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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_socio-economic_unfairness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci... > The reason
by aw3c2 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_socio-economic_unfairness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
> Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
- chrisco255 8y agoYou think that always holds up or is that an unreasonable extrapolation? There are plenty of high dollar products that don't last. And spending $100K on a car isn't going to give you a more affordable or longer lasting vehicle than a $20K Honda Civic. It's far more likely that you can buy a $20K Civic and it will last longer than the luxury vehicle with lower maintenance costs.
- ddingus 8y agoThe poor people do not buy $20k Civics. For about half the nations labor force, that purchase could be half a year worth of income. Given housing and other costs, financing that purchase is difficult. What they do is get $500 to $2000 cars. And those do break down frequently. They may or may not have resources, skill and or time to repair them.
- seibelj 8y agoA long time ago I worked at a pizza shop as a delivery boy and cook. Multiple coworkers had luxury cars, including one Cadillac sporty sedan. They just seemed to put every possible spare dollar they had towards the most expensive car possible. Made no sense, but buying too much car is a common phenomenon in America.
- H1Supreme 8y agoThat mentality is absolutely puzzling to me. A friend of mine is/was exactly that way. He would rather live at home and drive a Jaguar or a BMW, then move out and drive something more affordable.
- icedchai 8y agoBlame the banks. If it weren’t easy to get loans, people would live within their means. They wouldn’t have a choice.
- ddingus 8y agoYes they would. Banks are not the only finance means. On a more basic level, we set expectations for standard of living, and business actually depends on, expects those behaviors, while half the nation does not have income to meet those expectations, often despite full time or more labor. This idea of shitty jobs being worthless completely ignores the cost of the laborers. And those costs fall on all of us. Why subsidize business in this way? Or, if we want to do that, why so much angst over assistance?
- icedchai 8y agoI may be confused. Owning a luxury automobile has nothing to do with expectations for a standard of living. In many parts of the world, a car is required, yes... but a Cadillac, Mercedes, or BMW? No.
- chrisco255 8y agoI was one of those poor people, buying $3000 cars to get by 10 years ago, when gas was hitting $4 a gallon while the economy was absolute shit. Truth is, you can find even used Civics for like $4K (although the idiotic Cash-For-Clunkers program caused a lot of lower end inventory to disappear...hurting poor people like me at the time)...and you can still squeeze 100K miles out of them with minimal repairs.
- DanBC 8y agoAnd those cheap cars are more likely to have faults that police can write tickets for, pushing those poor people into further debt, and then into the criminal justice system because US courts are just weird.
- DanBC 8y agoI don't understand why this has been downvoted, it describes a well known phenomenon of US courts. This was one of the factors at play in Ferguson: police were told to maximise revenue, and they were doing this by issuing fines to car drivers. Those drivers then have to attend court to pay the fines - missing work and losing wages because of it, and sometimes losing their jobs. If they don't attend court to pay their fines they have arrest warrants issued against them. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-31849421 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-31849421 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/02/poor-for-profit-probation-prison-georgia https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/02/poor-for-profi...
- pasta 8y agoI don't think this applies anymore. Cheap is getting better and better. And the rich just buy new because they like to go with the trend spending hundreds of dollars on boots. Most people I know (Netherlands) who are not wealthy have mental issues or don't know how to manage money. Edit: I don't want to sound like I think the author belongs to those 2 groups. There are many more reasons why someone is poor.
- tarboreus 8y agoI think it's fair to say that this is less true in America, where we have essentially no social safety net.
- pasta 8y agoTrue. That's also why the USA is now a third world country. And I really feel sorry for the author. But my comment was more about the boots story.
- chrisco255 8y agoWe also have a HUGE, far more diverse, far more spread out population that's an order of magnitude larger than the Netherlands.
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- em-bee 8y agocheap is getting better, but also expensive is getting worse. i can't tell from the price whether something is of good quality or not.