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

namanyayg

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.

AussieWog93

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!).

legitster

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.

vannevar

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/

CodeBytes

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.

simonw

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.

tyrust

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

I see one version being buying more than you need for volume discounts.

randusername

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.

dlcarrier

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

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

> 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