In his 1993 Discworld novel, Men At Arms, author Sir Terry Pratchett's character Samuel Vimes, observed that 'the reason that the rich were so rich 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 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.
An index based on this passage from the book has previously been proposed to show the disproportionate effect rising prices have on people from lower income households:
This metric could have even greater impact if it also assessed the wider cost of disposability.
All that breaks or doesn't last long has to be managed, exported, burned, buried. It is a huge financial, material and carbon cost to individuals, households, communities.
What if we had a metric called the 'Vimes-Pratchett' Index which calculates the cost to lower socioeconomic households, to government, and to the environment, of collecting, sorting and processing ever-more stuff because people can’t afford the upfront cost associated with more durable goods?