Based on the excerpt from this Discworld book, what other items do you use regularly that would fit in this theory? (Boots and shoes are fair game!)
Text transcript for people who want it:
[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 Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.]
Bonus: suggest ways you can repair/restore your item/other people’s items.
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My problem is I don’t know what products are expensive because they are good, and what products are a scam. No idea how to even search to find out either.
It depends on the category of the item you are planning to buy, there are lots of gear reviews blogs/sites for outdoor gear as well as tech. As for clothing, I YouTube the brand for review videos… A bit more time consuming than just impulse buying on the spot but this way, you can make an educated guess on the quality of what you are planning to spend your hard earned money on.
Oh easy, I just check for a thread on reddit where two guys are at each other’s throats arguing the merits of different crescent wrenches
…oh, wait.
This whole thread reminded me of this old viral tweet
This and Chocolate Rain, I guess that’s two times he’s made an impression on my life now
Wait! This is the same guy?
Yup!
I’ve been paying and paying and paying for that damn root canal.
That one dental problem has cost me way more money than i made at that job in total.
I see Sir PTerry, I upvote.
And hey, just sliding this totally smoothly into the conversation, did you all know we have !discworld@lemmy.ml (Lemmy / Kbin)
*sidles out awkwardly*
Super neat!! Thanks for the link. :) If anyone likes the style of writing, go look at the Discworld community. These books are great.
I’m hoping this quote can drive some critical thinking about sustainability, and maybe some discussion about how to better what people CAN afford/already have.
It’s expensive to be poor
It really is. I have a few friends who are not doing very well, and it amazes me the shit they have to pay for.
Renting -
Buying a house is like having a bank account you can’t access until you want to move. Renting a house is just paying into someone else’s bank, and you end up unable to save for your own.
The rich don’t get rich by saving more or spending less: though it is an advantage when they choose to use it.
The rich get rich by exploiting the labor (or income from labor) of those less fortunate than them.
On the plus side, short notice and a little risk and you can just move. New job? Bad neighbour? New family? Other changes in needs?
Trying to sell property can be a massive pain and take ages in many places.
Problem now is “luxury” brands, which is the same shit quality at a huge markup. Quality is often not even a consideration for producers these days.
Boots, shoes, clothes, technology, cars, houses, furniture.
Everything.
Car repair. Towing and fixing a car with a ruined engine is ten times as much as doing regular maintenance. And it’s not just the dollar cost of oil changes and belts: When you are better off, you have the free time to run that errand to do those things.
Dental care, for almost the exact same reasons.
General healthcare has all of those factors PLUS if your general health goes bad you may not be able to work so now fixing it is expensive and you have no income.
Car
repair.Sorry, I usually don’t make these shallow comments. But cars are just another way to accumulate money for the rich few. Transportation is the boot, and we can’t afford good public transit and international railways.
Sorry, I don’t think I fully follow. Would you care to explain how cars are a way to accumulate money for the rich?
@H3L1X reminds me of one rule from woodworkers/DIYers – buy a cheap set of tools, when one of the tools breaks, replace that one tool with a more expensive one (upgrading based on use)
This works for all sorts of things, especially automotive tools, but there’s one exception that I live by.
Don’t cheap out on the things that come between you and the ground.
Your shoes, your socks, your tires, your bed, the chair you spend twelve hours a day in. Those are worth some investment. It pays dividends.
That is true, I do quite like that rule.
In a somewhat paradoxical fashion, it would be cheaper to buy and own many things over an extended period of time versus renting them. However, pooling resources to buy just one of something and have it be accessible to a community seems like the more ideal sustainable approach… But we also see perversions of the ‘sharing’ model with things like ride-sharing and AirBnB. Just something some of the comments (i.e. on laundry and tools) made me think about.
It’s Terry, so it’s good. But as someone who buys expensive leather shoes due to fucked up feet and good shoes increasing the time until the hurt, it absolutely tracks. I’ve been using my 250€ leather shoes for three years now and they’re still OK. 75€ standard sneakers I used before had holes in the soles within a year.
Thats what the concept ‘conscious spending’ tries to address and set up protocols to get out of the negative feedback cycle of having to constantly buy cheap shit only to have to replace it and double your cost.
https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/conscious-spending-basics/
The link above has much more details on this if y’all are interested.
A key component of Vimes’ theory is that he buys cheap boots because he can’t afford the expensive ones. Conscientious spending assumes the person has a choice; it isn’t an option for Vimes, or for many people.
There are many things that it makes sense to simply buy the cheap version of: things that’ll be used infrequently, or which usefullness is unknown. Gadgets which a friend loves and recommends, but which end up being simply unused.
I haven’t read the book you recommend; maybe it says all this. I do think, though, that for all the evils of cheap consumer goods, they’ve put much in the hands of people who would not otherwise be able to afford it.
as explained in our book, I Will Teach You to Be Rich.
Yeah, no… that’s a pass from me.
I would say it’s not so much that they managed to, it’s that they could afford to spend less money. You cannot afford good food, so you eat crappy food and get sick, so you have to go to the doctor. You cannot afford good insurance, so you have to spend a ludicrous amount to get good care that will fix the problem, but you cannot afford that, so instead of a one time charge, you now have the worse prescription that still costs a bit, and it doesn’t even keep you healthy, it just keeps you moving forward, barely. Because of your condition, you now can’t even work as well as you could, so you get paid even less, all the while your health is deteriorating because the medicine you can already barely afford isn’t actually what you really need.
How the fuck do you get out of that on your own?
House. If you can afford to buy one, it is much cheaper than to pay rent over decades.
Training. If you can afford to not earn money for a few years, training in a valuable skill will earn you much money.
More training. Sometimes you just need to stop earning money for a year.
Tools. It may be hard to choose good tools, some are overpriced for no good reason, but tools you work with instead of working around is a productivity booster.
BTW, this theory has a name in socio-economics, it is called the “poverty trap” (aka “it is expensive to be poor”) it is not as much how the rich get richer (there are a lot of more salient mechanisms there) but more about how the poor remain poor.
Food.
If you don’t have much money then it can be a lot harder to eat healthily, due to cost of fresh ingredients and time to cook, which is time you may not have.
This can lead to eating a lot of unhealthy and processed food, which then causes knock-on costs later with poor health, illness, and medical bills that aomeone with the money to eat healthily might have been able to avoid.
I think the “time to cook” is the kicker here. Healthy food is really much cheaper, but you have to buy ingredients to cook with, not ready-to-eat or close to.
Things like dried lentils, beans, rice, etc are way cheaper than even inexpensive canned. In-season produce or frozen counterparts, too.
I think so many people underestimate the value of time.
