Honestly, the rich get rich because poor people make stupid decisions, such as buying brand new cars, for example. Or credit cards. Rich people love that credit cards exist.
No, the rich get rich because they own and control the Capital, and through it steal the Value created by Workers. Credit Cards are an example of Finance Capital at play, debt entrapment.
I’m not going to down vote you, but I strongly disagree. Wealthy begets wealth. Poverty digs the hole deeper. This has been the pattern for longer than any of us have been alive.
You don’t have money? Congrats, you need to take out loans for any important purchase, and get terrible interest rates on those loans. You can live in a crappy apartment and drive a crappy car, but those still cost significant money when you have none. Work two or three jobs even. The minimum wage have been raised in 15 years, so what you earn is barely enough to scrape by, assuming you don’t have any health problems.
You come from money? Make investments, but rental properties, get your education without financially crippling you for years. You come from lots of money? Corner the market, influence Congress to pass bills that protect your assets and punish others.
You definitely have a point. Some people are definitely stuck in a vicious cycle, but others really do choose to put themselves their. I would say most people have the opportunity to live below their means and choose not to.
Taken seriously, it is misleading because it treats poverty and affluence like god-given eternal conditions. And considering Vimes ancestor being mentioned quite often, i’m pretty sure it was not to be taken seriously.
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.
Where on the Disc did you get ‘god-given external conditions’ from that?
And knowing how Sir Terry stood on social issues, it was indeed supposed to be taken seriously. He often used his books to speak out about problems in society.
Where on the Disc did you get ‘god-given external conditions’ from that?
In the premise and in the presented alternative. As you noticed, the boots, while being literal in the story, are also a metaphor, but for a metaphor on the broad topic as poverty and affluence, it’s exremely reductive, especially for someone who is not a medieval cop with a meddle-age crisis of nihilism and rampant alcoholism (for whom it’s understandable) but a XXI century reader. It does not present anything else for you to make it an universal theory to proclaim with smugness. It’s also untrue because price don’t necessary, or even that much often, equal quality.
Also Vimes was a cop and a lib, regardless what he babbled to himself, his job and purpose was to keep the status quo. And Pratchet, however good his books are was also a lib and his thoughts about revolution never came even an inch further than the usual liberal propaganda about revolution eating its children, lesser evil is dope and status quo is good, what he promoted was a old bankrupted “capitalism with human face” and other liberal ideals. Just he was intelligent enough to place his stories in the medieval like world where the capitalism is only emerging and this is still undeniably progressive.
By “not to be taken seriously” i meant that Pratchet was not a 10 year old and even in his liberalism knew society, politics and economics are much more complcated than to make universal theory based on “price = quality”
The Boots theory is simple: rich people can buy better quality goods that last longer, so they spend less money in the long run. For modern audiences and situations, one can also add loans vs buying outright.
It is more expensive to be poor.
As far as Pratchett’s writing, if that’s what you got out of it, then you may have read his works, but you understood nothing in them. And for that I pity you, because he has many great lessons in them as well as great, very human stories, if you care to pay attention.
Corporate propaganda and advertising pushing a narrative that being happy is having more shit than the people around you is hard to resist if your parents/role models don’t explain to you that the crap on the screens and on the paper is just there because it convinces people to spend money they don’t really have on shit they don’t really need.
Honestly, the rich get rich because poor people make stupid decisions, such as buying brand new cars, for example. Or credit cards. Rich people love that credit cards exist.
No, the rich get rich because they own and control the Capital, and through it steal the Value created by Workers. Credit Cards are an example of Finance Capital at play, debt entrapment.
I’m not going to down vote you, but I strongly disagree. Wealthy begets wealth. Poverty digs the hole deeper. This has been the pattern for longer than any of us have been alive.
You don’t have money? Congrats, you need to take out loans for any important purchase, and get terrible interest rates on those loans. You can live in a crappy apartment and drive a crappy car, but those still cost significant money when you have none. Work two or three jobs even. The minimum wage have been raised in 15 years, so what you earn is barely enough to scrape by, assuming you don’t have any health problems.
You come from money? Make investments, but rental properties, get your education without financially crippling you for years. You come from lots of money? Corner the market, influence Congress to pass bills that protect your assets and punish others.
You definitely have a point. Some people are definitely stuck in a vicious cycle, but others really do choose to put themselves their. I would say most people have the opportunity to live below their means and choose not to.
I’d recommend looking up the Vimes Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness. It costs a lot more money to be poor.
Taken seriously, it is misleading because it treats poverty and affluence like god-given eternal conditions. And considering Vimes ancestor being mentioned quite often, i’m pretty sure it was not to be taken seriously.
What? No it doesn’t.
Where on the Disc did you get ‘god-given external conditions’ from that?
And knowing how Sir Terry stood on social issues, it was indeed supposed to be taken seriously. He often used his books to speak out about problems in society.
In the premise and in the presented alternative. As you noticed, the boots, while being literal in the story, are also a metaphor, but for a metaphor on the broad topic as poverty and affluence, it’s exremely reductive, especially for someone who is not a medieval cop with a meddle-age crisis of nihilism and rampant alcoholism (for whom it’s understandable) but a XXI century reader. It does not present anything else for you to make it an universal theory to proclaim with smugness. It’s also untrue because price don’t necessary, or even that much often, equal quality.
Also Vimes was a cop and a lib, regardless what he babbled to himself, his job and purpose was to keep the status quo. And Pratchet, however good his books are was also a lib and his thoughts about revolution never came even an inch further than the usual liberal propaganda about revolution eating its children, lesser evil is dope and status quo is good, what he promoted was a old bankrupted “capitalism with human face” and other liberal ideals. Just he was intelligent enough to place his stories in the medieval like world where the capitalism is only emerging and this is still undeniably progressive.
By “not to be taken seriously” i meant that Pratchet was not a 10 year old and even in his liberalism knew society, politics and economics are much more complcated than to make universal theory based on “price = quality”
The Boots theory is simple: rich people can buy better quality goods that last longer, so they spend less money in the long run. For modern audiences and situations, one can also add loans vs buying outright.
It is more expensive to be poor.
As far as Pratchett’s writing, if that’s what you got out of it, then you may have read his works, but you understood nothing in them. And for that I pity you, because he has many great lessons in them as well as great, very human stories, if you care to pay attention.
Corporate propaganda and advertising pushing a narrative that being happy is having more shit than the people around you is hard to resist if your parents/role models don’t explain to you that the crap on the screens and on the paper is just there because it convinces people to spend money they don’t really have on shit they don’t really need.