Eléments de sociologie pratchettienne (4)

Où l'on découvre une théorie "botière" des inégalités socio-économiques...

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasonned, was becase 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 a an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK 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 wre until the soles were so thin that he could 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 poor of boots that'd still 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 Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots" theory of socio-economic unfairness.

Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms, p. 35