(Roughly) Daily

Via the estimable Alan Jacobs, some wisdom from the remarkable Terry Pratchett…

The Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply “the boots theory,” is an economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items. The term was coined by English fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett in his [marvelous] 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, illustrates the concept with the example of boots.

The theory has been cited with regard to analyses of the prices of boots, fuel prices, and economic conditions in the United Kingdom…

… Sam Vimes is the cynical but likable captain of the City Watch of the fictional city-state of Ankh-Morpork. In the 1993 novel Men at Arms, the second novel focusing on the City Watch through Vimes’ perspective, Pratchett introduces the “Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness” through Vimes musing on how expensive it is to be poor:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … 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. … 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...

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* James Baldwin

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As we knit safety nets, we might send insightfully-humorous birthday greetings to William Penn Adair Rogers; he was born on this date in 1879.  A stage and motion picture actor, vaudeville performer, cowboy, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator, he traveled around the world three times, made 71 films (50 silent films and 21 “talkies”), and wrote more than 4,000 nationally syndicated newspaper columns.  By the mid-1930s Rogers was hugely popular in the United States, its leading political wit and the highest paid Hollywood film star.  He died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska.

Known as “Oklahoma’s Favorite Son,” Rogers was a Cherokee citizen, born to a Cherokee family in Indian Territory (now part of Oklahoma).

“Ten men in the country could buy the world and ten million can’t buy enough to eat.”- Will Rogers

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