Boots

2021-11-24T17:02:39Z

You may already be familiar with the Boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness. As an allegory about how much more expensive it is to be poor, it's fine, but I think there's another story of socioeconomic unfairness we can tell with boots as well.

Let's take a trio of characters: a cobbler, a tradesman, and an investor. The cobbler, looking to retire, has one last pair of boots for sale. Much like Pratchett's good boots, they're high-quality and marked at $50, the sort you could reasonably expect to last for a decade.

Our tradesman needs new boots and has one hundred dollars, and so goes in to the store to buy them. Seeing this, the investor offers to pay a little more, thus starting a bidding war with our tradesman.

Naturally, the investor wins the bidding war. He gets the boots for $101—just enough to price our tradesman out of the market. The cobbler is certainly happy—he got twice as much for the boots!

The investor, having no need for the boots himself and keen to spot an opportunity, offers to rent the boots to the tradesman, for a mere $5 per month.

The tradesman, still in need of boots, agrees.

One year in, our investor has netted $120 (a $19 profit!), and our tradesman is $70 poorer than he would have been had he been able to buy the boots himself.

Over the ten year lifetime of the boots, our investor has received $1,200 ($1,099 in profit!), and our tradesman is $1,150 poorer than he would have been had he been able to buy the boots.

Not bad for the investor, considering all they brought to the table was the ability to outbid our tradesman by a dollar. Our investor got richer not by being more clever or smarter than our tradesman, or even a better negotiator, but merely by being lucky enough to start with more money.

Pratchett's boots allegory is, in my mind, a comparison between poor and middle class, here we've made a comparison more between middle class and wealthy. I think it demonstrates that the rich don't get richer just because they can buy better boots, but because their starting advantages can be leveraged into vastly outsized results (the investor's $1 advantage netted over a 1000x return!). A small wealth gap can be expanded into a large wealth gap, and that process can be repeated ad nauseam until they own everything and the rest of us are merely tenants.

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The Disparate Musings of Pixie

Boots