I love when this comes up and also I see it play out in my life, where my GF prefers fast fashion whereas I buy something from brands I like and I wear it for long (some of the clothes in my wardrobe have been there for 12+ years.. I feel old.)
Also Sir Terry Pratchett is a gem of an author and you should read all of his books. I have read through maybe 25% of Discworld and it's the funniest fantasy series ever.
Man, part of me wishes the theory were still true. So many products you spent good coin on and then later find out are in fact no better than the cheap stuff (or worse, literally just rebadged Alibaba products!).
It's never been the case that more expensive products are better, despite better products being more expensive.
Quality isn't the only reason something may be expensive, and costly signaling will always dominate, whether or not the products are of high quality.
Silver isn't a better material for making jewelry than stainless steel; if anything, it's worse. Jewelry's purpose is to show that the owner doesn't care about costs, but it's not the only way. Buying needlessly expensive technology works too, like cars and computers and phones, and the more expensive ones are not known for lasting long, and they are used for much shorter period of time than a cheap version of the same, despite the cheap one being hardier and longer lasting.
Its a fun thought exercise, but I've found the opposite to be true in most cases. More expensive clothes are usually less durable (depending on the brand). The same goes for appliances, and cars, and phones, and etc. The cheap designs are simple and robust and the expensive designs add complexity and features.
In reality I think there are more forces extracting money from the wealthy and their effete needs. My example is an airplane. The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome. The same is true for ovens and shoes and phones and cars.
This highly, highly depends. I've never bought a Meile appliance but seen others here swear on them for durability. Le Creuset and All Clad make cookware I've had for decades with no problems or degradation at all and they'll last for centuries as far as I can tell. I've got a 70L pack I bought from the Arcteryx factory store 20 years ago and I've damn near taken it to the moon and back. Virtually every mountain in North America. Had it rained on, dunked into streams, fallen while full of 40 kilos of gear onto sharp rock. Not so much as a single seam has ever frayed and it's just just as waterproof as it was the day I bought it.
And you're overestimating the cost of first class, at least in my experience, and that's kind of a lot of experience. I work in pre-sales engineering and travel a ton. My company won't pay for first class, but I'm 6'2" with ten screws in my spine and always pay for the upgrade, and it's usually between $200-$500, which has never tripled the price and almost never even so much as doubles it. You can sneer that I'm overpaying for nothing, but you try getting into a situation where sitting in a sardine can for four hours leaves you unable to stand up straight for 40 hours when you land. To me, it's worth it. The other option is I die with more zeros in my bank account, which is even more pointless. It's not like I'm failing to hit savings goals because of this.
Same thing applies with cars, by the way. I work from home when not traveling and don't drive very much, but I do own a luxury vehicle, and the difference between that any nearly any rental is pretty stark. It doesn't win on any reliability rating I'm aware of, but I've put less than 20,000 miles on it in 6 years of ownership and don't particularly care about the durability. I care about comfort and my own car is way the fuck more comfortable than the Nissans and Toyotas the rental agencies give me.
"Effete needs" is awfully sneering. I've lived on the back of an Abrams tank for weeks at a time in the past. I lived in the backseat of a 1994 Honda Civic and worked an overnight shift detailing theme park restrooms while putting myself through community college 25 years ago. I can live with little to no comfort if I actually need to, but given the choice and sufficient disposable income that it makes no difference, why the hell would I choose to be less comfortable just so I can brag to all the Bogleheads that my savings account has an extra hundred grand in it when I need five mil to retire anyway? Frugality doesn't push the needle much in the realm of travel and consumer goods. Cheap housing and a well-paying job is what pushes the needle.
I have nothing to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a feature.
If these luxury items are being used by the society (or at least in some circles) as a proxy for 'success'(ie having enough disposable money) it probably would be better if they we also quite fragile. This way you could distinguish between someone who received a expense gift vs someone that has money to always keep buying new items.
I'm not sure how real it this, but I've read somewhere that part of the appeal of expensive glassware was the fact that it was pretty fragile. Serving someone at your house with expensive glassware was a way to tell 'look how much money I've got'.
Just to be clear, I don't think we should get impressed/try to impress people by how much money someone has. But that is a practice as old as time, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
Bought an expensive jacket. It's indestructible and cool and has good pockets. It's a motorcycle jacket. I didn't know I was buying an indestructible normal jacket.
The boots theory is a concrete way of expressing the risk of ruin, which is the principle advantage of wealth (though our society has layered on many others): the rich can afford to take more risk, and consequently enjoy more reward. A poor person who buys the $50 boots has a much higher risk of coming up short for something else, and that lapse may have disproportionate consequences. So they go for the cheap boots, which end up costing them more in the long run, trapping them in an endless cycle.
Another way to consider it is through the lens of meritocracy. Consider two poker players of equal skill. Have them play each other until one has lost everything. Run this competition over and over, starting each player with a random stack. Over many trials, the player starting with the bigger stack will win in proportion to the ratio of their stack to their opponent's. Given a large enough ratio, this wealth advantage can begin to overcome greater and greater advantages in skill on the part of their opponent.
In the US, the ratio of the wealth of the top 10% to the wealth of the median has risen from 5.8x in 1963 to nearly 10x in 2022. In the same period, the ratio of the top 1% to the median has risen from 35x to 70x. And the effective advantage is probably much higher, as this calculation does not take into account liquidity: most of a median family's wealth is in their family home.
This feels like it's becoming less and less true, good quality items are becoming so expensive now or very hard to find.
I do think it is still very true for tools though. It's nearly always worth getting decent ones, they nearly give better results or are easier to use and last so much longer.
Re-reading Discworld books today demonstrates how timeless they are. Stories Terry wrote in the 1980s still feel like biting satire against the modern world today.
The books also get better as I get older - I read them first as a teenager and many of the deeper ideas about the human condition went straight over my head.
The way the cult leader in Guards! Guards! manipulates his followers, to give just one example.
Consumer goods have dropped in price, which is good for offsetting inequality. I think the allegory still holds in some other areas (off the top of my head: healthcare spending and renting versus owning your primary residence).
That said, income inequality is probably the much bigger source of unfairness these days.
Personally I think it's an inverted bathtub curve.
Some things are so cheap you can't mess it up. Some things are well-made because the manufacturer made a series of quality-conscious decisions that really added up.
The trouble is the middle, where consumers pay the most attention to branding to make decisions. At the extremes, though, brands matter less.
The poor man wants boots. The rich man wants boots. The man in the middle wants Timberlands or Harley-Davidsons or Doc Martins or whatever.
A good example would be modern safety razors. I was looking at alternatives to the King C Gillette and most of the generic branded ones performed similarly to the big three German brands.
Vimes is talking about being penny wise and pound foolish.
It is not in any way addressing costly signalling, a completely unrelated behavior where purposefully wasteful and highly visible spending on lower-utility products elevates social status, making low-utility products more expensive and more common than equivalent high-quality products.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
The premise is just false. The parable might be true when comparing, say, lower class vs lower-middle-class, or lower-middle-class to middle class. But the difference between upper class and middle class is not "spending less money." It's a vastly different net worth that comes from inheritance, building / running businesses, investments, etc.
The boots theory focuses on the costs, but the real difference comes from the income & net worth
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 51.0 ms ] threadAlso Sir Terry Pratchett is a gem of an author and you should read all of his books. I have read through maybe 25% of Discworld and it's the funniest fantasy series ever.
Quality isn't the only reason something may be expensive, and costly signaling will always dominate, whether or not the products are of high quality.
Silver isn't a better material for making jewelry than stainless steel; if anything, it's worse. Jewelry's purpose is to show that the owner doesn't care about costs, but it's not the only way. Buying needlessly expensive technology works too, like cars and computers and phones, and the more expensive ones are not known for lasting long, and they are used for much shorter period of time than a cheap version of the same, despite the cheap one being hardier and longer lasting.
In reality I think there are more forces extracting money from the wealthy and their effete needs. My example is an airplane. The first class passengers are effectively paying 3x as much for the same outcome. The same is true for ovens and shoes and phones and cars.
And you're overestimating the cost of first class, at least in my experience, and that's kind of a lot of experience. I work in pre-sales engineering and travel a ton. My company won't pay for first class, but I'm 6'2" with ten screws in my spine and always pay for the upgrade, and it's usually between $200-$500, which has never tripled the price and almost never even so much as doubles it. You can sneer that I'm overpaying for nothing, but you try getting into a situation where sitting in a sardine can for four hours leaves you unable to stand up straight for 40 hours when you land. To me, it's worth it. The other option is I die with more zeros in my bank account, which is even more pointless. It's not like I'm failing to hit savings goals because of this.
Same thing applies with cars, by the way. I work from home when not traveling and don't drive very much, but I do own a luxury vehicle, and the difference between that any nearly any rental is pretty stark. It doesn't win on any reliability rating I'm aware of, but I've put less than 20,000 miles on it in 6 years of ownership and don't particularly care about the durability. I care about comfort and my own car is way the fuck more comfortable than the Nissans and Toyotas the rental agencies give me.
"Effete needs" is awfully sneering. I've lived on the back of an Abrams tank for weeks at a time in the past. I lived in the backseat of a 1994 Honda Civic and worked an overnight shift detailing theme park restrooms while putting myself through community college 25 years ago. I can live with little to no comfort if I actually need to, but given the choice and sufficient disposable income that it makes no difference, why the hell would I choose to be less comfortable just so I can brag to all the Bogleheads that my savings account has an extra hundred grand in it when I need five mil to retire anyway? Frugality doesn't push the needle much in the realm of travel and consumer goods. Cheap housing and a well-paying job is what pushes the needle.
I have nothing to back that up, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is a feature. If these luxury items are being used by the society (or at least in some circles) as a proxy for 'success'(ie having enough disposable money) it probably would be better if they we also quite fragile. This way you could distinguish between someone who received a expense gift vs someone that has money to always keep buying new items.
I'm not sure how real it this, but I've read somewhere that part of the appeal of expensive glassware was the fact that it was pretty fragile. Serving someone at your house with expensive glassware was a way to tell 'look how much money I've got'.
Just to be clear, I don't think we should get impressed/try to impress people by how much money someone has. But that is a practice as old as time, and it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.
Bought an expensive jacket. It's indestructible and cool and has good pockets. It's a motorcycle jacket. I didn't know I was buying an indestructible normal jacket.
Another way to consider it is through the lens of meritocracy. Consider two poker players of equal skill. Have them play each other until one has lost everything. Run this competition over and over, starting each player with a random stack. Over many trials, the player starting with the bigger stack will win in proportion to the ratio of their stack to their opponent's. Given a large enough ratio, this wealth advantage can begin to overcome greater and greater advantages in skill on the part of their opponent.
In the US, the ratio of the wealth of the top 10% to the wealth of the median has risen from 5.8x in 1963 to nearly 10x in 2022. In the same period, the ratio of the top 1% to the median has risen from 35x to 70x. And the effective advantage is probably much higher, as this calculation does not take into account liquidity: most of a median family's wealth is in their family home.
https://apps.urban.org/features/wealth-inequality-charts/
I do think it is still very true for tools though. It's nearly always worth getting decent ones, they nearly give better results or are easier to use and last so much longer.
The books also get better as I get older - I read them first as a teenager and many of the deeper ideas about the human condition went straight over my head.
The way the cult leader in Guards! Guards! manipulates his followers, to give just one example.
Consumer goods have dropped in price, which is good for offsetting inequality. I think the allegory still holds in some other areas (off the top of my head: healthcare spending and renting versus owning your primary residence).
That said, income inequality is probably the much bigger source of unfairness these days.
Some things are so cheap you can't mess it up. Some things are well-made because the manufacturer made a series of quality-conscious decisions that really added up.
The trouble is the middle, where consumers pay the most attention to branding to make decisions. At the extremes, though, brands matter less.
The poor man wants boots. The rich man wants boots. The man in the middle wants Timberlands or Harley-Davidsons or Doc Martins or whatever.
A good example would be modern safety razors. I was looking at alternatives to the King C Gillette and most of the generic branded ones performed similarly to the big three German brands.
It is not in any way addressing costly signalling, a completely unrelated behavior where purposefully wasteful and highly visible spending on lower-utility products elevates social status, making low-utility products more expensive and more common than equivalent high-quality products.
The premise is just false. The parable might be true when comparing, say, lower class vs lower-middle-class, or lower-middle-class to middle class. But the difference between upper class and middle class is not "spending less money." It's a vastly different net worth that comes from inheritance, building / running businesses, investments, etc.
The boots theory focuses on the costs, but the real difference comes from the income & net worth