It’s expensive to be poor

It’s probably because I’m working on my tax returns that I’m more sensitive to the contrast between expensive and cheap, between well off and poor. And I have to admit that I feel fortunate that I haven’t really had to struggle with poverty. But my awareness of the extreme differences in our society has been sharpened. And it makes me sad.

Socio-economic unfairness means that it’s expensive to be poor. When you don’t have much money, you can only buy lower quality products at a lower price but such products don’t last very long. So you have to replace them more quickly.

Still a bit vague?

For a quick example, the author Terry Pratchett gives a great explanation of socio-economics in his book Men at Arms:

“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 okay for a season or too and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, costs ten dollars. (…)

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 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.“

Poverty is expensive because it is a multiplier of problems. It makes a person postpone their needs because they can’t afford them now…until they have to pay more for those needs later when they can’t live without them.

And I realize that these thoughts don’t really even begin to dive into the extreme poverty of so many people on this planet of ours.

We must do more for others.

I must do more.

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