. "So the old saying 'The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is not some kind of ironic paradox but an economic law as trim and tidy as Newton's Third Law of Motion: the rich get richer when the poor get poorer, and vice versa", C. Donald Loomis, Radical Democracyp. 71. It may or may not be true that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, but it is verifiable that this is a widely-held opinion on the left end of the political spectrum and that this opinion is frequently expressed in these precise words. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:23, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Comment Also 42 hits in Google Books on exact phrase "Rich get richer and the poor get children".
 * Comment Curioser and curioser: At least one book of quotations gives Raymond Egan as the source for "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Raymond Egan was the lyricist for Ain't We Got Fun, which of course says the poor get children, not the poor get poorer. No, I'm wrong about that. And I need to find some kind of good source for the original lyrics. Dpbsmith (talk) 18:30, 11 August 2006 (UTC) No, I'm probably right about that after all. Web sources for the lyric vary, unfortunately, but these two  match each other exactly--except that the the former hyphenates the syllables, so one is probably not a straight cut-and-paste of the other--and a Van and Schenk recording of the song matches both of them, exactly. All of them give the phrase, on its first appearance, as the rich get rich and the poor get&mdash;children." And incidentally it's "the rich get rich," not "the rich get richer.''" Dpbsmith (talk) 01:31, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete This can never be any more than a ramble around a phrase. Wikipedia's discussion of wealth, poverty, inequality and so forth should be in articles with serious titles, not folksy ones. Piccadilly 23:08, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep. I suggested deleting on July 20 (see the article's Talk page), but Dpbsmith's argument convinces me. Though worthless as an economics article, it could be a useful history of the catchphrase.--CJGB (Chris) 00:49, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete per Picadilly. It'll never be any more than a catchphrase, although it won't stop people from using it as a title for essays about its truth or otherwise, or its derivation. Ohconfucius 04:22, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * We have articles about catch phrases far more recent and far less significant than this one. Gazpacho 23:08, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Delete However interesting and mind-blowing the topic might be, this is an essay rather than article, and I can't imagine how it could be anything else. One might write a Wikiquote entry on that, but I can hardly imagine anybody searching for that in an encyclopedia. Moreover, the article is currently linked from userpages and one talk page, not including pages related to this AfD, and I can't imagine any other legitimate Wikilinks that could logically be generated without pushing. Last but not least, this article is extremely prone to become POV-slanted and generate unending debates and conflicts, certainly not helping with the informative purposes of an encyclopedia. All, in all, I can't see how this can be developed into a proper encyclopedic entry Please note that my opinion is not based on the current contents of the article, but my thought on what it may be and might become. I have only taken a brief look at the current article and not read it thoroughly, as I believe all issues with the text that could be fixed do not merit a deletion - only when an entry cannot be improved to become a proper encyclopedic its article deletion is legitimate. Regards, Bravada, talk - 23:28, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Please read it thoroughly, and follow the citations as well. Gazpacho 23:38, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
 * If it changed my view of this article, it's only for the worse (which is why I chose not to delve into the contents before I decide). As I presumed, it is an essay, of a rather poor quality, trying to tie a few different quotes to a catchphrase referenced (imprecisely) from a song and discuss some economic and sociological issues more or less loosely related to it. It is constructed as an essay and not as an encyclopedic article, because it tries ot gather different things related to some elusive topic rather than describe all the facts pertaining to a well-defined subject. And, as I said, I can't imagine it ever developing into the latter (i.e. proper encyclopedic article), so it has no place in an encyclopedia. Bravada, talk - 00:04, 13 August 2006 (UTC)
 * None of those are reasons to delete. The distinction between essays and articles, in Wikipedia terms, is our No original research policy, which is not, apparently, what you are implying at all.  You are apparently merely criticising the writing style, which is a matter of cleanup, not deletion.  That nothing links to an article is not a reason to delete it.  Neither is the fact that an article is a magnet for editors that want Wikipedia to become a soapbox a reason to delete it.  (We don't delete Hindi and Urdu, for example.)  To argue that an article will only ever be a stub, one has to argue that it is a topic that has not already been discussed in the world at large (which Dpbsmith's citation of C. Donald Loomis above disproves) or that the discussion of the topic is so trivial and peripheral that it is not enough to actually fill an encyclopaedia article. Uncle G 11:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think I managed to get my message accross - the topic of this article is a purported "catchphrase and proverb", but the article goes to mention some more or less irrelevant issues and develop into an essay loosely based on the title. This is NOT an encyclopedic articlein the first place. Secondly, I believe that it would not be possible to create an encyclopedic article based on that, because the connections between different instances of the use of the "catchphrase" in popular culture are weak. See AYBABTU for a good article on a catchphrase, which does not resemble an essay on ideology (mostly because there fortunately is no major ideology connected to that). Bravada, talk - 12:32, 14 August 2006 (UTC)


 * My immediate reaction to the article, given above, was to remember "Everybody Knows", the relevant lines of which are "Everybody knows the fight was fixed. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich.".  My second reaction to this was that having an article about a topic in economic theory at this title was as bizarre an idea as having an article about Muhammad Ali at I am the greatest.  Looking at the sources, however, it appears that Leonard Cohen was correct.  Everybody does "know" this.  And, moreover, they cite this as the name of the purported economic law, even if they call it a clich&eacute; when they do so.  (See Dietz and Cypher.) The topic of this particular economic trend, correct or not, has been the subject of much published work.  What swung it for me was the books and papers.  Not only have Reiman and Hapgood written whole books on this subject, Hayes has a whole paper in American Scientist discussing the modelling of free market economic systems to determine whether this maxim is true or not.  Keep. Uncle G 11:43, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I only understand what you mean until you mention Cohen. But if what you mean is that this is an article on an economic theory, then it should be one. And perhaps there is a much more precise name for that, one has to dig deeper into the history of economics to find one. You won't find economies of scale under It's cheaper to produce more. Bravada, talk - 12:32, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
 * It shouldn't be an article about economic theory. It should be an article about a phrase that is so proverbial that it will virtually always used be invoked in any discussion of economic inequality. Although not a very good article, a comparable example would be Giant sucking sound. The article describing NAFTA should not be entitled giant sucking sound. But giant sucking sound should not simply redirect to NAFTA or to Ross Perot because it is now an idiom that pops up in any discussion of jobs being lost to neighboring regions. Dpbsmith (talk) 15:42, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Keep as good documentation of notable and socially significant catchphrase. Otherwise, redirect to economic inequality. N (t/c) 14:50, 14 August 2006 (UTC)
 * I was won over on this one in much the same way Uncle G was (although my first thought was of Ain't We Got Fun, instead). As long as this article remains about the use of the phrase, I say keep it. Jacqui ★ 05:03, 17 August 2006 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.