I think that Siderea’s section 2 is actually very important.
While it is possible that the monetary costs of the boots are structured such that buying good boots once is a better use of money than buying cheap ones every year, it is certainly the case that the time-costs of avoiding that big upfront expenditure are huge. The same is true for many of your examples. Being money-poor forces you to work up to your constraints on other dimensions (time, stress, etc) to survive without money—which in turn prevents you from using slack in those dimensions to stop being poor.
I will commend your notice of financial products being cheaper for the rich. This is, I think underrated as a source of inequality. It takes $3k to invest in the top tier of vanguard funds. It takes $1mil to become an accredited investor (possibly changing?). This incentivizes more savings behavior by the wealthy, it is literally cheaper/better. Those incentives can create a self reinforcing system. This is probably why we see lots of people giving advice along the lines of “fight every inch for the first $100k of net worth” (see e.g. charlie munger rule).
I think that Siderea’s section 2 is actually very important. While it is possible that the monetary costs of the boots are structured such that buying good boots once is a better use of money than buying cheap ones every year, it is certainly the case that the time-costs of avoiding that big upfront expenditure are huge. The same is true for many of your examples. Being money-poor forces you to work up to your constraints on other dimensions (time, stress, etc) to survive without money—which in turn prevents you from using slack in those dimensions to stop being poor.
I will commend your notice of financial products being cheaper for the rich. This is, I think underrated as a source of inequality. It takes $3k to invest in the top tier of vanguard funds. It takes $1mil to become an accredited investor (possibly changing?). This incentivizes more savings behavior by the wealthy, it is literally cheaper/better. Those incentives can create a self reinforcing system. This is probably why we see lots of people giving advice along the lines of “fight every inch for the first $100k of net worth” (see e.g. charlie munger rule).