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Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness (2022)

• namanyayg 7mo ago
  I love when this comes up and also I see it play out in my life, where my GF prefers fast fashion whereas I buy something from brands I like and I wear it for long (some of the clothes in my wardrobe have been there for 12+ years.. I feel old.) Also Sir Terry Pratchett is a gem of an author and you should read all of his books. I have read through maybe 25% of Discworld and it's the funniest fantasy series ever.
  • try-working 7mo ago
    I wanted to like Discworld and read a couple of the books but they're frankly not funny.
    • exe34 7mo ago
      You must have had a very good surgeon then! Congrats!
    • Planktonne 7mo ago
      He definitely grew significantly as a writer over time, and I would agree that some of his early work isn't particularly strong (The Light Fantastic, for example, is relatively bog-standard comic fantasy without any of the depth his later work showed). If you start reading at the very beginning of the Discworld, you're slogging through the weaker stuff, and it's easy to get discouraged. A smoother path is to pick one of the defined sub-series (the guards are very popular, but my vote goes to the witches) and start along just that track; you'll get to the strong stuff much faster.
      • devilbunny 7mo ago
        My advice has always been to start with Small Gods. It is a standalone book that references but does not rely on any others, and is far enough into his career that it’s fair to say that if you don’t like it, you won’t like his work in general.
  • markx2 7mo ago
    This has stuck with me for years. “Yes, yes,” said Bethan, sitting down glumly. “I know you don’t. Rincewind, all the shops have been smashed open, there was a whole bunch of people across the street helping themselves to musical instruments, can you believe that?” “Yeah,” said Rincewind, picking up a knife and testing its blade thoughtfully. “Luters, I expect.” Excerpt From The Light Fantastic Great author.
  • phyzix5761 7mo ago
    I do the same (wear clothing for a long time) but I only buy the cheap stuff. I bought 1 replacement shirt in the last 5 years and 1 bag of replacement socks in the same time frame.
• AussieWog93 7mo ago
  Man, part of me wishes the theory were still true. So many products you spent good coin on and then later find out are in fact no better than the cheap stuff (or worse, literally just rebadged Alibaba products!).
  • everdrive 7mo ago
    This is still true in the margin, but it requires a shocking amount of research to suss it out. You might enjoy the Rose Anvil channel, as it dissects boots (literally) and discusses their quality in depth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vHTlrwHttc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vHTlrwHttc There are cases where spending more gets you a more premium product ... but in so, so many cases it's just like you stated. You spend on luxury, and the "nice" speakers have the same terrible PCB design and fail in 1-2 years, or the "nice" skilsaw ends up failing way too soon, etc. A brand used to be good, but now it's terrible, and you have no way of knowing. It's all a mess.
    • ValentineC 7mo ago
      Rose Anvil has (like many other internet celebrities) had some controversies: https://www.reddit.com/r/Boots/comments/1oyxfuo/what_do_you_think_of_rose_anvil/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Boots/comments/1oyxfuo/what_do_you_... That said, I like watching him for validation that my taste is good, since I bought Lems' shoes before he started plugging them.
      • everdrive 7mo ago
        I think that's fair. I didn't know anything about boots before watching him, so I wasn't aware that boot construction could even vary so much. I had no sense that a pair of $80 boots were effectively glorified tennis shoes, whereas nearly any $200 boot would be much more durable and constructed fundamentally differently. (even if all $200 boots are not equivalent with each other) So, even if he's doing a little access journalism and has some bias, I still think there is some value in just understanding the construction of different boots.
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• legitster 7mo ago
  Its a fun thought exercise, but I've found the opposite to be true in most cases. More expensive clothes are usually less durable (depending on the brand). The same goes for appliances, and cars, and phones, and etc. The cheap designs are simple and robust and the expensive designs add complexity and features. In reality I think there are more forces extracting money from the wealthy and their effete needs. My example is an airplane. The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome. The same is true for ovens and shoes and phones and cars.
  • ArcHound 7mo ago
    I think you're right on the luxury brands being less durable. To address the second airplane example, we really have to go through all that you're buying. Namely: more leg space, faster airport queue processing, more luggage, better in-flight service. Do I value these at 3x the cost? Maybe yes.
    • legitster 7mo ago
      Both me and the richest person on the flight are going to the same destination. They're not getting there any faster or safer. Everything else is a fleeting luxury. Not saying it's a bad to spend money on temporary comfort, but it's the opposite of the Vimes boot problem.
      • nothrabannosir 7mo ago
        If you are over thirty and still this strong, then you have my respect and envy. I’m not even forty and even I would say a >7h economy flight (middle seat particularly) can take about two days to recover from. How much money would you pay for two extra days of life? In the end, time itself is also “fleeting”, if you want to put it that way. But I sure as heck would fork over the money if I had it.
      • triceratops 7mo ago
        > Not saying it's a bad to spend money on temporary comfort, but it's the opposite of the Vimes boot problem. It's true that comfort isn't a permanent good you own a la Vimes. But better comfort is a decidedly different outcome and you argued that it wasn't.
• vannevar 7mo ago
  The boots theory is a concrete way of expressing the risk of ruin, which is the principle advantage of wealth (though our society has layered on many others): the rich can afford to take more risk, and consequently enjoy more reward. A poor person who buys the $50 boots has a much higher risk of coming up short for something else, and that lapse may have disproportionate consequences. So they go for the cheap boots, which end up costing them more in the long run, trapping them in an endless cycle. Another way to consider it is through the lens of meritocracy. Consider two poker players of equal skill. Have them play each other until one has lost everything. Run this competition over and over, starting each player with a random stack. Over many trials, the player starting with the bigger stack will win in proportion to the ratio of their stack to their opponent's. Given a large enough ratio, this wealth advantage can begin to overcome greater and greater advantages in skill on the part of their opponent. In the US, the ratio of the wealth of the top 10% to the wealth of the median has risen from 5.8x in 1963 to nearly 10x in 2022. In the same period, the ratio of the top 1% to the median has risen from 35x to 70x. And the effective advantage is probably much higher, as this calculation does not take into account liquidity: most of a median family's wealth is in their family home. https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/ https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
  • jnwatson 7mo ago
    There's another important aspect of being wealthy that I've noticed myself. The less money you have, the more of your brainpower is spent in conserving it. Figuring out how to make rent this month, balancing your checkbook so you don't overdraft, keeping track of when payday is, looking through the newspaper to see what is on sale at the grocery store, is all time that could instead be spent thinking "how could I invest my money?", and "what are my longterm goals?".
• CodeBytes 7mo ago
  This feels like it's becoming less and less true, good quality items are becoming so expensive now or very hard to find. I do think it is still very true for tools though. It's nearly always worth getting decent ones, they nearly give better results or are easier to use and last so much longer.
  • Rebelgecko 7mo ago
    I'm a big fan of the Harbor Freight Pareto Principle If you're a hobbyist or doing something at home, a lot of the times you're gonna buy some random tool and only use it a few times. 80% of the time, the Harbor Freight knockoff is going to be good enough. If you use a tool so much that it breaks, then it's time to spring for the expensive and high quality version. However you may want to go straight to the nice version for things that have safety implications (skip the infamous Harbor Freight jack stands)
  • entuno 7mo ago
    > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. The "boots" item feels less true, because expensive doesn't seem to be as correlated with "good quality" as it used to. But the general statement still very much stands. Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this. And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one. It can still apply to individual items, as long as you're careful about what you buy and do your research to make sure you're actually buying high quality boots, and not just cheap ones with an expensive logo on the side.
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    • lotsofpulp 7mo ago
      >Things like financial products that charge higher interest rates to poorer people, or services that offer discounts for paying annually rather than monthly are great examples of this. Exchange of future cash flows are not comparable to a one time exchange of goods or services due to the risk of default. > And less direct things, like being able to drive to cheaper shops and buy in bulk, or being able to do preventative maintenance to avoid a cheap fix turning into an expensive one. This is a good example, but the best example I can think of is having sufficient cash flow to be able to purchase a home in a higher socioeconomic neighborhood, because if you have kids, you are effectively paying almost nothing for a higher quality education since a lot of comes back to you in the form of equity and your child’s increased chances of financial stability.
• simonw 7mo ago
  Re-reading Discworld books today demonstrates how timeless they are. Stories Terry wrote in the 1980s still feel like biting satire against the modern world today. The books also get better as I get older - I read them first as a teenager and many of the deeper ideas about the human condition went straight over my head. The way the cult leader in Guards! Guards! manipulates his followers, to give just one example.
  • abstractbill 7mo ago
    I read them as a teenager, and now my teenaged daughter has started reading them. They are every bit as good as I remember them being.
• tyrust 7mo ago
  ITT: an allegory is read literally Consumer goods have dropped in price, which is good for offsetting inequality. I think the allegory still holds in some other areas (off the top of my head: healthcare spending and renting versus owning your primary residence). That said, income inequality is probably the much bigger source of unfairness these days.
• karmakaze 7mo ago
  I see one version being buying more than you need for volume discounts.
• randusername 7mo ago
  Personally I think it's an inverted bathtub curve. Some things are so cheap you can't mess it up. Some things are well-made because the manufacturer made a series of quality-conscious decisions that really added up. The trouble is the middle, where consumers pay the most attention to branding to make decisions. At the extremes, though, brands matter less. The poor man wants boots. The rich man wants boots. The man in the middle wants Timberlands or Harley-Davidsons or Doc Martins or whatever.
  • Onavo 7mo ago
    > Some things are so cheap you can't mess it up. A good example would be modern safety razors. I was looking at alternatives to the King C Gillette and most of the generic branded ones performed similarly to the big three German brands.
• dlcarrier 7mo ago
  Vimes is talking about being penny wise and pound foolish. It is not in any way addressing costly signalling, a completely unrelated behavior where purposefully wasteful and highly visible spending on lower-utility products elevates social status, making low-utility products more expensive and more common than equivalent high-quality products.
• tonyedgecombe 7mo ago
  I do have a decent pair of boots but I doubt I am saving any money over buying cheap boots because resoling them is not cheap anymore.
• hazard 7mo ago
  > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. The premise is just false. The parable might be true when comparing, say, lower class vs lower-middle-class, or lower-middle-class to middle class. But the difference between upper class and middle class is not "spending less money." It's a vastly different net worth that comes from inheritance, building / running businesses, investments, etc. The boots theory focuses on the costs, but the real difference comes from the income & net worth