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“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” –James Baldwin
Samuel Vimes' boots theory of economics:
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
Guards, Guards! is just Capital Vol. I ch. 3-7 for fantasy nerds.
For real, if you're rich you can always buy the thing with the best usefulness/price ratio and not just scrape together whichever money to buy something that barely gets the job done.
And when you buy the good one it still breaks after one season. Case in point: most of my "brand name" shoes. Tempted to just buy local from a small manufacturer. The guy basically allows you to go in, point at a pair of shoes and say like "I want these shoes, but size 47 and with more fluff inside because my feet get cold" and he's like "Okay, it'll be ready by Wednesday" and you actually don't pay more than for a brand name shoe.
Mood. I splurged one year for my birthday, and got some doc martens. they started splitting apart at the seam of the boot and the rubber after a year. Come to find out, they don't even have their lifetime guarantee anymore because they switched manufacturers and their boots are shit now.
Every sneaker I bought basically has its sole completely worn down and the fabric ripped within one season. Are my feet broken (my orthopedist says they somewhat are) or what?
Curiously went on that local manufacturer's website, and he's got like, some really clean looking shoes for way less. And, like, he doesn't even make them in Bangladesh or so, they literally make them a few blocks from me (from what I've heard, dude has some crazy coronavirus safety measures, like, with non-overlapping shifts and breaks for disinfection and airing the whole place out).
Also, with the digital age you're locked more and more into ecosystems. It's impossible to enjoy and education nowadays without a smartphone. The hoops you would have to jump through are not realistic. There are tons of those barriers to entry in our modern civilization. It fucking sucks.
I don't know how every single economist can explain Vimes' Boots paradox, but then don't come to the conclusion capitalism is unfair. They believe this and they believe you can "vote with your dollar."
