A Bloomberg opinion piece published over the weekend has categorically missed the mark on reading the room, according to the reaction it received online.
In the editorial, penned by Teresa Ghilarducci, a professor in economics at the New School for Social Research, a private university in New York, the financial adviser attempts to offer up, what she believes, is sage advice for weathering the current inflation crisis and high gas prices.
At the outset of the piece, she whittles down her target audience to anyone who is earning less than $289,000, as, she writes, “Americans at that level spend no more than 1% of their take-home pay on gas and oil”.
The audience then is those who are earning much less, as she specifies those at the median with an income of $50,000 who will spend 3 per cent of their take-home pay on gas and motor oil.
Ms Ghilarducci offers up tips that seem to lose most of the internet, who reacted to her article being shared on Twitter over the weekend.
Some pieces of advice she offers up in the article, titled “Inflation stings most if you earn less than $300k”, begin innocently enough.
First, she offers optioning for public transit in lieu of driving your car to the office every day (albeit this advice also doesn’t consider that those working minimum wage jobs to support their families might, in addition to being financially stripped, be time poor and therefore won’t be able to afford spending the extra time commuting to their perhaps multiple jobs a day).
The ones that truly struck a chord with the Twitter-sphere though were the tidbits where the economist says that families might consider skipping out on their pet’s medical bills – and begin swapping out meat for lentils.
“Though your palate may not be used to it, tasty meat substitutes include vegetables (where prices are up a little over 4%, or lentils and beans which are up about 9%,” the scholar writes.
The writer also offers some advice for new pet owners that, by her own admission, may sound “harsh”, but that many social media users viewed as downright dark.
“If you’re one of the many Americans who became a new pet owner owner during the pandemic, you might want to rethink those costly pet medical needs,” she writes.
The recent lentil-gate resembles similar controversies where people in positions of power and privilege have used their platforms to prescribe what those in lower socioeconomic brackets should be doing with their finances, often times executed with a level of inconsiderateness that spawns several dozen think pieces and thousands of quote tweets.
There was the now-infamous avocado toast incident, in which Australian millionaire Tim Gurner said during an interview with 60 Minutes that his advice for millennials struggling to make rent or buy a home was to cut the fancy toast from their diet.
“When I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” he said on the CBS show. “We’re at a point now where the expectations of younger people are very, very high.”
Millionaires – and billionaires, for that matter – have also had noteworthy cases of foot-in-mouth syndrome when attempting to make their financial reality more relatable to the masses. Talk show host Kelly Ripa, who’s worth approximately $75m, once described her university son’s life at NYU as “extreme poverty” and musician Grimes once described billionaire Elon Tusk as living “below the poverty line”.
