It’s a very common example used to illustrate the plight of the poor.
Boots, you see, are a required piece of equipment for anybody working a blue-collar job or other forms of manual labor. The boots protect your feet, keep you warm, and provide essential traction on sometimes slick surfaces where you may be carrying hefty objects. Suffice it to say, it is likely that a poor person needs boots. But boots aren’t cheap. Thus, the math of poverty ensures that a poor person stays as they are—poor.
A good boot—one made with high-quality materials that can be expected to last many years—is expensive. Far too expensive for a person without the luxury of discretionary income to afford. So the poor worker must instead turn to the cheap boots. The ones made with poor-quality materials and can only be expected to last one season, maybe two if you’re exceptionally lucky. What this, of course, amounts to is that a poor person may spend $50 on a pair of cheap boots while a wealthy man spends $150 on the expensive boots. But while those expensive boots will last five years, those cheap boots will need to be purchased again next year, and again the year after that. In three years, the poor man has spent the equivalent of the expensive boots. In five years, an additional $100.
The reasoning goes that this math is what keeps the poor poor and the rich rich. The poor person is forced to spend additional money over the long-run because they cannot afford to do so up front.
This is Sam Vimes’s Boots Theory, developed in the book series Discworld by Terry Pratchett.
It is as evocative as it is mistaken.
The problem is not necessarily in the simple arithmetic, but the framing. This story smuggles an implicit prescription—what is needed is for poor people to somehow access the upfront cost of the high-quality boots, or for boots to somehow be both cheap and high-quality. Neither is possible, nor desirable.
Expensive products are made with expensive materials. Those materials are expensive not only because they have many uses, but because they have many highly desirable uses. Take those boots, for example. The leather that makes the upper can be used to make other articles of clothing like jackets or pants; it can be used for gloves, or furniture, or bags. The rubber that makes the sole can be used for tires, electrical insulation, hoses, or seals, and even industrial machinery. With only so much leather and rubber to go around, we would surely not wish the highest quality units to be used up by the boots industry alone.
So the individuals who want the highest quality of material in their boots must convince the manufacturer to spend that high-quality leather and rubber in the production of boots rather than of those other important and profitable uses. They must be willing to pay that manufacturer a higher price.
But while the price gap between the boots is not an injustice to be corrected, it’s simply the trade-off of directing scarce materials from one use to another; that reality says little about what the poor man should do about it. Indeed, there are poor people who very much need boots, but that $100 difference in price between the cheap boots and premium boots is $100 they can spend on other necessities—things like nourishment, transportation, and potentially the monthly rent.
We cannot, and should not, force a poor person to sacrifice an immediate need for future savings. We cannot force a poor person to take on immediate risk in pursuit of a deferred benefit they may or may not desire in comparison to that which they gave up in the present.
Consider what the $150 boot actually demands of the man who cannot easily spare it. He must give up something certain and immediate, this month’s rent, this week’s groceries, the bus fare that gets him to the job in the first place, in exchange for $100 of savings that only materializes if the next five years go according to plan. But poverty is rarely so cooperative. Should that poor man be laid off tomorrow, fall ill, or have car trouble, he’ll have $100 fewer dollars with which to absorb the hardship. The rich man’s advantage isn’t merely that he can afford the better boots; it’s that he can afford to be wrong. He can absorb a bad week without missing a meal. The poor man cannot.
This is why the cheap boot is so valuable. By spending $50 rather than $150, the poor man keeps his resources available—free to be redirected toward whatever emergency or opportunity actually materializes, rather than locked up in a pair of boots he’s betting will still fit his life five years from now. The premium boot only pays off if nothing goes wrong. The cheap boot pays off immediately, and lets him decide again next season whether his circumstances can bear the bigger expense.
The cheaply-made boots are expressly the reason why so many manual laborers have all ten of their toes. By using lesser materials, the manufacturer doesn’t need so much convincing to produce and sell the boots. By meeting people at a price point they are willing and able to purchase those boots for, more poor people actually have boots on their feet without losing sleep over the cost.
The Boots Theory of socio-economic unfairness is woefully misguided. The poor man isn’t forced to spend money he does not have as compared to the rich man; the poor man is instead able to acquire an essential piece of equipment for a price that allows him to satisfy other needs in his life. Those cheap boots keep a man’s feet dry for a season or two, and his stomach full. Yes, the rudimentary math may be sound, but the analysis ignores human action. It asks a poor man already on the margins of society to trade flexibility for a gamble he cannot afford to lose, and calls him foolish when he declines.
None of this is particular to boots, nor is it a failure of society. That the poor man is merely able to choose is a fact worth celebrating. It is why the standard of living in the developed world has risen so dramatically since the Industrial Revolution. Materials, technologies, and creature comforts that would never have been accessible to the masses at their “premium” price could be produced more cheaply by innovative manufacturing and the use of lesser materials, meeting the needs of all walks of consumers at once. This means that refrigeration now takes place in your home kitchen, not just in five-star restaurants and seaside estates. Clothing, technology, foodstuffs, you name it, it’s likely available to you at a variety of price points for a variety of people to access and without the immediate financial risk.
So the next time you buy that budget item, cheer up. Is it not a wonderful thing for most everybody to be able to buy a pair of boots?
