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Personal Finance Memes: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Not all personal finance memes are created equal.
Social media is full of personal finance memes. Sometimes, they’re in a classic meme format: a funny image, a snarky caption, etc. Other times, they’re a poison pill of bad math and misleading reasoning, designed to be provocative and to get shared over and over, resulting in classic memetic contagion.
Of all my posts, this one will probably cause the most anger and random accusations, simply because personal finance memes deal with touchy topics. Then again, ships aren’t made to stay in harbors, are they? I don’t want this to end up being just another watered-down blog advising you to buy secondhand tupperware.
Fundamentally, there are two types of memes: those that try to spread misinformation, and those that don’t. The latter are jokes, funny captions, informal group misery sessions (e.g., all the cliché memes complaining about Mondays), etc. The former category, the memes that try to spread misinformation, can be a lot more insidious — especially when it comes to personal finance memes.
I’m just an enthusiastic amateur and not a scholar, but it seems to me that memes that spread false information either do that deliberately (i.e., the creator knew the math/logic was wrong, but went with…
