So, I have weird feet – very short and very wide.

Throughout my youth, when my parents were paying my way through life, I was forced to cram my feet in cheap shoes that never fit.  Ever.  I didn’t complain about it, because every shoe store I went in to had the same basic offering of shoes for the middle two or three sigma of the bell curve.  Thus, I never knew there were any other options.

After college though, I managed to walk into a Red Wing shop and had fitting by someone that knew what they were doing.   This is when I discovered that I had been wearing shoes two or three sizes too long just to get my foot into it.   It is also when I discovered that when you have the right shoe on, the arch in the shoe lines up with the arch in your foot.  This was a revelation to me.

Checking out was another revelation.  Red Wings where really well-made shoes that cost a lot of money compared to what I was used to paying.  I choked a bit, but coughed up the money, because this was the first time a shoe ever fit.

Over time, another lesson was slowly learned.  The damn shoes lasted forever.   I wore them for years before I even considered getting replacements.   This was the beginning of my understand of the cost of buying stuff versus the cost of owning stuff.   This would get formalized later in my engineering career as life-cycle cost analysis.  But at the time it was just one of life’s little secrets that no one taught you.  It was something you had to figure out.

Much later in life I would discover the books of Sir Terry Pratchett.  This passage struck me deeply:

 

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.

 

Confirmation bias kicked in.  And my bias was that this was the secret to climbing out of poverty.  Spend your money wisely in the beginning to save yourself lots of money in the long term.

For me, spending decisions came down to “Am I going to use this once or forever?”  If once, buy cheap and throw it away.  If forever, buy the best you can get your hands on.  Delay the purchase and save up if you need, but don’t waste money on cheap crap.

Over last summer, I ran across someone youngster on Facebook waxing poetically about this same passage.  Except, this youngster was using the quote as justification for “eating the rich” because the rich had unfair privileges that actively kept the poor down.  This can’t be right I thought.  But then the same message was conveyed by the BBC’s woke-horseshit take on the Nightwatch as well.  So, it appears the social justice warriors have laid claim upon Sir Terry.

A quick google search shows a lot of thought pieces based on Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.  It seems to be an even split between articles on “here is how to get ahead life” versus “this is why the poor are trapped and we need to DO SOMETHING”.

Well, dear readers.  It’s up to you.

 

Was Terry a proto-social-justice-warrior or not?