“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because 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 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 wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell 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 boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the 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 the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
-Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
This is where I am right now. I have a very dear aunt who is very business-minded and was fortunate enough to be an investment banker in the '80's and '90's. She's been rich for a long time and can't understand why my uncle (who runs a little food shop in the Philippines and drives the equivalent of a school bus on the side) can't ever seem to get it together. Now, this uncle works harder than anyone I know and in fact, his wife worked so hard that she thought that the pain in her neck and shoulders was nothing but work related fatigue until it turned out to be cancer.
Now, I love my aunt, but she's been rich a long time, as I mentioned. She's super smart and has a deep understanding of the way her world works, but doesn't really get it when her world and the world the rest of us live in collide. Her advice to me two years ago on moving back to the U.S. was to move to NYC, because "it's really a very livable city . . . once you resolve your housing problem." Now . . . her apartment cost $1.3 million in 1998 and well . . . I'm a teacher. I'm oversimplifying of course, but still.