Since the publication of Men at Arms, others have also made reference to the theory. It has thus been theorized that Pratchett drew inspiration from these antecedents. Likewise, in a 1954 column for The Observer, humourist Paul Jennings made similar comments about boots, and the adage "buy cheap, buy twice" has sustained itself as a Northern English adage. The theory has its antecedents in Robert Tressell's 1914 novel The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, protagonist Frank Owen directly refers to clothes and boots as necessities where the total cost over time is greater for the working classes, as " can seldom or never afford to buy good things" and therefore must "buy cheap rubbish, which is dear at any price". This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
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 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. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. 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 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. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. The boots theory comes from a passage of the 1993 novel Men at Arms, the second novel to focus on the City Watch, in which he muses about his experiences of poverty as compared to his fiancée Lady Sybil Ramkin's conception of poverty: In the Discworld series of novels, Sam Vimes is the curmudgeonly but principled captain of the City Watch of the medieval city-state of Ankh-Morpork. Since its publication, the theory has received wider attention, especially in regard to the effect of increasing prices of daily necessities. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, reasons that poverty causes greater expenses to the poor than to those who are richer. The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory first popularised by English fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms.
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