>Sam Vimes is also renowned for his "Boots Theory of socio-economic unfairness", as posited in Men at Arms:
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
This quote gets posted over and over ad nauseum on reddit and HackerNews and always seems to just get accepted as truth, but realistically the entire theory depends on the relative numbers between the two things being compared. The theory makes no sense if good boots cost 5x as much as shitty boots but only last 2x as long.
If the cost of most things depended only on quality then I'd find it more convincing, but especially when we're talking about consumer electronics, things like brand reputation, novelty, and user perception matter a lot.
A rich person can buy the cheap option. A poor person usually cannot buy the expensive option. Of course the rule doesn't apply to everything, but it applies to "enough".
Buying a house is often much better financially than renting (in high cost of living areas, usually by a factor)
Hardwood furniture can last several generations. Plywood stuff...not so much.
Mutual funds have much lower fees if you invest a larger amount of money. Banks and credit unions give you more, cheaper services if you have more money. Borrowing money is cheaper the better off you are.
You can get a better job if you can afford to be on the market for longer.
And so on, and so forth. There are exceptions (my cheap ikea couch has lasted 10-15 years, while a fancy hardwood table we got started falling apart after just a few years), but you just have more options if you can afford more expensive stuff. Some of those options are vastly more cost-effective. Being poor is very expensive.
If the point of the quote is to say that "sometimes the more expensive option is better value" it's accurate, but also is obvious, and doesn't really mean anything.
To be clear, I don't think it's strictly wrong, just that it adds nothing of value to a conversation. It just gives a very specific example of when a rule holds.
It's kind of like if the employment statistics come out, and they show improvement, but someone comments that they just got laid off that week. They aren't wrong, but they're also not adding anything to the conversation.
> If the point of the quote is to say that "sometimes the more expensive option is better value" it's accurate, but also is obvious, and doesn't really mean anything.
That is not the point, and the comment you’re replying to gave some very real, serious examples as to why not. Cost of living alone eats an incredible amount of your budget unless you’re very well to do, so there, immediately, you’re out of “sometimes” territory. We’re already in “the majority of most people’s budget” land. Then you have payday loans, any kind of loan in general, late fees, etc: all of these are costs to low liquidity. Unexpected expenses cannot be absorbed if you have no cash nor assets to sell. Being poor is expensive; this is not a random anecdote, it’s a fundamental character flaw in our society that has been consistently identified and documented. Google “the cost of being poor” for more reading material than one could process in a lifetime.
If you’re talking about the specific example in the quote, alone: it’s an illustration, to make a complex and ugly point understandable and palatable and easy to digest. It’s not a random data point: it illustrates the mechanism by which being poor is expensive. That’s not straight forward to intuit, hence this example has merit.
> Cost of living alone eats an incredible amount of your budget unless you’re very well to do,
this has not been true for a long time by now. If it were true there would be no mass market for tourism and no budget for so many people to buy iphones every year or two. By far we all earn way more than what we strictly need to live, even in your first jobs in your twenties.
It does mean something - there's asymmetry between rich and poor people's ability to buy good and bad items. The rich can buy either but the poor can only buy cheap. So even if only a few things had this boots effect, and everything else worked backward (cheaper item has better value per dollar) that would still skew the fairness in favor of the rich.
That assumes rich people actually participate. They could also just buy cheap things over and over because they can. I like to do that so I'm not too emotionally and financially attached to possessions, which becomes a liability and a worry.
Rich people dOnt always buy premiUm products in every single category of products. This was somewhat of an insight I learned when working in the FMCG industry.
Just a nitpick, but I think you meant particle board instead of plywood.
High quality plywood is composed of several thin sheets of hardwood in which the grain of each runs perpendicular to it’s neighbor. This makes is stronger than pure hardwood with far less warping and cupping over time.
If I had the choice between no housing whatsoever and stock market, sure. Unfortunately being homeless kind of sucks so the choice is between being and renting. The former is cheaper if only because I don't have to deal with massive rent increases every year. I literally bought my place because I was about to get priced out of the city by my landlord.it took only 2 years for an equivalent unit in an equivalent location to cost me less (including mortage, taxes, maintenance, HOA) than the unit I was renting now goes for.
I literally mean "cost me less" (the numbers below are bogus but the proportions are correct, just so people who know me don't get too much insight into my finances, haha)
When I last rented (in a very high cost of living area), my rent was 2500 and I was faced with a 300/month increase on the renewal of my lease.
I bought a place in an area that is roughly an (almost) as high in demand. Much nicer, 3 times the size. The mortgage was 2000/month. Add taxes and HoA and It's about 3000/month. There is some maintenance and I have to pay for my own repair, so my housing budget is about 3500 a month.
That was several years ago. I can look up the listing for the apartment I used to rent (large building, lots of units on the same floor with the same plan and they have a website). It hovers between 3000 and 3500/month these days.
Except I can deduct about $5000/year in taxes from my mortgage interest and the property taxes (though starting this year I won't be able to do the later anymore because of caps). And on that 3500/month I pay for housing, about $1500ish goes in principal. So effectively, the place costs me about 1500-1600/month. Add that property value is up drastically in the area over the last few years, and I'm living here somewhere between "for free" and "at a profit". That's a heck of a lot cheaper than renting.
There was the matter of the downpayment. I got pretty lucky in some of my stock investments, but the above is hard to beat (and the only reason I have so much money to invest IS because of how much cheaper my housing is now compared to what it would be). Oh, the condo association is letting me stick a solar array on the roof, which is also a fine investment even with the new tariffs. Landlord wouldn't have allowed it. If I ever need to leave or cash in, I can flip the place on the market in a day (well, plus like a month for the closing I guess). I can rent it too for a sweet added profit.
You raise a good point, but I'd say the problem is that determining if the more expensive one is _actually_ better is really difficult, there's lots of marketing blurring everything, even going so far as fake reviews, shill comments, etc. You thought you found a quality product but Walmart (or the brand owner, or the brand's new parent company) decided to use cheaper materials to increase margins (possibly even once per year!). The source of trustworthy reviews yesterday somehow "monetized" itself into giving outstanding 5 star reviews quoting phrases like "buy for life", "it's worth spending extra for the quality" when it's literally the same unfit for use garbage you can get unbranded for dirt cheap on a Chinese clone of Amazon. Counterfeit goods on Amazon is already a big problem.
Most likely, the person who can afford the pricier boots and tells you they last longer than yours just needs to use them less, but justifies his decision because it was actually true back in his father's day. Economic inequality is a huge issue right now, sure. But information assymetry is also doing a lot of damage. I can get a spec sheet on 2 motherboards and get about all the information I need from them for a purchasing decision. You can't do that with boots at Walmart in this scenario.
I like this suspicion, but I don't buy into anymore. I think there is a floor to quality. However, even what we call cheap quality shoes nowdays are typically above the quality of what you used to be able to get many places, period.
More, if you want shoes to last a long time, I have found nothing beats having multiple sets and not wearing the same shoes constantly. I have not empirically studies this, though. So, if anyone has, I'd be delighted to see the results. I just know that if I buy an expensive set of shoes for me, they last about 6 months if I constantly wear them. I can, of course, resole them. But they are not magically doing better than the cheaper shoes I can also buy. Rotating shoes so that I wear a different set day to day makes a huge difference in how long they last.
Fair enough, footwear is not the best example nowadays. I went from buying cheap $10 shoes at Walmart to only wearing Marine issue Vibram boots that would cost in excess of $200. Although the special forces boots are silent and more comfortable they only last a couple years. My current pair I've had for 4 years and they look identical to the day I got them. But they're not for everybody. However if we extrapolate away from footwear and think about cars I think the anecdote is more apt. Take for instance something as trivial as an oil change. Regular 5w30 will cost around $30 but it breaks down relatively quickly and needs to be changed if you're lucky every 3k miles. Full synthetic on the other hand will set you back $100 plus and will last at least 7k miles. When you change it you'll find with normal use that the oil hasn't really broken down within that span and you're really just changing it to remove combustion and minor engine particulates. Not to mention the engine with full synthetic will run smoother and more efficient, while the regular oil by nature will run noticeably sluggish when reaching its end of life. All of this is moot when making the choice to go full electric, but how much will that set someone back vs buying a good used car that in the most rare circumstances can hope to get less than a quarter of the life of an electric. An even more relevant example for this community I would think would be the concept of tech debt.
I find that the most cost-effective clothes are usually those that you won’t find at Wal-Mart or K-Mart nor at, for example, Sack’s Off Fifth. $50 dollar Levi’s, $100 Nike running shoes, $10 tee shirts, etc seem to last way longer than the cheapest stuff and the expensive stuff. That said, I recently started learning to sew, and am starting to believe that, for example, a $10 sweatshirt from CVS plus some sewing is much more cost effective than, say, the $50 Adidas option.
I wish, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, so not really. All I’ve repaired so far is a couple pairs of Levi’s that I keep tearing on my desks at school.
I mentioned sweaters from CVS because I bought one for ~$9 and the seams are coming apart after about 8 months, but it seems like it will be easy to fix because it was made in such a simple way.
Just to save you some trouble, if it comes apart on the seams because of age and not because of shoddy sewing from the maker, it's not worth fixing - it will come apart again at a different place within the next month or so. This is especially true for jeans. At least this is my decade-long experience with fixing everything.
Thanks! That's sorta what the woman said at the shop I bought my needle/thread. The sweater is definitely just poor sewing from whatever factory it came from, the jeans a combination.
Given that you have some experience, do you have any resources you can recommend? Maybe a good book with a bunch of the fundamental skills?
Ah, no, I'm sorry. I basically never learned how to do it apart from looking at a few pictures over 15 years ago and talking about it a little (experiences of when to use a patch and when just thread is fine for example). A friend of mine taught me how to use a machine but I find that for repairs it's far better to do things by hand.
Most of the things are really easy to figure out with common sense. I bet youtube can help you though. I for myself would rather put my energy into learning how to work with new material, I'm often annoyed by how often old fabric does not hold up and I'm mostly repairing old stuff anyway where a repair does not need to be pretty or long-lived.
I bought a pair of Frye boots -- ostensibly hand-made and durable, $360 dollar shoes -- which completely disintegrated after a year of walking around New York city and were not actually repairable. My cheapo $60 mall boots, on the other hand, got me through 3 years.
I have found nothing beats having multiple sets and not wearing the same shoes constantly.
This, a thousand times over. Shoe trees also do wonders to extend the life of footwear. It's all about letting the shoe completely dry out between wears.
I finally got Birkenstocks just because they are apparently bullet proof and comfortable, but after something like 18 months of wearing them non-stop (almost every day), they have completely worn through and are not usable.
After that I had a pair of Walmart flip-flops that lasted only half the time under similar use but they were 1/10th the price.
Before that I had a pair of no-name not flip-flop (i.e., velcro strap) sandals that lasted nearly 6 years of fairly continual use.
There is no particular moral or conclusion here, they are just anecdotes. I just think you can't make any general rule about "it's better to buy quality than cheap" or vice-versa: it's all situation specific and depends on the quantitative costs and lifetimes.
There are many examples of "it's expensive to be poor". There also many examples of where it's not, and how people have what would have been considered a very high standard of living in the past on minimal output. Many not poor people are also definitely not doing the boot anecdote thing posits: they aren't buying one set of boots and wearing them their entire lifetime. They aren't buying one set of hardwood furniture they use from their 20s until they die and they aren't buying a quality vehicle and running it for 20 years on synthetic oil.
Easily, for some types of shoes. In dry weather, I don't care. Small holes in the shoes don't really matter much. In wet, though, it is baffling how quickly I can go through shoes.
This was back when I walked about two to five miles a day. Just in the office, the same shoes can last much longer.
For that matter, most of the change has been in the wet season. I wouldn't be surprised to find the shoes flat out wear faster in that environment.
If you don't use something that often then it turns out that buying a fancy one was money wasted. When I buy power tools I usually go for the cheapskate version and figure if it breaks I'll buy a better one next time.
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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Vimes#Boots_theory_of_soci...