Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe's idea for 'Vimes Boots' poverty index

[muriel_volestrangler]

Terry Pratchett’s estate has authorised Jack Monroe to use the “Vimes Boots Index” as the name of her new price index, which is intended to document the “insidiously creeping prices” of basic food products.

The author’s daughter, writer Rhianna Pratchett, said her father would have been proud to see his work used in this way by the anti-poverty campaigner. Monroe was prompted to create her index after inflation jumped to 5.4% last week, and she found herself “infuriate[d]” that the index (the consumer price index or CPI) used for this calculation “grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least”. She laid out how the prices of “value” product ranges in supermarkets had soared over the last decade – rice in her local supermarket had increased in price from 45p for a kilogram bag last year, to £1 for 500g, a 344% increase – and how the number of value products has shrunk. She was soon working with economists, charities and analysts to compile her own index.
...
In a tweet on Wednesday, Monroe announced that the index is already starting to make a difference, as the Office for National Statistics has admitted that “one inflation rate doesn’t fit all”. She wrote: “Delighted to be able to tell you that the @ONS have just announced that they are going to be changing the way they collect and report on the cost of food prices and inflation to take into consideration a wider range of income levels and household circumstances”, using the hashtag #VimesBootsIndex.
...
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “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 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 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.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/26/terry-pratchett-jack-monroe-vimes-boots-poverty-index

(Jack Monroe is a food writer who has done much campaigning about poverty and food - see eg https://www.ft.com/content/60456feb-03c5-4b4f-bb35-65760f462901 )

[Pinback]

1. This belongs on the Greatest page.

And so it shall be.

Great boots “parable.” And a great development.

[Biophilic]

2. I remember when I first read that and I had to stop and re-read it. It just stunned me.

It was so accurate and appalling. I had never thought about that but I was living it and it was accurate. This is awesome.

[hunter]

3. Poverty is expensive.

K&R

[Hekate]

4. Brilliant. Sir Terry Pratchett really was a genius at observing humanity & society...

This was one of his more striking insights. Where else but the UK would someone pick up on this and create the Vimes Boots Index?

[Hekate]

5. KnR for visibility