She had initially named the idea the "Vimes Boot index" after the Terry Pratchett character: "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 okay 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 a 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." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/terry-pratchet...
The problem with the story is that it is vaguely correct but it makes subtle mistakes.
The problem isn't the fact that the boots are longer lasting. It's the fact that buying new boots is an emergency so you cannot just delay it. It's a fixed cost that everyone has to pay. The rich person can afford to buy both the crappy boots and the good boots and still have enough left over for everything else.
a tailored narrative at best. Vimes could have borrowed money to buy the good boots - as long as he could earn more than the interest when using those boots.
it is, but the narrative was that the total cost of the flimsy boots is some 10x the cost of 1 of the good one. An enterprising financier could charge 5x the cost of 1 good boot, over the life time of it, and the wearer is still going to be better off (and he obviously could afford it because previously he was paying 10x over the same period).
So the only reason this isn't done is because the flimsy boots aren't 10x the cost, but likely only 2x the cost. There's no room for financing option since transaction and friction costs would absorb any possible profit.
This was demonstrated quite well in a Twitter thread by Jack Monroe about food poverty in the UK - https://twitter.com/BootstrapCook/status/1483778776697909252 - and led to the Office For National Statistics looking into calculating the impact of inflation on different income groups - https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jan/26/cost-of-liv...
She had initially named the idea the "Vimes Boot index" after the Terry Pratchett character: "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 okay 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 a 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." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/terry-pratchet...