Excellent characterization. This Bach influencer or David Brooks walk into a coffee shop and opine, what are these (mostly women) doing all day? Must be indisci

Excellent characterization. This Bach influencer or David Brooks walk into a coffee shop and opine, what are these (mostly women) doing all day? Must be indisciplined spending on coffee. I feel Gen-X and millennials know in our bones that this stupid advice is path-dependent on a surface of rules that will never happen again. Take one coffee drinker, who in May 2001, might be advised by a financial planner like Bach to buy Enron stock instead of that avocado toast. That advice kept her from having a down payment for 7 years. In 2008, millions like her were foreclosed. This talk of frugality deserves a fraction of a paragraph before we move onto the serious costs of child care, health care, psychotherapy, alcoholism around you, college loans for people without rich parents, what to do during 3 hours of commuting, losses from Worldcom ($1385 per taxpayer), losses from Madoff ($27 per), losses from the fourth largest investment bank (Lehman Bros) collapsing, etc. So the latte and avocado toast joke is funny, even with such a dour punchline. This article is good because sometimes I need to be reminded that there’s a fringe who took the joke seriously.