Today, millions of people who live in poverty know the one inescapable fact about their situation—it’s expensive being poor. While this saying may seem counterintuitive at first, it does make a lot of sense. Compared to those who live in comfort, underprivileged people often have to spend more money just to survive.
Terry Pratchett, an English fantasy writer, had a great observation for one of the many reasons why it’s more costly to be poor than to be wealthy. Although the author is no longer with us, his work still gets shared on his official Twitter account. In a recent post, Pratchett’s estate tweeted the “Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness” from his 1993 book “Men At Arms.”
The theory comes from a simple piece of dialogue where Vimes, who was born into poverty and became a member of the nobility, observes the habits of the rich. He explained that one reason the rich keep getting richer “was because they managed to spend less money”. Read on for the full story.
Author Terry Pratchett’s story about two pairs of boots explains how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer
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While Terry Pratchett’s work can transport us into a magical world, it also carries insightful views of the class divide and social injustice. According to Guardian, the Pratchett estate tweeted this quote in support of Jack Monroe’s campaign to draw up an inflation index to track basic food prices.
Monroe, a British food writer, journalist, and activist, has “used the idea drawn from Discworld novels to register the disproportionate effect price rises have on the lower-paid” and called it the “Vimes Boots Index”. It all started when she heard on the radio that the “cost of living is rising a further 5%.” She tweeted that the index that’s used for this calculation “grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least.”
“The system by which we measure the impact of inflation is fundamentally flawed—it completely ignores the reality and the REAL price rises for people on minimum wages, zero-hour contracts, food bank clients, and millions more,” she added.
So the activist compiled a new price index that is meant to “document the disappearance of the budget lines and the insidiously creeping prices of the most basic versions of essential items at the supermarket.” And, at the very least, would show the reality millions of people face every day.
Later on, Jack Monroe shared that the “Vimes Boots Index” already started to make a difference: “Delighted to be able to tell you that the ONS [Office for National Statistics] have just announced that they are going to be changing the way they collect and report on the cost of food prices and inflation to take into consideration a wider range of income levels and household circumstances.”
Terry Pratchett’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner. “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work,” she said.
“One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch—a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him. Some of which he’s had a hand in perpetrating in the past.”
Rhianna Pratchett continued: “Vimes’s musing on how expensive it is to be poor via the cost of boots was a razor-sharp evaluation of socio-economic unfairness. And one that’s all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and are cast adrift from protection and empathy.”
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