I think you’ve had her buy an extra pair of boots.
Ah, true. So, $239.41, at the end.
(Of course, this all assumes that the cheap boots don’t get more expensive over the course of 14 years. Siderea does say that she spends $20 each year on boots, but that’s hard to take seriously over a decade-plus period…)
We might be talking about poverty at different orders of magnitude, and you might be writing off a lot of failures to purchase efficiently as “skill issue”… but being poor in skills and the capacity to hone them is, itself, a form of poverty.
Once we’ve redefined “poverty” to mean something other than poverty, we can obviously make all sorts of claims about it. Being “poor in skills and the capacity to hone them” can be the cause of poverty. Notice how this is a different cause from the one that “boots theory” posits.
As I’ve written, I have personally experienced my family being quite poor. Buying a roll of toilet paper instead of a whole package, or buying just one meal’s worth of food instead of a week’s worth, is definitely a “skill issue”.
Being poor is unpleasant in many ways. It being “expensive” is not one of them.
In another world, Siderea buys $20 boots and invests $260. …
I think that your calculation is a bit off. After a year, she’ll have $258.20 (i.e., ($260 * 1.07) − $20). After two years, $256.27 (i.e., ($258.20 * 1.07) − $20). And so on. After 14 years, she’ll have $219.41.
Still better than buying the expensive boots—in purely financial terms.
(Inflation-adjustment is another important point, of course. That $200 in 2005 would be $265 in 2018 dollars.)
In short, yes, this is indeed a very poor example—ironic, as it’s a real-life version of the original example!
(This is also often missing when people talk about buying versus renting. Yes, the mortgage is often lower than rent, and house value is likely higher at the end, but you gave up investing your deposit. How do those effects compare? Probably depends on time and place.)
This is precisely what made renting come out far ahead, in my aforementioned calculation. (And this is without even considering the time value of money.)
buying poor quality food and then having to pay for medical care
I have seen this sort of thing mentioned, but I don’t think that it works.
Let’s set aside for the moment the somewhat tenuous and indirect connection between the food you eat today, and the medical care you will require, some years down the line. (If you end up with heart disease in ten years because you’ve been eating poorly, surely this can’t be any part of the reason why you’re poor today—that would require some sort of anti-temporal causation!)
And let’s also set aside this business of “having to pay for medical care”. (Even in the United States—famously the land of medical bills—the poorest people are also the ones who are eligible for Medicaid. You’re more likely to have to pay for medical care if you’re sufficiently well-off to eat well than if you’re very poor!)
Let’s instead consider just this notion that there’s a causal connection between being poor and eating poor quality food—and specifically, the sort of food that contributes to poor health outcomes—because you can’t afford healthy food.
There was a time when my own family was very poor. (We’d just arrived in the United States as brand-new immigrants, with little more than the proverbial clothes on our backs; my mother had to work two, or sometimes three, jobs just to pay the rent; even my grandfather, then already of retirement age, got a job delivering newspapers.) As I would routinely help my grandmother with grocery shopping, I was very well acquainted with how much it cost to feed a family on a very tight budget, what sorts of purchasing decisions needed to be made, etc.
And what I can tell you is that the sort of food we ate was not cheap-but-unhealthy. Rather, it was cheap-but-healthy. What was missing was luxuries and variety—not nutrition! You can, in fact, have a healthy (and even tasty) diet on a tight budget. I have extensive personal experience with this.
The difference between my family and the poor people who buy junk food is much more cultural than anything else. Specifically, the missing ingredient is cultural transmission of knowledge of, and expertise in, preparation of nutritious, satisfying food under severe financial constraints. My family’s cultural background contains a tremendous amount of accumulated wisdom on this topic. Someone who, for whatever reason, lacks access to such cultural metis, will be severely disadvantaged in this regard. But this has nothing to do with poverty as such.
buying a cheap car that costs more in repairs
This, too, is a dubious example. The key word here is “more”. More than what?
Do you mean:
(1) “Car A (which costs less), over a period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling X; car B (which costs more), over the same period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling Y; X > Y”
If so, then notice that this does not support “boots theory”! But perhaps you instead mean:
(2) “Car A (which costs less), over a period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling X; car B (which costs more), over the same period of N years, requires repairs of cost totaling Y; (cost[A] + X) > (cost[B] + Y)”
This might support “boots theory”. But is it plausible?
The car I currently drive was bought used, at a cost of ~$13,000, in 2016. Since then I have spent ~$2,000 on repairs (not counting inspections and oil changes, which will apply to everyone equally), for a total of ~$15,000.
In 2016, I could instead have purchased a much cheaper used car, for ~$3,000. Suppose that this had been all I could afford. For this to have turned out to be a “boots theory”-supporting example, I’d then have to spend ~$12,000, in the 9-year period since, on repairs.
Seems improbable. Indeed, at that point, I could just buy another car. I could buy a new car four times! (And notice that this scenario would then still not support “boots theory”.)
payday loans
This is a complicated topic, and I am not qualified to opine confidently on it. I will say only that it seems like a highly non-central example of the alleged phenomenon.
paying rent instead of buying and building equity
It’s interesting that you should mention this. I currently rent an apartment. At one point, some years ago, I realized that my financial situation was such that, if I wanted to, I could buy a condo or co-op. I recalled the received wisdom that owning is better than renting, and looked into my options. After doing the math, I concluded that, on a time horizon of 10, 20, 30, or 40 years[1], renting unambiguously came out ahead—and not just slightly ahead, but way ahead. Buying an apartment would have amounted to setting a big pile of money on fire for no reason whatsoever. The received wisdom was diametrically wrong.
(One can make all sorts of objections to this, along the lines of “but isn’t this just because of the crazy real estate market in NYC”, or “but isn’t this just because of historically-unusual economic situation X which currently obtains”, etc. But what is the use of that? The reality is what it is.)
buying consumable goods instead of investments
Investing is certainly useful, if you can do it. But what in the world does that have to do with “boots theory”, or with the “phenomenon where people spend a lot to buy things that are poor quality instead of longer lasting higher quality things”?
Your “instead of” in the “consumable goods instead of investments” clause is fallacious, I think. Poor people spend some amount of money on consumable goods, have no money left over, and thus do not invest. Rich people spend more money on consumable goods than poor people, still have money left over after spending more, and invest the remainder. This is unambiguously not consistent with “boots theory”.
working jobs instead of building passive income
This, too, seems like a non sequitur. You can only be “building passive income” if you already have a lot of money. You can’t get there by spending less money. What’s more, if you do have a lot of money (which you can invest, thus securing a source of passive income), nothing prevents you from also working a job, and earning additional money. Indeed, plenty of people do just that. Many don’t, of course—but this is not because it would somehow end up costing them more money than not working! Rather, it’s because they (quite reasonably) don’t want to work if they don’t have to.
There is still a real phenomenon where people spend a lot to buy things that are poor quality instead of longer lasting higher quality things.
Well, I should like to see some examples. So far, our tally of actual examples of this alleged phenomenon seems to still be zero. All the examples proffered thus far… aren’t.
Or longer, really—but “longer” is likely to be a moot point, for various reasons. ↩︎
Boots theory captures the “being poor is expensive” element that’s true in Ankh-Morkpork and also true on Earth
It certainly is not true on Earth.
As I have written:
It sounds so wise and worldly! And it’s also complete bullshit.
Because let’s say that I want a pair of sneakers (i.e., shoes that are comfortable and won’t hurt my feet) that won’t wear out in a couple of years, so that I can buy them once and wear them for ten years. Why, I’d have to pay five times the price of an ordinary pair of sneakers! But then I’d have my ten-year shoes. Right?
WRONG.
Oh, sure, I can buy a pair of sneakers that costs five times what normal sneakers cost. And they’ll last for just about as long—at best!
And it’s the same with cookware, it’s the same with computer hardware, it’s the same with a whole lot of things.
The reason why people mistakenly come to believe this “boots theory” is not that more expensive stuff lasts longer, out of proportion to the price difference—but rather, that stuff purchased in the past, whose inflation-adjusted price was substantially higher than the current price of the current cheap goods, lasts longer. But this is not because of the price difference.
It’s because they don’t make ’em like they used to.
I’ve become so reliant on a GPS that using maps to direct myself feels like a foreign concept. Google Maps, Waze, whatever, if it’s outside of my neighbourhood, I’m punching in the address before I head out. Sometimes I notice the GPS taking slower routes or sending me the wrong way as I get out of a parking lot, but regardless, I just follow its directions, because I don’t have to think. Though I know, without this convenient tool, I’d be lost (literally).
If you recognize this problem, why not stop using a GPS? Navigating without a GPS is not difficult. You could regain this skill easily. What’s stopping you?
Given how spectacularly harmful psychedelic drugs can often be, I think we’d better hope that there isn’t any such “sensory-input-only” method of inducing psychedelic states.
your proposal would have the displayed image revert back to the first frame on
mouseleaveIIUC
Yes, correct.
I was hoping to have the hover-mode animation seamlessly pause and unpause
This SO question has several answers, all of which seem like reasonable solutions to me (if I were doing this, I’d try them all and pick the most performant one, most likely).
Genghis Khan was, in fact, elected: