That one quote about the economic impact of Ankh Morpork, that I've seen circulate on here as an example of how Pratchett had some basic understanding of economics, is definitely one of the better excerpts from Discworld but the wider context of that quote, and successive scenes, show some staggering misconceptions and just basic lack of thought.

Pratchett seems to have mashed up about a century of European revolutions (the French revolutions, revolutions of 1848, and the Paris Commune seem to be the main inspirations), bourgeois and proletarian alike, and then looked at the resultant incoherent mess and made a series of smug jibes about how silly revolutions are. 2a. This is really well illustrated in the scene where Reg Shoe says 'Seize the means of production' and gets into an argument with an artisan cobbler about how infeasible that is. A city dominated by artisan manufacture isn't even going to have a large and developed proletariat; that demand is one of proletarians demanding collective ownership of machinery already under collective operation. 2b. This contradiction provides so much wasted opportunity for good jokes; just off the top of my head I could make loads about, say, the necessarily conflicting meanings of freedom for the bourgeoisie vs the proletariat. 2c. Reg Shoe being a communist zombie reanimated by his burning fervour for revolution is such a funny dimension to a character who later becomes a police officer.

I love young Vetinari.

That people on here claim the Watch novels as some kind of meaningful critique of the police because of the occasional funny jibe is made especially absurd here given that it's the greatest example of the novels repeating the police force's self-hagiography.

Why does the book include the time monks telling Vimes where their base of operations is if it wants to have Vimes using his special cobble-feeling powers to find his way back there later? 5a. This is a personal gripe beyond reasonable critique but I dislike that a funny little detail about Vimes became this inescapable facet of his character. It feels like flanderisation.

I really love young Nobby Nobbs.

The seamstress jokes are good and answer a lingering question from earlier books? (That being, where do people go for an actual seamstress?) 7a. The detail of a bourgeois revolution that uses a network of sex workers for the clandestine transport of information and materiel, which ends up winning them better rights, including the ability to form a guild, is really really historically interesting and it's tragic that nothing more is done with it.

It really wastes an opportunity to have a solid emotional core. Vimes's sense of loss towards his childhood is an established character trait, but it's brought up here in a perfunctory manner for one exchange establishing that Vimes won't visit his dead mother one last time, and that's it. The time monks establish that Vimes has a job to do before he is forcibly returned to his time; his presence is merely mechanical, to move the plot. Meanwhile, his present reality is defined by extreme anxiety towards the future. What a better story it could have been if Vimes was forced to choose between the comfortable past, where he knows how everything will go and has a definite role, and an uncertain but nonetheless exciting future! 8a. This also offers an interesting parallel with the theme of revolution: do we change or do we stay the same? Is the new necessarily better than the old?

Pratchett is way too fond of the clean-knockout-punch as a plot device to keep Vimes's hands (relatively) clean. Half of these people are dying of concussions, Samuel.