It depends on how tightly you draw the analogy. If your takeaway from the boots-story is that buying better versions of commodity, manufactured goods like shoes, is a key part of the story, then this is pretty clearly false, if only because those goods, even in aggregate, don’t make up a large enough part of anyone’s budget.
If you broaden it to include expenditure and accumulation of all resources, not just money, then it’s mostly true. In a given year, a person might work a minimum wage job (have more money now, less money later—cheap boots) or attend a programming bootcamp (have less money now, more money later—expensive boots). They might eat cheap unhealthy food (have more money now, face problems later), or high-quality more expensive food (have less money now, fewer problems later). And so on, repeated across many kinds of decisions, and many kinds of resources.
It depends on how tightly you draw the analogy. If your takeaway from the boots-story is that buying better versions of commodity, manufactured goods like shoes, is a key part of the story, then this is pretty clearly false, if only because those goods, even in aggregate, don’t make up a large enough part of anyone’s budget.
If you broaden it to include expenditure and accumulation of all resources, not just money, then it’s mostly true. In a given year, a person might work a minimum wage job (have more money now, less money later—cheap boots) or attend a programming bootcamp (have less money now, more money later—expensive boots). They might eat cheap unhealthy food (have more money now, face problems later), or high-quality more expensive food (have less money now, fewer problems later). And so on, repeated across many kinds of decisions, and many kinds of resources.