Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [101]
THE MATTHEW EFFECT
And finance is in many respects an easy case—because the existence of indices like the S&P 500 at least provide agreed-upon benchmarks against which an individual investor’s performance can be measured. In business or politics or entertainment, however, there is much less agreement about how to measure individual skill, and even fewer independent trials over which to measure it. Most important of all, serial accomplishments are usually not independent demonstrations of skill in the way that, say, each of Roger Federer’s grand slam victories in tennis are independent. One could argue that Federer’s reputation can intimidate opponents, thereby giving him a psychological edge, or that tournament draws are organized in such a way that the top seeds don’t play each other until the later rounds—all of which could be seen as an advantage deriving from his previous success. Nevertheless, every time Federer walks out on the court he has to win under more or less the same circumstances as the very first time he played professional tennis. No one would think it fair to give him, say, an extra serve, or the ability to overrule the referee, or any other advantage over his opponent, just because he’s won so often in the past. Likewise, it would be outrageous to give the team that wins the first of seven games in an NBA playoff series ten extra points at the start of the second game. In sports, that is, we place tremendous importance on making the playing field as level as possible and every test of skill independent from every other.
Much of life, however, is characterized by what the sociologist Robert Merton called the Matthew Effect, named after a sentence from the book of Matthew in the Bible, which laments “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” Matthew was referring specifically to wealth (hence the phrase “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer”), but Merton argued that the same rule applied to success more generally. Success early on in an individual’s career, that is, confers on them certain structural advantages that make subsequent successes much more likely, regardless of their intrinsic aptitude. In science, for example, junior scientists who land jobs at top research universities tend to experience lighter teaching loads, attract better graduate students, and have an easier time getting grants or publishing papers than their peers who end up at second- or third-tier universities. As a result, two individuals in the same field who may have been roughly comparable at the beginning of their careers may experience dramatically different levels of success five or ten years down the road on no more grounds than that they were hired at different institutions. And from there, it just gets more unequal still. Successful scientists also tend to receive a disproportionate share of the credit for anything with which they are associated, as when they write papers with unknown graduate students, who may have actually done most of the work or had the key ideas. Once someone is perceived as a star, in other words, not only can he attract more resources and better collaborators—thus producing far more than he would otherwise have been able to—he also tends to get more than his fair share of the credit for the resulting work.15
Merton was writing about scientific careers, but as the sociologist Daniel Rigney argues in his recent book The Matthew Effect, the same forces apply to most other careers as well. Success leads