Dan Luu
Roughly speaking, Vimes' boots theory of poverty is the idea that, if you're poor, you're forced to buy cheap products, such as boots, that wear out quickly and need to frequently be replaced, causing a kind of poverty trap.
Below are some quotes that illustrate typical examples of how people think about Vimes' boots theory.
Dan Luu
One person I polled replied with something like "[laugh] have any of these people been to a place where you can buy cheap bulk food [that isn't one one of the expensive membership places like Costco]? Look at the SES of the shoppers!"
Well, there's that one guy I know who owns two planes who buys rice by the pallet, but that's really unusual. I suspect no one who's saying that poor people pay more for food than rich people know someone who does this.
Dan Luu
The idea that middle class folks are eating more cheaply than someone who buys 50lb bags of beans, living more cheaply than someone who, e.g., puts an entire family into a studio in a cheap neighborhood, drives more cheaply than someone who takes the bus, etc., is obviously absurd, so it seems like people just have no idea how a frugal poor person lives
A lot of people are replying with "that stuff isn't as nice as [rich person stuff]". Yeah. I know. But that has nothing to do with Vimes' boots
Dan Luu
Yeah, having enough money that your investments throw off significant income is pretty great. So is winning the birth lottery and having a trust fund you can live off of or winning an actual lottery.
But that's a different thing than having to buy lower quality items that cost more in the long run.
If you look at the actual thing, the price of homes purchases by poor people or the cost of rent paid, it's generally lower and not higher.
Dan Luu
Housing is another common example with the appreciation of a home vs. the cost of rent. But almost every time I've had someone brag about how much their home has appreciated, when I've compared how my investments have done (boring mostly world market cap weighted stuff, using some instruments to get leverage), my investments have outperformed, so this is really about having investments vs. not, which is super different from Vimes' boots as stated as well as how people generally reference it.
Dan Luu
I think a lot of this comes from people having no idea what a poor person might spend on something. If you eat rice and beans from 50lb bags, that's really cheap. If you want to beat this cost with "purchasing only a rich person can do", you basically have to buy by the pallet. How many middle class or rich people do this?
I do know one person who does this (a formerly poor person, of course) but, in practice, rich people aren't spending less on food because they can buy in bulk or whatever.
Dan Luu
As I've discussed elsewhere (https://danluu.com/talent/, https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1477001191548542980, https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109537224752779343, etc.), of course there are massive advantages to growing up middle class and even larger advantages to growing up wealthy but, AFAICT, none of the advantages are related to this Vimes' boots thing people love trotting out.
People I polled had the same reaction — being poor is terrible, just not for the Vimes' boots reason that middle-class people and rich people love to cite.
Dan Luu
For everyone who's replied with "haha well no one thinks it's about boots [even though I literally quote someone who specifically cites boots], it's actually about how you spend less if you buy quality", please name the classes of items that are significant expenses where, as you get richer, you spend less by buying better items.
Multiple people I talked to found this bit — what major expense do you spend less on as you get richer? Food? No. Clothing? No. Housing? No. Medical care? No. etc.
Dan Luu
Anyway, I polled everyone I personally know who grew up poor (by the definition above) and zero of them thought that Vimes' boots theory made sense. Additionally, on the specific quotes above, people found them laughable, with comments like
"what kind of poor person is buying a new shirt?" [the implication, too obvious to be stated, is that you'd get hand-me-downs or buying shirts at a secondhand store], "how much does this guy think it costs to operate a beater car?", and
Dan Luu
"wtf was the person doing who was buying shoes every year until they bought $200 boots? I still have my XYZ shoes I got for free ten years ago, my ABC goes I got for free six years ago, [etc.]"
And, BTW, none of these people are currently poor, although many still have deeply ingrained habits. And the last comment was from a former elite athlete and serious mountaineer, who was certainly putting more intense wear on their gear than the person from the quote, who was walking around Boston.
Dan Luu
If you grew up poor and find Vimes' boots theory to be anything but silly, I'd be curious to hear why (this question is the point of the thread).
As someone who read the Pratchett bit when I was a poor kid and appreciated it as a bit, I've been baffled by how often I see people take it seriously, both on the internet (it's frequently the top comment in poverty discussions) as well as IRL.
I've polled quite a few poor people about this and literally everyone has had the same reaction as me.
Dan Luu
I was going to write this after the poll expired to avoid poisoning the results, but since I don't find the results remotely plausible for at least two reasons, no reason to wait.
1. I posted this poll at ~1am PT / 4am ET and the response rate is basically the same as for any other poll I post around this time even though I asked for U.S. and Canadian folks only. I have decent info on, geographically, who will see things depending on when I post based on when I post and this makes no sense.
Dan Luu
2. The numbers have bounced around a bit, but it's been fairly consistent that ~20% of people marked themselves as having grown up starvation-level poor, which should not be true in a poll that's representative of the U.S., let alone one of a population of people on Mastodon who are mostly programmers.
In surveys, you'll see 20% of some disadvantaged populations with some food insecurity, but that's less a lower level of poverty than this poll's definition of regular starvation or equivalent.
Tom Walker
@danluu I think what you've learned is that you can't add a big pile of caveats above your poll and expect that everyone answering will read it
Dan Luu
@dkalintsev As with the car example, I don't think the monetary cost of this can really catch up. Say you pick up a fridge by the side of the road that's extremely inefficient and uses an absurd 2kWh per day more than a nice fridge that a rich person would buy (this isn't really even plausible). Locally, this costs $70 of power per year. A "nice" fridge is $1k+ and you're never going to catch up to that for as long as a rich person keeps their nice fridge.
Dmitri Kalintsev
@danluu I personally can speak about home appliances and tools. In both cases, poor quality ones cause waste of time, energy (less energy efficient), potentially materials (in case of tools), endangering the operator (think eg, of dull knives vs. sharp ones), and accummulating frustration.
Another example is computers; a Mac Mini we use as a home storage server is 12 years old; and we have only just recently got rid of a Mac Pro that was almost that old.
Dan Luu
@Adamlett What does being wiped out here mean? And what are you insuring here? When I was a kid, we rode bikes a lot and took the bus a lot. We had a cheap beater car that sort of didn't work so if it got totalled, that wasn't much of a loss. We had an apartment that we didn't own and if it got burnt down, we'd declare bankruptcy and have nothing, so same as before.
I mean no offense by this, but I feel like you're not really in the mindset of a poor person here.
Dan Luu
@Adamlett If, at any point in time, you have enough that you don't want to be wiped out, you can buy insurance (we did eventually get a house for something like $75k and I believe we had it insured). If for some reason we couldn't afford it and had to sell the house, we'd have $75k, which is enough to live on for a while even with no income (after graduating, I lived on ~$12k/yr).
Adam Lett
@danluu You are in effect self insuring, which may or may not be cheaper than the alternative, depending on a lot of factors.
But I still think my point stands, which is that if you cannot absorb the variance, self insurance (ie. no insurance) has the potential to wipe you out.
Dan Luu
@Adamlett I don't think that has any relevance to the point, but no, that's just the sticker price. I have no idea how much I'm saving in expectation and I don't think the calculation is really even possible since the state-run monopoly here only uses a few gross factors to price insurance and the true cost will be based on my own driving and I don't think it's really possible for me to model the expected cost of that decently.
Dan Luu
@Adamlett I think, on my current car, I save something like $1k/yr by not insuring the vehicle itself because I live in a place with super expensive car insurance, but that amount would be more like $50/yr (just guessing based on the car's value of ~$500) when I had my worthless beater and of course the difference in depreciation between the beater and my current car dwarfs $50/yr.
Adam Lett
@danluu Is the $1k you are saving the amount that the insurance is overpriced with respect to it’s expected value? If so, how do you know that?
Dan Luu
@Adamlett For cost of rent, yes. For insurance, I feel like it's the other way around — now that I'm fairly well off, I forgo a lot of insurance to save a trivial amount of money, e.g., I only carry liability car insurance have to pay for my repairs if I'm at fault, if my car gets vandalized, etc.
But, even there, if you look at my total automotive expenses, they're much higher now than they were when I was poor because my car actually costs something, so I don't think this qualifies.
Adam Lett
@danluu Does this calculation account for the fact that besides appreciating in value, a house also provides you a place to live? After all, you can’t invest the money you spend on rent (or – in fairness – interest on a mortgage).
One other thing besides owning vs renting, jumps to my mind: Insurance. I would imagine that poor people forego insurance on things like cars and healthcare, with catastrophic economic consequences for some.
Dan Luu
@peterbautista I could see needing something like that if you have no friends and no community, but the poor people I've known and polled would borrow from a friend rather than take out extremely expensive short term debt, would get a bank account, etc.
A lot of this feels to me like "making poor decisions can have really bad consequences if you're poor and sort of doesn't have consequences at all if you're middle class", which seems quite different from Vimes' boots, IMO.
Dan Luu
@peterbautista I think things like that are definitely extremely expensive, but no one I knew growing up would touch something like that with a ten foot pole, and lot of folks were refugees who came to the country with absolutely nothing and were, financially, doing as poorly as is possible in the U.S., often with significant medical issues as well, e.g., my father was severely injured in the Vietnam war and had significantly reduced function and chronic pain for life.
Peter Bautista
@danluu I don't think the poverty trap comes from having to, for instance, buy new boots frequently. In absolute terms, clearly poor people spend less than rich. But as a percentage of your available income, people spend more (eg they can't save). For me the classic example is banking -- if you're using a check-cashing service instead of a bank 1) you're checks are a lot smaller than most people with banks and 2) you're getting charged fees on top of that people in banks aren't.
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