In my quest to be a more serious denizen of the blogosphere, I recently began reading TAPPED and Kevin Drum more regularly. Much to my chagrin, both refer to Megan McArdle constantly. Why?
I understand that she makes occasional good points about things like free trade, but there must be other conservative bloggers who do this who don’t say stupid things like this…and who can generally express their thoughts in under a thousand words. Why do people like Kevin Drum and Tim Fernholz take her blog seriously?
Update. This is indeed probably how the process works:
1) Megan gets a ridiculous contrarian thought
2) Megan writes 800 word minimum post about said thought
3) Sully writes one sentence link, must include some form of the word “fisk” at least 50% of the time
4) Tyler Cowen links to it
5) after 3 and 4 liberal bloggers simply cannot ignore the obvious fallacies, rip the piece to shreds
6) Megan defends her piece by any means necessary up to and including striking her critics with lumber
7) critics again fail to recognize that she is not arguing in good faith and provide yet more links to Atlantic.com
Comrade javafascist
Perhaps they have a Glibertarian Elf Fetish? Or maybe they just like Himalayan salt.
Brien Jackson
Because her post basically necessitates that you counter her bullshit. The Atlantic isn’t Hot Air, or National Review, or Reason.
DougJ
The Atlantic isn’t Hot Air, or National Review, or Reason.
Frankly, much if not most of the stuff at Reason is smarter, better-argued versions of what she writes.
Xanthippas
But you’ve seen the rest of the blogosphere right? People take her seriously because she sounds reasonable, which means she dresses up with a civil tone the same nonsense you find on right-wing blogs. That’s why serious bloggers like Drum and Fernholz will go to the trouble of dismantling her arguments, when they won’t take even five seconds to read some nonsense Gateway Pundit who might essentially be saying the same thing.
Dr. I. F. Stone
Perhaps because the loony left-wing contains virtually no intelligent, knowledgeable, and literate writers on the general subject of “economics;” see, for example, what passes for “economic thought” by some clown named, “DougJ.”
Corner Stone
Bewbs. That is all.
DougJ
see, for example, what passes for “economic thought” by some clown named, “DougJ.”
I never write about economics.
DougJ
People take her seriously because she sounds reasonable,
She doesn’t sound that reasonable, though. She often sounds unhinged.
Robin G.
@Corner Stone: Bingo. It’s all about the bewbs. Dumbass conservativism sounds less like misogynism when it’s coming out of a woman’s mouth, just like GOP surely CAN’T be racist if they have their Token Black Guy defending them. If she had a British accent, she’d have her own show on CNN.
joe from Lowell
Liberals, being liberals, want there to be two sides to every story, want there to be a reasonable and decent opposition to engage, and want the other side to have a full airing of their ideas.
So, we search and search for that reasonable, decent opposition, and consistently end up disappointed in what we find.
Morbo
With Megan the Atlantic has reached Six Sigma status in bullshit linkbait manufacturing. The process is as follows:
1) Megan gets a ridiculous contrarian thought
2) Megan writes 800 word minimum post about said thought
3) Sully writes one sentence link, must include some form of the word “fisk” at least 50% of the time
4) Tyler Cowen links to it
5) after 3 and 4 liberal bloggers simply cannot ignore the obvious fallacies, rip the piece to shreds
6) Megan defends her piece by any means necessary up to and including striking her critics with lumber
7) critics again fail to recognize that she is not arguing in good faith and provide yet more links to Atlantic.com
And with that process, the Atlantic has cultivated a 99.9999998027% success rate of bringing in those sweet, sweet pageviews. All the dead luminaries who once wrote for it spin in their graves.
dmsilev
@Dr. I. F. Stone: Yeah, I mean take that loony lefty Paul Krugman. Doesn’t know a thing about economics.
-dms
someguy
Why do you and John or anybody else ever discuss the irrelevant wingers ever? Why do you work yourselves into a seething little tantrum over them at all? There’s no need to.
As for answering your question, I presume it’s some variation on “Smart Women: Foolish Choices.” There’s a lot more rewarding and pleasant things to focus on in life than the stupidity and evil of conservatives and libertardians, which are basically endless topics if you really want to go there. When you look into the abyss, it’s filled with Repuke ideas.
PeakVT
It’s a stumper. Maybe the professional McMuddle bashers will weigh in.
NobodySpecial
She couldn’t make a good point if you gave her a grinder and directions. She’s a lying tramp.
jibeaux
Conservative bloggers who make good points…..hmmm.
Other than Larison, who as far as I can tell is read primarily by our denizens, nothing comes to mind.
harlana peppper
Megan Who?
Napoleon
This is honestly one of the biggest mysteries to me in the blogsphere. It is just idiotic to “take someone seriously” just because they may post at The Atlantic because by doing so you drive the “you must take them seriously” phenomena. The better thing would be to simply ignore her. To do otherwise is to feed the Villagers/establishment media’s self appointed role of determining what is and is not subject to mainstream discourse. She is so self evidently idiotic it hardly seems worthwhile to even point that out. To the extent that she may sometimes say something kind of interesting/may be in the neighborhood of getting something right, it really is just a manifestation of a stopped clock being right twice a day/a million chimps at a million typewriters will give you Shakespeare.
BTW, I try to post in as many of their (and Matt Y who is another big offended with MM) threads something to the effect of “why does anyone take Megan M. seriously” every time they mention her? I suggest everyone else do the same.
SGEW
@Dr. I. F. Stone:
Um . . . I guess these two guys don’t count? Not “loony” enough for you?
[ETA: Ah,dmsilev beat me to KThug. It ’twas pretty obvs, tho’]
DougJ
Why do you and John or anybody else ever discuss the irrelevant wingers ever? Why do you work yourselves into a seething little tantrum over them at all?
Mostly to make fun of them or warn of the impending apocalypse, not to pretend they’ve made some great point about Austrian economics.
GReynoldsCT00
sorry but have to post this comic relief
jibeaux
This is not a statistic, it’s an anecdote!
I am kind of a little depressed that I am now so deeply inside the baseball of the political blogosphere that this is a joke to me. I can’t think of anyone I know in real life who would get or appreciate it. Glad I’ve got you guys!
Xanthippas
You missed my definition of “reasonable”, which means “dressing up with a civil tone the same nonsense you find on right-wing blogs.” That’s why I no longer blog about her, or comment on her blog. I realized I was essentially responding to the sort of right-wing nonsense I don’t bother to read.
Anya
@Dr. I. F. Stone: Someone should sue this asshole for sullying I.F. Stone’s good name.
SGEW
@jibeaux:
Julian Sanchez, who blogs here and here (as well as at Reason and The Economist) is, apparently, a “conservative”; and is reasonable, knowledgeable, and wicked smart. Highly recommended, even tho’ (or, perhaps, because) I don’t agree with many of his policy preferences.
Randy P
Every time I see the name Megan McArdle what I think is “Isn’t she the one who played the original Annie on Broadway? Is she a writer now?” I’m too lazy to check who that actually was and why her name makes me think that.
There are only a few blogs I read regularly, though I follow the occasional link to others and then read back issues of them if it’s one I remember liking before (Glenn Greenwald for instance).
So I have no freaking clue who or what Megan McArdle is or what her schtick is.
kid bitzer
my fear is that mcardle’s success shows us the rise of a new village.
just like broder, hiatt, cohen, kristol, dowd, et al., i’m afraid the blogosphere may be creating its own clique.
yglesias, ackerman, sullivan, coates, douthat, mcardle, et al.
now, i love yglesias, coates, and ackerman. i think sully is on the whole a force for good.
but those people give a lot more credence to the douthats and mcardles than they should. and i think the reason is exactly what cohen said about rumsfeld: you shop with him in the supermarket. you have dinner with him. and so you start becoming reluctant to attack him.
i started going after douthat on tnc’s blog, and tnc told me to take it elsewhere. okay; it’s your blog.
thing is, i know that tnc disagrees with douthat on nearly everything. but they are both atlantic alums. and yglesias was too. and ackerman roomed with yggles.
one of the big challenges for the good guys in that pack is going to be *avoiding* creating a new village. with mcardle as its dowd.
Col. Klink
You left out the part where Megan’s significant others get hired by Big Oil funded think tanks to produce utter rubbish demonstrating that if we don’t tax billionaires everyone gets a free pony. (The poor especially, because taxes not only hurt them the most, but also take away their freedom.)
joe from Lowell
I was thinking of Sanchez, but he’s not a conservative. He seems to be the leader of a tiny but fanatical band of rogue left-leaning libertarians.
The Republic of Stupidity
Cool… a totally fact-free rant…
Gregory
Drum has, inexplicably, always referred to McArglebargle. At least he doesn’t cite Ann Althouse quite as often anymore…
The Republic of Stupidity
You do all realize the average ‘citizen’ out there, and I use the term loosely, has no idea who ‘the village’ is and will never, ever read their crap on a daily basis… ever… too.
Notorious P.A.T.
Princeton’s Paul Krugman Wins Nobel Economics Prize
mclaren
No, no, no, no, no, no.
This is the pathology of the Beltway.
Drum and Fernholz take the ignorant deluded crackpot Megan McArdle seriously because the people inside the Beltway take her seriously — proving that, of course, Megan McArdle must be a Very Serious Person.
And why do the sages inside the Beltway (who assured us in their profound wisdom that Iraq had mountains of nukes and lakes of sarin, and assured us that No Housing Meltdown Could Possibly Happen Because the Outstanding Percentage of Housing Mortgage Derivatives Was Only A Tiny Party of the Economy, and who assured us that the Iraqis would greet our invading troops with flowers and candy, and who assured us that the Iraq war would pay for itself with all the oceans of oil that would gush from Saddam’s newly-liberated wells) take the ignorant deluded crackpot Megan McArdle seriously…?
Well, here’s the pathology that afflicts the Washington D.C. establishment, you see. Because the people inside the Beltway suffer from a form of brain damage that makes them certain, absolutely certain, that There Are Always Two Sides To Every Question and that The Deep Wisdom of Truth Consists of Splitting the Difference Between These Two Opposing Views. (So if Josef Mengele came back to life and advocated performing medical experiments on Jews today, in 2009, the Beltway pundits would have to find someone to make the case for Mengele, and then they’d have to invite that wack job on the Sunday talk shows to have a “debate” about the Very Serious Issue of whether we should perform human vivisection without anaesthesia… “Murdering children by cutting them open without painkillers — pro, or con? We’ll have a lively debate today on Meet the Press…”)
Therefore when every economist who wasn’t a complete nutjob stood up and wrote op-ed pieces pointing out that the Great Depression was only ended because of massive government intervention…
…Why, then the Beltway sages immediately cast about to find someone with an opposing view. Because, you know, There Are Always Two Sides To Every Question and that The Deep Wisdom of Truth Consists of Splitting the Difference Between These Two Opposing Views.
And the Beltway sages couldn’t find any credible economists who would spout insane nonsense, like, oh, say, the crazy claim that FDR’s massive government intervention actually caused the Great Depresison, or that the truly wise thing to have done back in 1932 was to let tens of millions of people stay out of work, and shut down industry throughout America, and let milions of people starve. Because even the batshit-insane economists of the Chicago School of Economics aren’t that batshit insane.
So Megan McArdle was the only gibbering loon the Beltway sages could find who would spout this crazy horseshit. Literally. The only person. No one else was demented enough to claim that FDR actually caused the Great Depression, or that the best thing to do right now is…nothing! Just let the financial markets collapse! Let all the businesses in America shut down, let hundreds of millions of Americans starve, and the magic of the market will work miracles and fix everything (and a pony!).
Because (remember!) There Are Always Two Sides To Every Question and that The Deep Wisdom of Truth Consists of Splitting the Difference Between These Two Opposing Views.
So when every economist in America stood up and clamored for government intervention to save the global economy from total collapse, the Beltway sages really had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find someone, anyone, who would claim the exact opposite — namely, that FDR almost destroyed the U.S. economy with his meddling, and that the best thing we should do now is nothing, just let the markets collapse and shut down and let everyone starve.
And that bottom of the barrel the Beltway sages scraped to find someone crazy enough to say that crap was…Megan McArdle.
The Beltway sages therefore took the nutter McArdle very seriously indeed. Because (wait for it…) There Are Always Two Sides To Every Question and that The Deep Wisdom of Truth Consists of Splitting the Difference Between These Two Opposing Views. So the Beltway sages now had two sides to the question of what to do about the global financial crisis: the side resprented by Stiglitz and Krugman and Samuelson and Volcker and Geithner and Summers and a horde of other Nobel prize winning economists…and the side repserented by the human sinkhole of gibberign lunatic ignorance, Megan McArdle.
Therefore there could be a Very Serious Debate between these two “opposing sides” (the sane people, and the crazed wack job McArdle) about what we ought to do to fix the world economy.
Having once been taken seriously by the Beltway sages, Megan McArdle now glides forth in a cloud of golden sanctity, forever blessed with the beatitude of Being A Very Serious Person. And, as we all know, once the Beltway crowd concludes that you are a Very Serious Person, nothing you ever say or do can change this.
You can run around like a chicken with its head cut off screaming raw insanity, the way Tom Friedman a day after 9/11, when the shrieked hysterically that “we are in World World Four”!!!!!!!
That crazy hysterical overreaction to two jets flying into two skyscrapers did not suffice to get Friedman taken off the list of Very Serious Persons. And then when Friedman made a complete fool of himself by assuring everyone that “the next six months are the critical period in Iraq” for five years, no, that did not suffice to get Friedman taken off the list of Very Serious Persons. When Firedman pronounced, in tunes of punitive hysteria, that “America cannot afford to lose in Iraq” and then turned around and urged us to “get out of Iraq” ignoring and negating everything he had written for the last 6 and half years aout Iraq…why, no, that did not suffice to get Friedman taken off the list of Very Serious Persons. Even Friedman’s nutty boosterism of the glorious “golden straitjacket” of globalized free market capitalism, which resulted in the total collapse of the world economy, was not a stupidly ignorant folly vast enough to get Friedman booted from the list of Very Serious Persons. Like Henry Kissinger and William Kristol, Tom Friedman has been consistently wrong in every one of his predictions, wrong for 10 years, wrong about Iraq, wrong about globalization, wrong about NAFTA, wrong about Iran, wrong about WMDs, wrong about claiming that 9/11 was “world war four,” wrong about how allegedly crucial is was for America invade Iraq, wrong about who supposedly vital it was to “win” the war in Iraq, wrong about everything, wrong, wrong, wrong, constantly wrong, he was wrong from the start, wrong in the middle, wrong at the end, wrong in every possible way about everything he ever said for hte last decade…but none of that sufficed to eject Tom Friedman, the Moustache of Wisdom, from the list of Very Serious Persons.
Because, you see, once you have a rep, the demented sick culture inside the Beltway judges your actions by your reputation. NOT the other way around.
Out here in the real world, it works exactly the opposite. If you do something stupid, or say something obviously contrary to observed reality, your reputation goes down the toilet. Out here in reality, we judge people’s reputations by their actions and by their words.
But inside the crazy Bizarro World of the Beltway, everyone’s actions and words get judged by their reputation. And once the Beltway sages decide that you are a Very Serious Person, that’s the reputation by which all your actions and words are judged.
So at this point, Megan McArdle could tear her clothes off, paint herself purple, run through the halls of congress shrieking that giant pterodactyls from Venus were about to attack…and megan mcArdle’s pronouncements about Venusian pterodactyles would be taken Very Seriously Indeed. The subject of all the Sunday talkshows that week would be the “debate” between “the two opposing viewpoints” about Venusian pterodactyls. You’d have the sane people pointing out that Megan McArdle is out of her fuckin’ mind and she’s shrieking abject lunacy, and Fareed Zakaria would nod and rub his chin and then ask William Kristol and David Brooks what their view of attacking Venusian pterodactyls was, and Kristol and Brooks would explain that there’s a great deal of historical evidence for attacking Venusian pterodactyls, and liberal peaceniks have tried to weaken America, and it’s important not to let a Pterodactyl Gap develop, because, you know, the world is full of Venusian pterodactyles who hate us, and Venus is a dangerous place, and it’s crucial to American security, and therefore we need a much larger defense budget to invade Venus and stop those pterodactyls from attacking us.
“Because the pterodactyls on Venus hate us for our freedom,” William Kristol would explain sagely, and Fareed Zakaria would nod with gravitas, and everyone would assure themsevles that this is a Very Serious Conclusion by Very Serious People who need to be taken Very Seriously Indeed.
Now do you understand why the ignorant demented lunatic-fringe kook Megan McArdle gets taken seriously by bloggers, and the Beltway pundits, and everyone else trapped inside their crazy little Bizzaro World of the Washington D.C. Establishment of Very Serious People?
Notorious P.A.T.
@dmsilev:
beat me to it
MikeJ
@NobodySpecial:
huh?
What does her promiscuity or lack thereof have to do with what an idiot she is?
neff
@Randy P: The original Annie was Andrea McArdle. When I was a little kid I read a book about the Annie musical and for some reason that fact stuck in my head ever since.
My favorite thing about McMegan is how, back when she used to write for the Economist while just blogging on the side for the heck of it, she would also write with British spellings on her blog; when people would make fun of her for this, her explanation was that she was too dumb to be able to switch back and forth between writing British for work and writing American elsewhere.
jibeaux
@joe from Lowell:
He appears to be a thirty year old hipster looking guy with a hell of a lot of French and words like “Mannheimian” in his writing. So he’s definitely not READ by conservatives. Also, no flag pin.
SGEW
@joe from Lowell: I think Sanchez has described himself as a “conservative” at one point or another, tho’. But you’re right; he kind of falls under that mysterious border zone of “socially progressive libertarian” that only seems to exist on the internet.
Also: What about Andrew “I’ve Actually Written a Book About Oakeshott” Sullivan?
Corner Stone
@The Republic of Stupidity:
You misunderstand the use of the term “village”.
They don’t care what the citizenry actually reads, feels, thinks, deals with. The village writes for itself. A viewpoint will be arrived at, it will be stated, all village denizens will express it in some form or other, then it will become accepted and pushed outward to the larger MSM.
Politicians, pundits, lobbyists, etc. will then use it to either defend a bad decision or vote, or attack someone else’s good decision or vote.
Ipsa cogito hac carborundum.
Mark
People take her “seriously” because they strive for false objectivity. Two parties in America = two equally valid points of view. The notion that perhaps the poles of opinion should be Ron Wyden on the right and Bernie Sanders on the left does not occur to anyone.
Also, I don’t understand the “shopping with Rumsfeld” argument. How can you stay friends with someone who emits a stream of, at best, gobbledeegook and, at worst, bigotry against the poor? I think of my ex-girlfriend’s Republican mother who was way ahead of the curve on Obama’s lack of patriotism. You can’t imagine how happy I am to not get her emails about how Mexicans are ruining the country anymore. Eating dinner at her house never made me better-disposed towards her.
mattH
Much like his continued attempts to “address” Social Security, Drum has this conservative economic trend that runs through his writings. Makes it where he has a hard time distinguishing a sound argument from tripe.
Napoleon
@kid bitzer:
This.
DougJ
@kid bitzer
Seconded, or thirded or fourthed at this point.
Dr. I. F. Stone
How on earth could old Izzy have a “good name” given that he spent much of his professional life in the secret employment of the old Soviet Union?
The Republic of Stupidity
Corner Stone
Ummmmm… actually I understand the use of the word completely in this context…. a pack of talking heads completely out of touch w/ reality, obsessed with their own thoughts.
And like I said before, the average ‘citizen’ has no idea who these clowns are and will never read their nonsense. I’ll bet less than 10% of the population (and probably substantially less) as a whole has any who McArdle, Drum, Sully, etc, is, at all, too, ever…
some guy
I like SadlyNo!’s take on the “Teh Megan, Matt, and Ezra Show.”
meh
Shutup – that’s why
kid bitzer
#46–
i agree that very few people read mcardle, yglesias, etc.
for that matter, probably fewer than 10% read broder, dowd, cohen, etc.
but the thing about the original village (i.e. broder’s bunch) is that they set the tone for a whole media cascade which in the course of time reaches even the lowest of the low-information voter.
and their own quirks and obsessions (“clinton came in here and trashed the place!”) become the conventional wisdom that makes possible everything else on cable and fox and usa today and etc.
will the young villagers ever get that indirect reach? who knows. douthat is doing pretty well on that score already.
dmsilev
@Dr. I. F. Stone:
From Wikipedia.
FOAD.
-dms
Morbo
Please tell me you’re not going to write a post about “editor” McArdle and leave that “The” dangling up there.
Barry
Seconding #4, and to Dougj – I have a feeling that they’ve met her. I’ve seen at least one guy I know get totally wimpy about her, after having lunch with her. She’s probably putting on the charm (sexual but more importantly simply personal charisma).
Keven and the others are facing a problem known as ‘cognitive capture’. They’ll be working with people like McArdle their entire lives, so there’s a strong overt/covert pressure to go along to get along. Note that this is true to a Borg-like level in the professional elite MSM. And in this case, Megan is their ‘superior’; she’s an employee of a much more prestigious publication.
Added to this is most people’s psychosocial unwillingness to declare somebody a liar, after having met that person in the flesh. Somebody made a comment that a good reporter should have a touch of sociopathy about them; they need to be able to talk with somebody for hours or days, and still write damaging facts about that person.
I’ve been watching Megan’s career for a while, because she’s a ongoing example of how somebody gets into the MSM and advances. Most of the pundits are dried up middle-aged or elderly people who got absorbed 20-30 years ago. In her, we see how somebody who’s an actual human being works their way into the system. I would also say be compromised by the system, but she’s already a glibertarian who likes war, and so comes at least 75% pre-compromised.
jO bLow
mclaren-
Bravo
kid bitzer
…and right on cue, mcardle tells a bunch of lies about reid “appointing a dictator”, and sully mainstreams it on his own blog.
and i’m not linking to either one.
lewp
I believe Dr. Stone is referring to all the “Loony Lefties” that think supply-side is bullshit. Which is to say, the entire Economics profession.
To which he counters, I suppose, with Larry Kudlow.
El Cid
She’s an in-group member of the punditarians, and the blithering uninformed glib idiot is regularly featured in media outlets and on programs like “Marketplace”, so we have to hear more complete hack bullshit as though she’s some economics expert, because, fuck you hippies.
Tomlinson
@mclaren:
Holy crap, that was a post of beauty.
Andy
I canceled my subscription to the economist when I discovered she was a contributer. Any magazine that publishes the trite nonsense she writes, does not deserve to be read.
Tomlinson
FTR, if you can manage to avoid actually engaging with McMegan – and this can be very tricky at times, the temptation to actually rebut her drivel is strong – you will find that she is entirely useful.
She is almost always wrong. That takes skill.
And her arguments are soon to be parroted far and wide, so if you want to know what the next idiot meme will be, she’s an excellent source.
mattH
The Village isn’t just the media in DC. It’s the entire insular culture of the politicians, lobbyist and the media, and how they function as a tribe or village. It was first presented in a book in ’80 called “Tribes on the Hill” by anthropologist Jack Weatherford, and gained currency in the left blogsphere with the impeachment of Clinton, which itself was all about punishing a politician that wouldn’t come to heel in the Washington culture.
Don’t remember when Village became the common term, but the idea’s been around for a long time.
We mostly complain about the media because it’s supposed to hold itself above these influences, but doesn’t. As long as they socialize with the other two groups, I think we’ll be stuck with seeing some of the people who we hold our hopes on for changing media culture, like Matt and Ezra, subverted by the DC culture.
Panglossian Archangel
Who is Jane “McArdle” Galt? An extraordinarily tiresome wingnut hack “economist” who is best ignored. I bet she has a cat named “Branden.”
Amanda in the South Bay
I always figured it had to do with a perverted sense of ethics-McArdle blogs for a very, very mainstream magazine, and you won’t see liberal bloggers at MoJo, whatever the hell Yglesias’s outift is called, the WaPo, etc. go after someone who works for The Atlantic, because you sully the good name of MoJo, etc with the kind of jabs that you see on the blogosphere.
I mean, Yglesias used to star in fucked up videos with her and Douthat and Ambinder-what are the odds he would say a bad thing about them that people at more independent blogs-like here and LGM-would say?
Corner Stone
@The Republic of Stupidity: Ok, you understand it completely. So shut up, that’s why!
Grumpy Code Monkey
@mclaren:
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Comment of the Year.
kid bitzer
#60–
agree that “village” includes pols and lobbyists as well as media.
i didn’t know about weatherford–thanks for that.
i think the term owes its popularity in the progressive blogosphere to its use by duncan black at eschaton–at least, that’s what i associate it with.
Kiril
Actually, I think the real answer is simpler. McArcdle is friends with Yglesias, Ackerman, Klein, Douthat, Sanchez, Capps, et al. They were all part of that wave of bloggers that hit DC when online media outlets decided they needed some bloggers, since that’s what all the kids were reading. The crew went out drinking together, and throwing dinner parties, and going to movies. Maybe they did other stuff, but that’s all I remember reading about on their blogs. They are all social friends, they link to each other, and they at least pretend to take one another seriously. Drum and Fernholz respect Yglesias, Ackerman, and Klein, so they follow their links. The whole thing is incestuous? nepotistic? I don’t know. I mean, don’t you all remember Yglesias, Klein and Ackerman falling all over themselves to praise the NYT picking up Douthat? Why? It’s not because Douthat is especially good at his job. It’s because they’re all friends.
liberal
@Dr. I. F. Stone:
LOL! As if conservative or
crypto-feudalistslibertarians know anything about economics.And as if the economics profession as a whole hasn’t become a laughingstock with the collapse of the financial sector.
MBunge
kid bitzer, Barry and mattH are on the money. She’s from New York City and is engaged to Peter Suderman. People either know her, know people who know her or know people like her. That grants her a social credibility that gets extended to her often awful writing.
Mike
liberal
@joe from Lowell:
I don’t know, but would wager, that he’s a freedom hatin’, liberty despisin’ crypto-feudalist like most so-called libertarians.
Ash Can
She has a pretty face, they’re crushing on her, and she simply must be as smart as they want her to be. Cf. Palin, Sarah.
Amanda in the South Bay
Lets be honest-Klein and Yglesias are McArdle. How can they criticize themselves?
McMegan is always being called out for being a privileged, wealthy jerk who has no professional qualifications other than a fucking MBA to talk about economics. Which is all true, so how are Ezra and Matt different? Sure, they say what we all tend to believe in, so I guess they can get a pass on that, but they themselves are children of privilege who went to the right schools, had the right connections, have no real professional education or experience other than being generic political pundits and good writers.
I mean, Ezra has been anointed as the boy wonder of the health care debate, but if we are going to criticize McMegan for not being an economist, I don’t see Ezra really having any professional qualifications or experience to come across as an authority, other than (of course) that we tend to agree with him and not McMegan.
Pardon my bitterness…
Corey
If you’re reading TAPPED, don’t forget to click over to Beat the Press, because Dean Baker is great and corrects major news outlets on basic economics on a daily basis: http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press
Hob
@mattH: Yeah, and Drum never seems to realize that he’s taking conservative positions; there’s not really an effort to convince people that they’re all wrong about Social Security, he just wanders into that argument. It’s odd. I don’t think he’s a dumb guy exactly, but the blind spots are enormous.
Plus, IIRC, when he first started referencing McCardle all the time, she was still going by the name “Jane Galt”… which kind of makes reading the columns besides the point, since that pseudonym is basicaly equivalent to naming yourself “Deluded Asshole.”
Angelos
@mclaren: Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
Jason
It is one of the great Questions of the Blogs, right next to “Nobody who doesn’t have broken fingers should type this poorly. Why the hell doesn’t Yglesias just proofread a post?” The answer to both questions is: Kevin Drum’s blog is very, very boring.
mattH
I’ve been reading him since shortly after he started Calpundit and he’s had this particular blind spot for a long time. I blame it on whatever economics education he has, which tends to make people more conservative. That and he lives in Orange County, so I’m sure some degree of the culture invades his thinking.
NobodySpecial
@MikeJ:
Her promiscuity – lying down and spreading her legs for any bit of wandering libertarian claptrap roistering about – is well known.
NobodySpecial
@Amanda in the South Bay:
It gets worse than that, I’m afraid.
Kiril had it right. It’s all cronyism.
mattH
Ezra at least seems to do associated research, McArdle’s research is usually superficial, and often just an attempt to create some anecdotal evidence for some unhinged statement. Just look at Paul Campos’ interview and her posting afterward attacking health care reform.
asiangrrlMN
@Corner Stone: Ditto that. Bewbies.
Hob
@Amanda in the South Bay: Well, Klein does his damn homework, so there is that. True, he’s not a voice of experience, but at least when he’s writing on his favorite subjects there’s 1000 times more factual content there than you’ll get from most columnists, and 1000000000 times more than McArdle.
I kinda agree that it’s lame to anoint people as pundits who’ve never done anything but editorialize – “pundit” really shouldn’t be a job description. And all these characters annoy me for different reasons – Klein just because he’s 5 years old and knows so much that he’s sometimes too confident about stuff he doesn’t know; Yglesias for the same reasons except that he doesn’t know as much and often just tosses off opinions out of his ass; McArdle because she doesn’t know a damn thing and doesn’t care, and she doesn’t even have the excuse of being that young – she’s 37!
But it’s not really like they all just graduated from the right schools and were handed jobs. Not to say that personal background didn’t make it easier for editors to take them seriously, but– all three did a shitload of political blogging (I’m using the term “political” loosely in McArdle’s case) at a time when that field wasn’t so crowded, so they got noticed. And when print media started thinking “hmm, this ‘blogitizing’ thing seems to be hip with the kids” and looking to cherry-pick some writers who seemed sort of serious, could be counted on to provide lots of columns all the time, and weren’t too potty-mouthed, they were all natural choices for that role.
celticdragon
@mclaren:
I think I love you.
celticdragon
@Amanda in the South Bay:
Hey Amanda :)
Haven’t heard from you for awhile.
celticdragon
@NobodySpecial:
Libertarians always want free love and no strings attached (Chains are another matter) sex. In her more fanciful imaginings, McMegan might wish she were the illegitimate love child of Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein. However, most libertarians simply are not the sort of people you really want to have exuberant, promiscuous sex with.
(yes, I borrowed this from a side splittingly funny put down of libertarians I read some time ago. I wish I had the link)
Xanthippas
Well, I think it would be the fact that he knows what he’s talking about, and McArdle doesn’t. I don’t just read bloggers because I agree with them. Let’s give ourselves more credit than that please.
Let’s also not forget that there are scores of bloggers who have gained some recognition because of their in-depth writing and expertise on a subject, and not because of their credentials. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Amanda in the South Bay
@ celticdragon
Oh, I’m just moping around, being bitter and crusty at my ripe old age of 30.
I guess I’m having a hard time distinguishing something here. I mean, yeah, by any objective standard McMegan’s economic credentials are pretty pathetic, but she has written an awful lot over the years about econ and business matters, and if you happened to be conservative/libertarian, how could you not treat her as somewhat of an expert?
Its not as if we’re talking about something like a science where there is one correct answer here, its politics and economics, where arriving at the correct answer, whatever it is, is going to entail a but of subjectivity. Sure, Ezra generally has oodles of factual knowledge and research that Megan generally doesn’t have, but I often wonder how much of that subjective factor can be overlooked simply because we agree with him.
I’m sorry if I can’t seem to get my point across this early in the morning here in California; I guess that explains why I am not a prestigious pundit.
grumpy realist
Pundit == entertainer imagining he/she is an intellectual
And a lot of this is due to the fact that most pundits end up in that position because they can’t do anything else with their lives. Most people with abilities and gumption go off and do other things, like building spaceships and figuring out how to keep people from getting malaria.
There’s a very good reason they get called the “chattering class”, y’know.
And with that, back to work and analyzing a start-up’s patent portfolio….
Susan of Texas
McArdle is important because she is one of the wanna-be Villagers group and is taken seriously by much of the media–she’s been on CNN, the BBC, interview by the New York Times, and so on. But much like the old, lumbering dinosaur Villagers, she bases her analysis on her idiot ideology and personal prejudices. Klein is not much better–he knows more and is smarter, but he also lets ideology and personal biases affect his analysis. Sometimes he’s trustworth, sometimes he’s not, because he is also influenced by a desire to be liked, accepted and respected, which sometimes supercedes telling the truth and dealing with unpleasant facts.
McArdle is as transparent as glass, and through her writings we can see the thought processes of an entire class of men and women who think the poor are lazy scum who must find work (somehow) or they deserve to starve, bankers are an inherently superior group of elite Ubermen who must be allowed to have their way at all times, and eveyone must suffer to preseve her illusion of a free market. She’s stupid, mean and dangerous. That’s why she must be fought.
kindness
I’m seeing most of the posts I put on Kevin’s site are getting flushed down the drain. I can understand that when someone says something obscene or way overboard. But my posts are usually giving him a ‘gentle’ hard time about one of his positions or other.
Thin skinned I guess.
Susan of Texas
Sorry, please ignore the first post.
MNPundit
@kindness: That makes no sense. I troll him about half the time and actually have cussed him out a few times. My posts still get on there. What are you saying?
In fact the only person I troll more than Drum is Yglesias. Ye gods do I troll Yglesias.
Julia Grey
Kindness, I’ve had comments disappear at Kevin’s fairly often, also, and there’s never been a good reason for the toss that I could even imagine. In fact most of the zeroed comments have been pretty banal/ agreeable. I don’t think I’ve even dropped in an inadvertent “damn.”
Once I saw one of these totally blah comments actually show up about fifteen minutes and then later in the day it was gone.
It’s a mystery. I chalk it up to gremlins.