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Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

It's from a novel in a fantasy setting. I don't think it's meant to literally reflect what happens with boots in the real world, it's meant to be a metaphor.

It does happen quite literally in the real world with umbrellas, by the way. I live in a quite rainy area. Around 7 or 8 years ago I spent around €60 on a good Knirps umbrella, haven't needed another at the moment. When I bought cheaper umbrellas (not really due to skimping, but I didn't really know the good ones) they only lasted 1-2 years before totally breaking and becoming unusable.

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Yes I understand that. But then what are the real world example, because non of the once provided are convincing.

Maxing out your 401k, ibonds, HSA, mega backdoor Roth. Having extra money to buy the current market dip we are in.

> Maxing out your 401k

That's a political choice made in the US not nothing inherent.

And I don't have any idea what most of these other things are.

And determining if something is a 'dip' is just stock speculation.

> I don't have any idea what most of these other things are

It's what a poor person would invests in. There is great truth in your comment. We are ignorant of opportunities available to those in higher classes. Tax tricks, off shore businesses, multi million dollar art collections. I have no idea how these things work but I guarantee you it helps wealthy people build more wealth through opportunities not available to the poor.

I'm not American so some of those things I don't know about because they just don't exist in the same way or I know them by different names.

You don't need to be rich to make reasonableness investment choices with your limited savings.

Tax tricks are less important or impactful if you are poor. However I agree that the tax system is not helping. Moving to a simple tax system would be good for everybody. Payroll taxes are regressive for example.

Most middle class people don't have off-shore accounts, and we are comparing the poor to the middle class, not to the super rich. The same goes for art collections.

Those are things that make the super-rich different form middle class, they don't prevent poor people from becoming more affluent.

> Most middle class people don't have off-shore accounts,

That's my point. Just like poor people don't have enough space in their apartments to store bulk goods. The cost of being poor is invariant to your wealth. It's asking the wrong question.

Buying in bulk is typically cheaper and can be of even more benefit if there is a sale by buying enough to last until the next sale.

Yes but when you have a small apartment living space you can't have months worth of food stored.

Taking short term opportunity of sales of singular items makes sense. I often buy meat depending on what's for sale, but not months worth.

Maybe once in a while you can buy bulk for dry-store items like pasta or rice.

That's the point though - richer people with larger houses and sufficient refrigeration space at least have the option to save money by buying in bulk. Then again, richer people need a way of signaling their wealth to others so will typically by more "premium" products, so the two effects largely cancel each other out (as it is, the stats certainly don't show that the rich spend absolutely less on food than the poor - but certainly a significantly lower % of their income).

Having to buy a larger house, a larger refrigerate, a larger transport vehicle to get the option to potentially buy in bulk. When in effect what they actually do, and data shows this, they buy to much perishables and then throw them away.

So I can buy that yes, there some potential places where this theory could potentially apply.

However, if you derive a social theory from these effects, I would like to see some evidence of this effect being really large.

Compare that with the land use situation I keep bringing up, we have prove and had it for a long time that density and walkability does massively reduce the living cost of poor. This was modled in detail for California for example:

This video shows the results of some modeling done for California by a famous urban planner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUtdFbK4YG4

They just gave you a real-world example, umbrellas...

I have lived for decades in an very rainy country and almost never use an umbrella.

Umbrellas often get left behind in bars and are available for cheap second hand, sometimes even free. I have one, that I almost never use but I had it for 5+ years and it was many years old before that and it looks like a really cheap model and its still usable.

So sorry, I don't buy a social theory based on higher quality umbrellas being not affordable. Specially for an item that isn't actually required. A cheap umbrella can still last years.

If you could built a real social theory based on this concept, then it should be easy to list lots of things that are really high impact, not umbrellas that are a vanishingly small portion of spending.

^ this is a perfect example of how smart people are typically more prone to rationalization than others.

We could paraphrase the above as "the cheap version will last as long as the expensive version if you just don't use the cheap version!".

While technically true, it's also not useful.

It's certainly the case that anyone who needs an item but doesn't have cash on hand for it is going to pay more (by borrowing and paying interest), which isn't quite the same phenomenon but boils down to the same conclusion: in many cases, it costs more to be poor.

However I will agree there are likely more cases where buying the cheaper product is the most economical option even in the long run - obviously true for perishable items, but e.g. when deciding to buy 2nd hand vs new, and yes, even for things like clothes, there are clearly examples of items whose price bears little relation to their likely longevity. Though I would suggest in general that a $100 pair of shoes is likely to last more than 4 times longer than a $25 pair.

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