I don’t think Pratchett was seriously advancing the theory as an explanation for why some people are much richer than others. I’m not sure he was even intending to represent Vimes as doing that, even though that’s what the words literally say. Vimes is a policeman, not a logician or a philosopher, and this is just a passing thought. And Pratchett was a writer (writing humorous fantasy rather than, say, political philosophy or economics), and plausibly prioritizing vividity over precise accuracy.
Vimes, in-story, is obviously aware that Sybil Ramkin has a vast amount of inherited wealth that far outweighs any benefit she might have obtained from being able to spend less by buying higher-quality things with higher up-front costs.
So when you protest that people
don’t seem to realize that the thing they’re quoting is saying “rich people spend less money than poor people, and that’s why they’re rich”
I think you’re being unfair. Yes, that’s what the thing they’re quoting literally says. No, that’s not sufficient reason to think that it’s exactly what Pratchett’s character meant, still less to think that it’s exactly the point Pratchett himself was meaning to make.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that (1) Pratchett’s actual opinion on this is roughly what the Wikipedia article says, (2) to whatever extent he thought it through explicitly, Pratchett’s intention was to describe Vimes as having the same idea in a crude, very concrete, not highly analysed form, and (3) he worded it the way he did because he was aiming for something vivid and punchy, not because that wording was the most precise expression of the actual idea. And (4) I am very confident that Pratchett did not in fact think that being able to spend less for this sort of reason is the cause or even one of the main causes of rich people’s richness, and fairly confident that if you’d asked him what he imagined Vimes as thinking he would have said Vimes didn’t really think that either.
Similarly, when in Carpe Jugulum Granny Weatherwax tells a hapless young Omnian priest “sin is treating people as things, and that’s all there is to it”[1] I don’t think we should actually take Pratchett to be seriously claiming, or even to be representing E.W. as seriously claiming, that there is literally no other moral principle besides “don’t treat people as things”.
[1] Those aren’t the exact words, I’m not sure it’s in Carpe Jugulum, and I’m not 100% sure the other party is an Omnian priest. But, in each case, close enough.
In terms of your earlier article: I am very confident that Pratchett’s actual opinion was much more “level 1” than “level 3″ despite the literal sense of the words he described Vimes’s thoughts with.
(It’s definitely true that some people who talk about “boots theory” mean something different from what Pratchett meant, but that always happens.)
Similarly, when in Carpe Jugulum Granny Weatherwax tells a hapless young Omnian priest “sin is treating people as things, and that’s all there is to it”[1] I don’t think we should actually take Pratchett to be seriously claiming, or even to be representing E.W. as seriously claiming, that there is literally no other moral principle besides “don’t treat people as things”.
“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”
“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”
“But they starts with thinking about people as things...”
(And yes, it’s Carpe Jugulum.)
I feel like you’re saying “okay, but she’s not really saying....” And the E.W. in my head is glaring at you because she just explained that yes she is really saying.
So, first of all, she begins by saying “sin is …” but when pushed a bit she falls back to “that’s where it starts”. And, second, if e.g. you cornered her and said “look, here’s a case where someone did something awful to someone else, not because he treated her like a thing but because he treated her like a person but one much less important than himself” the answer would be more like “well, that’s just a watered down version of treating people as things” or “yes, fair enough, but it’s very much the same sort of failure” than like “if he didn’t literally treat her as a thing, then he wasn’t doing anything wrong”.
To be clear, I am not saying that what E.W. says to the priest is wrong, I’m saying it’s not intended to be taken strictly literally, just as the great majority of things people say aren’t intended to be taken strictly literally. And I think the same thing applies to Vimes saying “the reason that the rich were so rich was that they managed to spend less money”.
So my read is “E.W. is actually claiming that sin is just treating people like things. She doesn’t want the listener to tone it down to some less absolute position.”
Maybe the listener gets closer to the truth by doing that. But it’s not what E.W. intends. If the listener gets closer to the truth by adding nuance, then E.W. loses points both for being wrong and for interrupting to say “no nuance!” If E.W. herself tones it down while saying “no nuance!” then, well, let’s notice this and let it affect how seriously we take her in future.
(This doesn’t apply to Vimes, who was never challenged; or to Pratchett, who should not in general be assumed to endorse things his characters say.)
Vimes, in-story, is obviously aware that Sybil Ramkin has a vast amount of inherited wealth that far outweighs any benefit she might have obtained from being able to spend less by buying higher-quality things with higher up-front costs.
Vimes obviously should be aware of this. I’m not super confident that the passage in question was written with Pratchett being aware of Vimes being aware of it.
So when you protest that people
don’t seem to realize that the thing they’re quoting is saying “rich people spend less money than poor people, and that’s why they’re rich”
I think you’re being unfair. Yes, that’s what the thing they’re quoting literally says. No, that’s not sufficient reason to think that it’s exactly what Pratchett’s character meant, still less to think that it’s exactly the point Pratchett himself was meaning to make.
Oh, I don’t think people should think that either Vimes or Pratchett believed the literal words.
But I’d still like if they noticed that the literal words say something very different than their interpretation.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that (1) Pratchett’s actual opinion on this is roughly what the Wikipedia article says,
Why are you pretty sure of this? (And, do you mean the definition that the Wikipedia article gives, along with examples that don’t match the definition; or do you mean that Pratchett would think of Wikipedia’s examples as being examples of the concept, and Wikipedia’s definition is unnecessarily limited?)
Why do you think Pratchett was thinking something similiar to Wikipedia, and not instead
(Guess: perhaps you think some of these are “close enough to Wikipedia that it’s fine to use one name to refer to the vague cluster”, and the rest are “obviously silly”?)
(It’s definitely true that some people who talk about “boots theory” mean something different from what Pratchett meant, but that always happens.)
I think it happens more with “boots theory” than other things, and I think “~no one interprets it literally” is a large part of that. (“Non-literal interpretations” is a much broader space than “literal interpretations”.)
My intent was to talk about how it’s interpreted by internet culture, not how Pratchett originally intended. E.g. I quote quora users discussing it, and only briefly nod towards what Pratchett might have meant. In hindsight I think I should have been clearer about that. There’s a few comments (here and on LW) saying what Sam Vimes would have been thinking, and while that’s interesting, it doesn’t seem super relevant to me and I’m not sure if the commenters think it’s particularly relevant or just an interesting aside. (I certainly don’t object to interesting asides!) My position is something like...
One can reasonably ask what Sam Vimes believed; and what Pratchett himself believed; and whether the literal words are a good description of those beliefs; and if not, whether that was deliberate on Pratchett’s part; and what was actually true of Ankh-Morpork; and so on. But while those are reasonable questions to ask, none of them seem super relevant to how boots theory is used today. (Some of them might bear on how we think of Pratchett as a writer or thinker, but I’m not trying to judge Pratchett.) When it was originally written, it was written in service of storytelling. When it’s used today, it’s used to explain an economic phenomenon, so it needs to satisfy different constraints. If it does badly at that, which I think it does for reasons explained in the post, then it shouldn’t be used for that purpose.
But I’d still like if they noticed that the literal words say something very different than their interpretation.
I think most people most of the time don’t particularly pay attention to what the literal words say. Sometimes that’s a serious failing. It can bite you pretty hard if the words were written with careful attention to the literal meaning and you’re trying to get their consequences right. But when (as, I think, in this case) that’s not how the words got the way they did, I find it hard to be greatly bothered when people attend to the underlying meaning rather than the strict literal meaning.
Why are you pretty sure of this?
I’m not sure I can give much of an answer to that. Handwavily: because that sort of opinion seems both (1) an opinion Pratchett might plausibly have had and (2) one that might plausibly have led him to write what he did, whereas e.g. the literal reading that you call “level 3” in your earlier post does a bit better on #2 but to my mind much worse on #1.
And, do you mean [...]
I mean the definition at the start of the Wikipedia article. And I think
that definition doesn’t attempt to nail the theory down as specifically explaining “why the rich are rich” or “why the poor stay poor”; I think G.S.W. is offering not a different definition of “boots theory” from Wikipedia’s but a different view from the literal one of what phenomena the (same) theory is explaining
the same goes for “why being poor sucks so badly”
“buying in bulk” is related but I don’t find it plausible that either Pratchett or Vimes had that specifically in mind since the single example Vimes gives is of something that isn’t buying in bulk—but the idea “if you can afford to spend more then you can spend less in the long run” covers both buying in bulk and buying higher-quality items so this is definitely part of the same “vague cluster”
Ericf’s thing about assets versus income has some relationship to what I take Vimes/Pratchett to have been saying but I think that if Vimes/Pratchett had been thinking specifically of that then again Vimes would have picked a different example (something like Sybil never needing to buy furniture because she has a house full of high-quality furniture that’s been in the family for centuries, perhaps)
DirectedEvolution’s take isn’t really (I think) disagreeing about what Vimes’s theory says, he’s just saying that it’s stupid and so Pratchett can’t really believe anything like it is right. (I think that even if that’s so Vimes’s theory is still one of “socioeconomic unfairness” and if Pratchett is being ironic in using those words it’s not because they misrepresent what Vimes is thinking.) I don’t have very strong opinions as to how good a theory Pratchett actually thought it was, but I think it’s unlikely that he thought it as bad as DE does.
jimrandomh’s generalization doesn’t purport to be what either Vimes or Pratchett meant, I think. He’s proposing a Generalized Boots Theory for which something like your “level 3” might be true.
I’m not sure whether gbear605 is actually saying that Vimes or Pratchett really meant his (different) Generalized Boots Theory—his literal words do imply that, but just as with Pratchett himself I question whether he would endorse that if pushed—but this too seems like a reasonable generalization of the Vimes/Pratchett theory
so, broadly, yes I think most of these are in the same “vague cluster”; for the most part I wouldn’t myself endorse saying “boots theory is …” about them but doing so doesn’t seem entirely perverse to me.
When it’s used today, it’s used to explain an economic phenomenon [...] If it does badly at that, which I think it does [...]
I’m not sure what explanation of what economic phenomenon you’re saying “boots theory” is today used to mean. Your examples suggest that in fact it’s used in a wide variety of ways to describe and/or explain a wide variety of things.
Your earlier article (unlike this one) seems mostly to be claiming that the theory is generally offered as an account of why rich people are rich. I agree that it isn’t in fact a good account of that. I am not at all persuaded that people talking about “boots theory” commonly mean to claim that it is.
This article (unlike the earlier one) seems mostly to be pointing out that people use the term in a wide variety of ways—mostly not claiming that being able to buy better-quality stuff is why rich people are rich. (Indeed, above you suggest that they haven’t even noticed that interpretation of the theory, which is pretty much opposite to the position in your earlier post,) I haven’t myself made any serious attempt to survey how the term is used in practice. It may well be as varied as you say. My purely-handwavy-anecdotal impression is that most uses of the term are in the “vague cluster” that can be decently described with the words at the start of the Wikipedia article, and (like you, IIUC) I think that many such uses—corresponding to your “level 1″ or less frequently your “level 2”—are saying something that’s fairly clearly true.
I think it’s very reasonable not to be greatly bothered by this.
I do think it matters a little bit. If people are talking about “boots theory” and don’t mean the same thing, they’re going to communicate less well than if they unpack their definitions.
But I absolutely think of this as a hobby horse of mine. I do fully recommend that people avoid using the term “boots theory”, because it’s unclear. But I’m not trying to recruit people into a crusade against it.
I’m not sure what explanation of what economic phenomenon you’re saying “boots theory” is today used to mean.
I mean that there’s no single economic phenominon it’s today used to explain. When people talk about “boots theory”, it’s not clear what they mean, and that’s a problem when they’re trying to explain something.
Your earlier article (unlike this one) seems mostly to be claiming that the theory is generally offered as an account of why rich people are rich.
Ah, that wasn’t my intent. My earlier article was claiming (among other things) that the theory as written is an account of why rich people are rich, whether or not people offer it as that. It didn’t take a strong position on how people do in fact offer it; in this article I’ve looked at that question in more detail.
In-book it’s explicitly partly about inherited wealth; the passage wherein Vimes formulates his theory is preceded by a section about how the very richest people, like Lady Sybil, can afford to live as though poor in some ways (wearing her mother’s hand-me-downs, etc) and is immediately followed by this:
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 jewelery 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.
I don’t think Pratchett was seriously advancing the theory as an explanation for why some people are much richer than others. I’m not sure he was even intending to represent Vimes as doing that, even though that’s what the words literally say. Vimes is a policeman, not a logician or a philosopher, and this is just a passing thought. And Pratchett was a writer (writing humorous fantasy rather than, say, political philosophy or economics), and plausibly prioritizing vividity over precise accuracy.
Vimes, in-story, is obviously aware that Sybil Ramkin has a vast amount of inherited wealth that far outweighs any benefit she might have obtained from being able to spend less by buying higher-quality things with higher up-front costs.
So when you protest that people
I think you’re being unfair. Yes, that’s what the thing they’re quoting literally says. No, that’s not sufficient reason to think that it’s exactly what Pratchett’s character meant, still less to think that it’s exactly the point Pratchett himself was meaning to make.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that (1) Pratchett’s actual opinion on this is roughly what the Wikipedia article says, (2) to whatever extent he thought it through explicitly, Pratchett’s intention was to describe Vimes as having the same idea in a crude, very concrete, not highly analysed form, and (3) he worded it the way he did because he was aiming for something vivid and punchy, not because that wording was the most precise expression of the actual idea. And (4) I am very confident that Pratchett did not in fact think that being able to spend less for this sort of reason is the cause or even one of the main causes of rich people’s richness, and fairly confident that if you’d asked him what he imagined Vimes as thinking he would have said Vimes didn’t really think that either.
Similarly, when in Carpe Jugulum Granny Weatherwax tells a hapless young Omnian priest “sin is treating people as things, and that’s all there is to it”[1] I don’t think we should actually take Pratchett to be seriously claiming, or even to be representing E.W. as seriously claiming, that there is literally no other moral principle besides “don’t treat people as things”.
[1] Those aren’t the exact words, I’m not sure it’s in Carpe Jugulum, and I’m not 100% sure the other party is an Omnian priest. But, in each case, close enough.
In terms of your earlier article: I am very confident that Pratchett’s actual opinion was much more “level 1” than “level 3″ despite the literal sense of the words he described Vimes’s thoughts with.
(It’s definitely true that some people who talk about “boots theory” mean something different from what Pratchett meant, but that always happens.)
According to this reddit thread, the full quote is
(And yes, it’s Carpe Jugulum.)
I feel like you’re saying “okay, but she’s not really saying....” And the E.W. in my head is glaring at you because she just explained that yes she is really saying.
So, first of all, she begins by saying “sin is …” but when pushed a bit she falls back to “that’s where it starts”. And, second, if e.g. you cornered her and said “look, here’s a case where someone did something awful to someone else, not because he treated her like a thing but because he treated her like a person but one much less important than himself” the answer would be more like “well, that’s just a watered down version of treating people as things” or “yes, fair enough, but it’s very much the same sort of failure” than like “if he didn’t literally treat her as a thing, then he wasn’t doing anything wrong”.
To be clear, I am not saying that what E.W. says to the priest is wrong, I’m saying it’s not intended to be taken strictly literally, just as the great majority of things people say aren’t intended to be taken strictly literally. And I think the same thing applies to Vimes saying “the reason that the rich were so rich was that they managed to spend less money”.
So my read is “E.W. is actually claiming that sin is just treating people like things. She doesn’t want the listener to tone it down to some less absolute position.”
Maybe the listener gets closer to the truth by doing that. But it’s not what E.W. intends. If the listener gets closer to the truth by adding nuance, then E.W. loses points both for being wrong and for interrupting to say “no nuance!” If E.W. herself tones it down while saying “no nuance!” then, well, let’s notice this and let it affect how seriously we take her in future.
(This doesn’t apply to Vimes, who was never challenged; or to Pratchett, who should not in general be assumed to endorse things his characters say.)
Vimes obviously should be aware of this. I’m not super confident that the passage in question was written with Pratchett being aware of Vimes being aware of it.
Oh, I don’t think people should think that either Vimes or Pratchett believed the literal words.
But I’d still like if they noticed that the literal words say something very different than their interpretation.
Why are you pretty sure of this? (And, do you mean the definition that the Wikipedia article gives, along with examples that don’t match the definition; or do you mean that Pratchett would think of Wikipedia’s examples as being examples of the concept, and Wikipedia’s definition is unnecessarily limited?)
Why do you think Pratchett was thinking something similiar to Wikipedia, and not instead
an explanation not of why the rich are rich, but why the poor stay poor
why being poor sucks so badly
buying in bulk
even someone with only (modern numbers) $500,000 in assets (house, car, stuff, some investments) and a part time non-profit job that pays $25,000 a year is going to live a more comfortable life than someone in Vimes position of ~$1,000 in assets and $75,000 a year
When the author labels it a “theory of socioeconomic unfairness,” he’s being deeply ironic. You’d expect that analyzing one’s own economic problems would help them to solve them. Instead, Vimes’ theories seem to be keeping him poor.
If you broaden it to include expenditure and accumulation of all resources, not just money, then it’s mostly true.
every place where rich people are able to become richer because they have more money to start out with
(Guess: perhaps you think some of these are “close enough to Wikipedia that it’s fine to use one name to refer to the vague cluster”, and the rest are “obviously silly”?)
I think it happens more with “boots theory” than other things, and I think “~no one interprets it literally” is a large part of that. (“Non-literal interpretations” is a much broader space than “literal interpretations”.)
Aside, a comment I previously left:
Maybe I should have been clearer this time, too.
I think most people most of the time don’t particularly pay attention to what the literal words say. Sometimes that’s a serious failing. It can bite you pretty hard if the words were written with careful attention to the literal meaning and you’re trying to get their consequences right. But when (as, I think, in this case) that’s not how the words got the way they did, I find it hard to be greatly bothered when people attend to the underlying meaning rather than the strict literal meaning.
I’m not sure I can give much of an answer to that. Handwavily: because that sort of opinion seems both (1) an opinion Pratchett might plausibly have had and (2) one that might plausibly have led him to write what he did, whereas e.g. the literal reading that you call “level 3” in your earlier post does a bit better on #2 but to my mind much worse on #1.
I mean the definition at the start of the Wikipedia article. And I think
that definition doesn’t attempt to nail the theory down as specifically explaining “why the rich are rich” or “why the poor stay poor”; I think G.S.W. is offering not a different definition of “boots theory” from Wikipedia’s but a different view from the literal one of what phenomena the (same) theory is explaining
the same goes for “why being poor sucks so badly”
“buying in bulk” is related but I don’t find it plausible that either Pratchett or Vimes had that specifically in mind since the single example Vimes gives is of something that isn’t buying in bulk—but the idea “if you can afford to spend more then you can spend less in the long run” covers both buying in bulk and buying higher-quality items so this is definitely part of the same “vague cluster”
Ericf’s thing about assets versus income has some relationship to what I take Vimes/Pratchett to have been saying but I think that if Vimes/Pratchett had been thinking specifically of that then again Vimes would have picked a different example (something like Sybil never needing to buy furniture because she has a house full of high-quality furniture that’s been in the family for centuries, perhaps)
DirectedEvolution’s take isn’t really (I think) disagreeing about what Vimes’s theory says, he’s just saying that it’s stupid and so Pratchett can’t really believe anything like it is right. (I think that even if that’s so Vimes’s theory is still one of “socioeconomic unfairness” and if Pratchett is being ironic in using those words it’s not because they misrepresent what Vimes is thinking.) I don’t have very strong opinions as to how good a theory Pratchett actually thought it was, but I think it’s unlikely that he thought it as bad as DE does.
jimrandomh’s generalization doesn’t purport to be what either Vimes or Pratchett meant, I think. He’s proposing a Generalized Boots Theory for which something like your “level 3” might be true.
I’m not sure whether gbear605 is actually saying that Vimes or Pratchett really meant his (different) Generalized Boots Theory—his literal words do imply that, but just as with Pratchett himself I question whether he would endorse that if pushed—but this too seems like a reasonable generalization of the Vimes/Pratchett theory
so, broadly, yes I think most of these are in the same “vague cluster”; for the most part I wouldn’t myself endorse saying “boots theory is …” about them but doing so doesn’t seem entirely perverse to me.
I’m not sure what explanation of what economic phenomenon you’re saying “boots theory” is today used to mean. Your examples suggest that in fact it’s used in a wide variety of ways to describe and/or explain a wide variety of things.
Your earlier article (unlike this one) seems mostly to be claiming that the theory is generally offered as an account of why rich people are rich. I agree that it isn’t in fact a good account of that. I am not at all persuaded that people talking about “boots theory” commonly mean to claim that it is.
This article (unlike the earlier one) seems mostly to be pointing out that people use the term in a wide variety of ways—mostly not claiming that being able to buy better-quality stuff is why rich people are rich. (Indeed, above you suggest that they haven’t even noticed that interpretation of the theory, which is pretty much opposite to the position in your earlier post,) I haven’t myself made any serious attempt to survey how the term is used in practice. It may well be as varied as you say. My purely-handwavy-anecdotal impression is that most uses of the term are in the “vague cluster” that can be decently described with the words at the start of the Wikipedia article, and (like you, IIUC) I think that many such uses—corresponding to your “level 1″ or less frequently your “level 2”—are saying something that’s fairly clearly true.
I think it’s very reasonable not to be greatly bothered by this.
I do think it matters a little bit. If people are talking about “boots theory” and don’t mean the same thing, they’re going to communicate less well than if they unpack their definitions.
But I absolutely think of this as a hobby horse of mine. I do fully recommend that people avoid using the term “boots theory”, because it’s unclear. But I’m not trying to recruit people into a crusade against it.
I mean that there’s no single economic phenominon it’s today used to explain. When people talk about “boots theory”, it’s not clear what they mean, and that’s a problem when they’re trying to explain something.
Ah, that wasn’t my intent. My earlier article was claiming (among other things) that the theory as written is an account of why rich people are rich, whether or not people offer it as that. It didn’t take a strong position on how people do in fact offer it; in this article I’ve looked at that question in more detail.
In-book it’s explicitly partly about inherited wealth; the passage wherein Vimes formulates his theory is preceded by a section about how the very richest people, like Lady Sybil, can afford to live as though poor in some ways (wearing her mother’s hand-me-downs, etc) and is immediately followed by this:
As the previous post points out, she obviously didn’t.