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.

  • bastian_5
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    1 year ago

    How did you get enough money to get those things in the first place though? If you look at all those things, you cannot simply go without them for the months it would take to save up under ideal circumstances, and if you’re impoverished, you can’t really get a loan to get them either.

    • curiousaur@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      That’s why I said if you’re making ends meet. If you’re truly impoverished, then you’re just kinda stuck in that poverty trap