THE VIMES BOOT INDEX OF POVERTY AND WEALTH INEQUALITY

Sat 29 Jan 2022, 01:08

Sorry about the upper case headlines for a couple of posts, they were copied/pasted off an email list and should have retyped to something less shouty looking ... Yes, Terry had what can only be described as a "rapier wit". Cliched I know but nothing else matches the ability to skewer.

Never really got into the books. It was the radio adaptations etc that really brought the true genius to life for me. Probably a failure of my imagination to "hear" the voices, unvoiced, on a black and white written page.

Fri 28 Jan 2022, 19:12

I have always loved this economic observation and try to buy the best shoes I can simply so as not to fall into the Vimes trap. Terry Pratchett really was a very sturt observer of our world. 

Wed 26 Jan 2022, 21:34

So skeweringly good I've just got to share this prime Terry Pratchettism:

THE VIMES BOOT INDEX OF POVERTY AND WEALTH INEQUALITY

#VimesBootsIndex.

The index, Monroe said, is named in honour of Pratchett’s creation Sam Vimes, who in the Discworld novel Men at Arms lays out the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. 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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/terry-pratchett-jack-monroe-vimes-boots-poverty-index

We should now decamp over to debate if anyone wants to air their views on this perspicacious economic indicator...