I previously wrote about Boots theory, the idea that "the rich are so rich because they spend less money". My one-sentence take is: I'm pretty sure rich people spend more money than poor people, and an observation can't be explained by a falsehood.

The popular explanation of the theory comes from Sam Vimes, a resident of Ankh-Morpork on the Discworld (which is carried on the backs of four elephants, who themselves stand on a giant turtle swimming through space). I claim that Sam Vimes doesn't have a solid understanding of 21st Century Earth Anglosphere¹ economics, but we can hardly hold that against him. Maybe he understands Ankh-Morpork economics?

To be clear, this is beside the point of my previous essay. I was talking about 21st Century Earth Anglosphere because that's what I know; and whenever I see someone bring up boots theory, they're talking about Earth (usually 21st Century Anglosphere) and not Ankh-Morpork. But multiple commentors brought it up.

Radmonger:

you need to understand Vimes as making a distinction not between the upper class and everyone else, but the middle class and the working class, between homeowners and renters.

This is completely wrong.

Ericf:

Vimes is thinking of the landed gentry when he is considering the "rich" - that would be the top 1%, not the tippy-top super-rich. Also, in a pseudo-medivial environment, the lifestyle inequality isn't as extreme as today's 50th % vs 1%.

This is closer, but still wrong.

WTFwhatthehell:

The quote in the book is about old money families vs the poor.

JC O:

It should be noted that Vimes was specifically thinking of real generational wealth in that area. He'd spent some time in the home of a Lady from oldest and wealthiest family in the city, and saw that everything was old there, solid, built to last forever. Generations of clothing tailored to the fit of the family members, and saved if it was still in good condition, and if it was not, the fabric would be reused to make something else. Even the garden tools were old. The family owned multiple homes in various cities and in the country, and they owned sizable portions of the real estate in the city.

These are basically right. (I'm not sure about all of JC O's specific details, and I'd strike "vs the poor".) Here's the extended quote (from Men at Arms):

She was, Vimes had been told, the richest woman in Ankh-Morpork. In fact she was richer than all the other women in Ankh-Morpork rolled, if that were possible, into one.

It was going to be a strange wedding, people said. Vimes treated his social superiors with barely concealed distaste, because the women made his head ache and the men made his fists itch. And Sybil Ramkin was the last survivor of one of the oldest families in Ankh. But they'd been thrown together like twigs in a whirlpool, and had yielded to the inevitable …

When he was a little boy, Sam Vimes had thought that the very rich ate off gold plates and lived in marble houses.

He'd learned something new: the very very rich could afford to be poor. Sybil Ramkin lived in the kind of poverty that was only available to the very rich, a poverty approached from the other side. Women who were merely well-off saved up and bought dresses made of silk edged with lace and pearls, but Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. She was so rich she lived in three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion; the rest of them were full of very expensive and very old furniture, covered in dust sheets.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

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.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

The point was that Sybil Ramkin hardly ever had to buy anything. The mansion was full of this big, solid furniture, bought by her ancestors. It never wore out. She had whole boxes full of jewellery which just seemed to have accumulated over the centuries. Vimes had seen a wine cellar that a regiment of speleologists could get so happily drunk in that they wouldn't mind that they'd got lost without trace.

Lady Sybil Ramkin lived quite comfortably from day to day by spending, Vimes estimated, about half as much as he did. But she spent a lot more on dragons.

So Vimes is specifically distinguishing between the tippy-top super-rich and the "merely well-off".

There's, um, a lot to unpack here. It's kind of fractally wrong.

Note that bits of this don't make sense when taken literally. "Lady Ramkin was so rich she could afford to stomp around the place in rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother. She was so rich she could afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches." These are not expensive things compared to the alternatives.

I think the subtext here is something like "Lady Ramkin is so rich she doesn't need to try to impress people". Looking back at Guards! Guards! (the first book featuring Vimes and Ramkin), that's spelled out more explicitly: "A couple of women were moving purposefully among the boxes. Ladies, rather. They were far too untidy to be mere women. No ordinary women would have dreamed of looking so scruffy; you needed the complete self-confidence that comes with knowing who your great-great-great-great-grandfather was before you could wear clothes like that."

I'm tempted to attribute this to personality (speculatively, "autism") rather than wealth. But I think it does rhyme with discussions of class that I've seen. (Roughly: rich people don't want you to mistake them for middle-class, so they visibly spend money. The people richer than them aren't in danger of being mistaken for middle-class, but they don't want you to think they're merely "rich", so they avoid visibly spending money.) Let's stipulate that the subtext is accurate, and move on.

The mention of wine is out of place. Rich people don't have access to durable wine that isn't depleted when drunk. If Sybil Ramkin has a lot of wine, it's not because someone made a relatively small up-front investment in wine and now there's no need to buy wine ever again. It's because someone spent a lot of money to buy a lot of wine, and it just hasn't all been drunk yet.

Next, note the contradiction here:

• Sybil Ramkin is rich because she doesn't spend much money;
• Sybil Ramkin doesn't spend much money except on dragons.

She does spend a lot of money! She spends it on dragons!² So that can't be why she's rich! An observation can't be explained by a falsehood.

Could it be true, if it weren't for the dragons?

("It's wet here. Might that be from the sprinkler?" "There is no sprinkler, so no." "Okay. But if there were a sprinkler, might that be why it's wet?")

No: I'm pretty sure "Sybil Ramkin doesn't spend much money on things other than dragons" is also false. Here are some snippets from Guards! Guards!:

Vimes had completely forgotten the Watch House. "It must have been badly damaged," he ventured.

"Totally destroyed," said Lady Ramkin. "Just a patch of melted rock. So I'm letting you have a place in Pseudopolis Yard."

"Sorry?"

"Oh, my father had property all over the city," she said. "Quite useless to me, really. So I told my agent to give Sergeant Colon the keys to the old house in Pseudopolis Yard. It'll do it good to be aired."

Lady Ramkin's coach rattled into the plaza making a noise like a roulette wheel and pounded straight for Vimes, stopping in a skid that sent it juddering around in a semi-circle and forced the horses either to face the other way or plait their legs.

An effort had been made to spruce up the Ramkin mansion, he noticed. The encroaching shrubbery had been pitilessly hacked back. An elderly workman atop a ladder was nailing the stucco back on the walls while another, with a spade, was rather arbitrarily defining the line where the lawn ended and the old flower beds had begun.

To his amazement the door was eventually opened by a butler so elderly that he might have been resurrected by the knocking.

A terrible premonition took hold of Vimes at the same moment as a gust of Captivation, the most expensive perfume available anywhere in Ankh-Morpork blew past him.

Vimes was vaguely aware of a brilliant blue dress that sparkled in the candlelight, a mass of hair the colour of chestnuts, a slightly anxious face that suggested that a whole battalion of skilled painters and decorators had only just dismantled their scaffolding and gone home, and a faint creaking that said underneath it all mere corsetry was being subjected to the kind of tensions more usually found in the heart of large stars.

He must have eaten, because servants appeared out of nowhere with things stuffed with other things, and came back later and took the plates away. The butler reanimated occasionally to fill glass after glass with strange wines. The heat from the candles was enough to cook by.

Ignore that she gives away a building: that's a one-off. Stipulate that all those servants and the expensive make-up and perfume are just another one-off to seduce Vimes: that's at least partly supported in the text, she normally does her own cooking. Ignore for some reason the two workmen. Pretend that her clothes and furniture and property need no upkeep at all - including the fancy-rather-than-practical clothes she sometimes wears throughout the book. Assume she drives the coach herself: it's a little weird that that's not mentioned, but there's no explicit mention of a driver either.

Even granting all that, she still needs to feed at least two horses! Horses, I am led to believe, are expensive. (And need a certain amount of time and attention, and do you think Sybil Ramkin spends her time taking care of horses when there are dragons to take care of?)

Do we further assume she just rents the horses every time she needs to use her coach? She walks, herself, down to someone else's stables. Then brings two horses back to her house, where she hooks them up to her coach. (Could she keep the coach at the stables? Not for free.) She drives her coach around herself, and when her business is concluded, she drops the coach back at her house, returns the horses, and walks home.

And why does she do this? If she was struggling, she might do it to save money. But she's not. She has property worth about seven million dollars a year.

I'm not willing to credit that she does this. But even if I was, how much does it cost to rent two horses for a few hours? It can't be cheap, and she does that multiple times in the book.

Plus, even when she's not explicitly trying to seduce him, she feeds Vimes bacon, fried potatoes, eggs, cake and bread pudding. Does Vimes get to eat these things often? ("Vimes thought about the meals at his lodgings. Somehow the meat was always gray, with mysterious tubes in it."³)

This is not a person who lives on less money than Sam Vimes, and it's hard to believe Sam Vimes - a policeman, someone for whom "noticing things" is part of the job description, who is engaged to this woman - is ignorant of the fact.

That's based on Guards! Guards! What if we completely ignore that book, and just look at Men at Arms?

Then he dried himself off as best he could and looked at the suit on the bed.

It had been made for him by the finest tailor in the city. Sybil Ramkin had a generous heart. She was a woman out for all she could give.

The suit was blue and deep purple, with lace on the wrists and at the throat. It was the height of fashion, he had been told.

Willikins had also laid out a dressing gown with brocade on the sleeves. He put it on, and wandered into his dressing room.

That was another new thing. The rich even had rooms for dressing in, and clothes to wear while you went into the dressing rooms to get dressed.

(Hardly "rubber boots and a tweed skirt that had belonged to her mother", or "three rooms in a thirty-four-roomed mansion".)

"His lordship … that is, her ladyship's father … he required to have his back scrubbed," said Willikins.

(i.e. the butler seems to be a regular fixture.)

And this wasn't one of the old hip bath, drag-it-in-front-of-the-fire jobs, no. The Ramkin mansion collected water off the roof into a big cistern, after straining out the pigeons, and then it was heated by an ancient geyser [footnote: "Who stoked the boiler."]

(i.e. that's another person who needs to be paid.)

Lady Sybil was devoting to her wedding all the directness of thought she'd normally apply to breeding out a tendency towards floppy ears in swamp dragons. Half a dozen cooks had been busy in the kitchens for three days. They were roasting a whole ox and doing amazing stuff with rare fruit.

(Sybil Ramkin is so rich she can afford to live on biscuits and cheese sandwiches. But sometimes she likes to slum it, and spend money as if she was merely well-off.)

Also, I didn't find a convenient quote for this, but she hosts a dinner for a bunch of other rich people and somehow I doubt she asks them to pay for it.

I can offer two defenses of Vimes here. One is that all of this is from from after the quote about boots theory, so - again, as long as we're pretending Guards! Guards! never happened - maybe he didn't know all this at the time, and then he'd still be embarrassingly wrong but a bit less embarrassingly wrong. Like, he'd be making up shit that defies common sense, and it's weird he knows so little about his fiancée, but he wouldn't be making up shit that contradicts what he's seen himself.

The stronger one is that it's revealed he gives away $14/month to the widows and orphans of coppers. That increases the apparent spending power of his $38/month. So when he thinks Sybil spends less than he does, she has more margin to do that in.⁴

But still. C'mon.

Might Vimes have been right in general, but wrong about Sybil Ramkin?

I don't think we see much else of the very very rich. We're told Vimes doesn't either. (Men at Arms: "He hadn't had much experience with the rich and powerful.") If there's any reason for Vimes to think "the rich spend less money than the poor" is true in any sense in Ankh-Morpork, I don't know it.

So why does Vimes think those thoughts? I don't have a Watsonian explanation. One possible Doylist explanation is that Pratchett put it in the book because he wanted to comment on 20th Century Earth Anglosphere economics, and didn't notice or didn't care that it didn't make sense in context.

…but as someone who thinks it also doesn't make sense for 20th Century Earth Anglosphere economics, I think there's a slightly different explanation.

I think boots theory is a very foolish thing for Sam to believe of Ankh-Morpork, or for Pratchett to believe of Earth. But for whatever reason, lots of people do seem to believe it of Earth.

Or more accurately, lots of people interpret the description of boots theory as pointing at something they believe. I think they're wrong about some combination of "what those words mean" and "what is true" (and different people are wrong in different ways), but the point right now is that this is a thing lots of people do.

And if lots of people make a certain mistake about Earth, then it's also plausible that Pratchett made the same mistake about Ankh-Morpork, and inserted that mistake into Vimes' head. Or that Pratchett didn't make that mistake, but knew that lots of other people do, and deliberately inserted it into Vimes' head knowing it was a mistake.

So some possible theories are:

• Pratchett, wanting to comment on Earth, had Vimes think thoughts about Earth but substituted in Ankh-Morpork. Pratchett didn't notice or didn't care that those thoughts were false when thought about Ankh-Morpork.

• Pratchett had Vimes think untrue thoughts about Ankh-Morpork, that Pratchett thought were true about Ankh-Morpork. He thought that for the same reason that lots of people think the same thoughts would be true of Earth.

• Pratchett had Vimes think untrue thoughts about Ankh-Morpork, that Pratchett knew were false about Ankh-Morpork; but Pratchett thought it was a believable mistake for Vimes to make, because Pratchett had seen people making the same mistake about Earth.

But ultimately I'll probably never know, and it doesn't really matter.