DougJ asks us all a question:
if you were the business and economics editor of Atlantic, would you devote blog posts to analyzing Michelle Obama’s vacation habits?
To understand why McMegan exists at The Atlantic, you need to realize that the magazine doesn’t really care about business or economics. All the other writers there are interested mainly in politics and culture (except perhaps for James Fallows). Nobody else there is qualified to judge McMegan’s output — I doubt they even care that much about what she writes. Similarly, I would guess that most of the readers of The Atlantic don’t give a shit about business or economics, since the website is top-heavy with political and cultural commentary.
Writers who are serious about business and economics write where there’s an audience for those topics, and where the publication takes those topics seriously. Take Felix Salmon at Reuters, or even Paul Krugman at the Times, as examples.
So, McMegan is a hothouse flower. She doesn’t have to put up with any criticism or scrutiny from people that matter to her (colleagues and editors), so can do stuff like blithely ignoring order-of-magnitude errors. When a serious, knowledgeable writer comes across her work, the usual reaction is a jaw drop. And when she emotes about topics like Michelle Obama’s vacation, she probably gets a pat on the head, because she’s writing at a magazine that cares about politics, not economics.
She’s irrelevant to the real conversation about her topic, and we’d be best to mainly ignore her, except to point and laugh, occasionally.
IM
So she is the token economist and because she is a token anyway, she is not even a economist?
An easy billet, as they would say in a Conrad novel.
El Cid
I think in-group dynamics have a lot more to do with these things than people like to consider. Her father was extremely well-connected, and like lots of public commentators biography seems much more important than merit.
matoko_chan
zactly.
the conservative bench is nanowafer thin on females with IQs over two digits.
McMegan only looks smart in comparison to the dimbo brigade that makes up the rest of
mama grizzlietalking dogwymmin conservatives.High IQ women self-select out, or are driven out of conservatism…..like meh. :)
ericblair
If she just said random stupid things it would be one thing; then you can just point and laugh. However, she’s another spray nozzle for the great right-wing puke distribution system. Uppity Negress goes on fancy vacation while the rest of Washington, er, also goes on vacation, except instead of Spain they go to, er, well, to their French and Italian villas after a hard summer of, well, trying to make sure that unemployed people don’t get any money.
She’s The Enemy.
morzer
McArsehole by name, McArsehole by nature. Such is the situation with The Little Glibertarian That Could aka She Who Cannot Divide By Ten.
beltane
The Atlantic could provide a great service to its readers by choosing someone like, say, Barry Ritzholtz , to fill McMegan’s slot. If they insist on providing the viewpoint of a spoiled, not-very-bright, product of an upper-class Manhattan upbringing, perhaps they could mix it up a bit by introducing a revolving roster of bloggers brought in from Chapin, Spence, Brearley, and other elite private schools. The resulting product could not be worse, and may well be far better than anything McArdle has written.
beltane
@matoko_chan: McArdle does not look smart in comparison with the Dimbo Brigade. She just lacks the blonde, call-girl looks that are a hallmark of membership in the brigade. I guess that this is enough to pass as intelligence in the right these days.
El Cid
Maybe I didn’t notice it before, but right off Interstate-85 heading into Atlanta is one of those insane billboard for some local right wing nitwit candidate headlined with “STOP OBAMA” or whatever with the hammer and sickle replacing the final “A”.
This is really unfair. We didn’t get to see Democrats running with “STOP BUSH / CHENEY” replacing the “S” with a Nazi Swastika.
Pancake
Setting aside the usual economic Luddites that post here, who are these “serious, knowledgeable” people? Most economic writers that speak to wide audiences quote her and link to her posts quite frequently.
SiubhanDuinne
@El Cid #2: Doesn’t she claim that her parents are/were academics? Or am I thinking of someone else from the Glibbage?
Pancake
@beltane: Nice illustration of sexism there old man. You and matoko_chan realy do belong back in the early part of the twentieth century.
beltane
@El Cid: The only up-side in seeing billboards like that is that they present an opportunity to fantasize about what the actual Bolsheviks would have done to the teabaggers.
matoko_chan
@Pancake: only the message discipline “conservative” ones.
FYI Jim Manzi and the sane conservos avoid her like the intellectual plague of stupid she is…they never link her.
And real economists only link her to mock her.
beltane
@Pancake: Old Man? Wrong on both counts. But being wrong has never stopped you before, I see.
El Cid
@SiubhanDuinne: I may not know what McAddled claimed, but if she suggested her father was an academic, she was flat out lying. What she did was benefit from a lot of wealthy from a father deep in the large construction businesses of New York with supposedly deep criminal natures mostly funded by public dollars. She’s another silver-spoon spinoff of someone sucking on the public teat who uses her expensive schooling and father’s personal connections to advance herself in elite circles.
It’s the Bill Kristol approach to nepotistic excellence.
soonergrunt
This bears repeating over and over. If McMegan knew anything about business or economics, she’d be blogging somewhere other than the Atlantic.
Omnes Omnibus
@SiubhanDuinne: That was her.
@Pancake: Noticing and calling out sexism is not sexism. Moreover, since it is truly mind-boggling that she has the job she has, one has to look outside normal channels to try to find an explanation.
beltane
@Omnes Omnibus: Thank you. Holding female writers to lower standards than males is the ultimate in sexism.
Omnes Omnibus
@beltane: De rien.
thomas Levenson
I disagree — which isn’t surprising given how many bytes I’ve given to ripping McArdle’s stuff. I was talking with Aimai recently about this, though, and she reminded me that McArdle serves a function: she is there not to speak to the reality based community, but to the echo chamber, helping to shape what it is that would-that-they-were-only 27%ers are supposed to think.
As Aimai put it (and sorry for speaking for you here — correct at will) David Brooks is there to gull the center and left; McArdle serves as ideological officer for the armies of the right.
And I think that’s correct, and I think that is why it is important to build the case at regular intervals that she is something more than a joke; she is, to use the phrase I’m trying to turn into an epithet, Always Wrong.
SiubhanDuinne
@El Cid #8:
I see a similar billboard on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard every single day on my way to work. The “C” in “Obama Change” is the sickle. They’re ads for the nutjob who will quite likely be my next representative in the US House, FSM help me. He’s a Southern Baptist minister named Jody Hice. He’s in a runoff this Tuesday, and if he prevails he will almost certainly win in November, as this is a very Republican district I find myself living in. Not that the bad odds are going to keep me from working hard to keep that from happening. I’ve already told Doug Heckmann’s campaign that I’ll volunteer in the fall (Heckmann is the Dem candidate). Hice is a scary piece of work.
Chad N Freude
@Pancake: It would be helpful to your case if you provided a few names of serious female Republican/conservative writers/bloggers/columnists. Would you include Palin and/or Coulter in such a list?
Chad N Freude
@Pancake: Did you bother to read the “serious, knowledgeable” article DougJ linked to? If so, how would you demonstrate that it is not serious or knowledgeable?
Chad N Freude
@thomas Levenson: “Not always right, never in doubt.”
matoko_chan
@Pancake: lol. virtual chattel slavery of women and children is a republican value.
The talking dogs and mama grizzlies are just recapitulating the traditional semi-slave role of conservative breeder bots.
Anti-abortion laws mean forced breeding, and the anti-SSM argument that marriage is just about breeding children, not raising them.
Women as captive wombs– that is why Palin has to run in 2012, before she becomes post-menopausal.
demo woman
@SiubhanDuinne: Wow!
As we know the sane Repubs in Ga are becoming fewer and fewer. It seems as though the GA candidates are running in a new party called the Conservative Party.
Omnes Omnibus
@thomas Levenson: I guess I fall somewhere between the view that you and Aimai express and that of mistermix. I think that in a rational world she would be
We, however, do not live in that world and those who are willing to put the effort into deconstructing the nonsense perform a valuable service (Thank you, I don’t have the patience to wade through the muck myself). The end result of the deconstruction(ing?) should be to have McMegan be seen by the majority of people as the joke that she is. Taking her seriously should, in other words, turn her into a laughing-stock.
Starfish
@SiubhanDuinne: Wasn’t there a huge uproar about a video on moveon.org comparing Bush to Hitler that led to the video being taken down? Why isn’t there an equal uproar over the crazy Obama stuff with the hammer and sickle stuff? It’s almost as if Democrats believe in freedom of speech even if the speech is given by crazy people.
Bella Q
McMegan: Always Wrong, Never Uncertain.
SiubhanDuinne
@Demo Woman #26: You do realize, don’t you, that if this guy wins we will have two adjacent GA congressional districts (your 6th, my 7th) represented by Price ‘n’ Hice.
@Starfish #28:
Oh, could well be, but I don’t remember that. (I do remember the moveon.org “General Betray Us” ad and the uproar that engendered.)
I *know*! It’s like we actually paid attention to all that First Amendment-y stuff!!
El Cid
@SiubhanDuinne: That’s it. I must have looked at it wrong. I only saw it just as I was passing it by.
Susan of Texas
McArdle was obviously hired to provide “academic” support to corporate taking points (Not necessarily right-wing talking points; she always supports corporations over everyone else.) After she writes a post, it is spread all over the rightwing media as fact-based proof of that propaganda.
Some at the Corner will pick it up–maybe Jonah Goldberg. It will be reprinted in places like Business Insider and linked to by Instapundit. Then the smaller rightwing blogs will pick up the message, and everyone will agree with the propaganda, without having the faintest understanding if they are correct or not.
McArdle goes on CNBC, NPR, CNN, the BBC, and so on and repeat her propaganda. She does Q&As at the Washington Post. She’s interviewed on economic topics by The New York Times. She moderates panels and interviews at corporate gatherings and the Atlantic Ideas Festival. She has very wide exposure and is generally trusted, as a lesser television personality is usually trusted by people who automatically believe any authority.
She is also becoming more wingnutty. She is linking to her tea-bagging astro-turfing Reason husband more and more. She is slamming Elizabeth Warren and praising Paul Ryan. And she wants to get rid of Social Security and Medicare. She is utterly incapable of thinking beyond a narrow spectrum (banks good–workers bad) and utterly ignores the consequences of spreading her propaganda.
A lot of rightwing beliefs come from a place of anger and fear and obedience to their authorities. The left believes in cooperation and respect for the educated and, yes, their authorities. Educated elites on the left want to keep their positions in society and profession as well. So—almost nobody wants to fight for what they want. They don’t want to attack others because they’re afraid they’ll be wrong, people won’t like them, they’ll be attacked for being mean and petty and spiteful, it’ll hurt their career.
Tom’s post on McArdle’s attack on Warren had a huge effect. It forced The Atlantic to chose sides (It chose Warren, via James Fallows) and inspired many other people to respond to McArdle as well. She is now terrified to make another overt attack. We need knowledgeable people to respond to the McArdles, and we need others to keep up the pressure and attacks. Many liberals hate messy public fights, but if we don’t fight, the other side wins by default.
Some of us want to fight, but there’s very little support for us, either moral or financial. So the right will win in the end, and we will watch them start wars, starve the poor, and destroy our country.
Or we’ll get mean, and fight to defend our fellow Americans.
trollhattan
I’d love to ignore her out of existence if that actually worked, but so long as she pops up as a go-to interviewee or quote source as an expert on things economic, she forces us to continue to elevate and mock her vapidity and mock anybody using her as a source.
Perhaps she’ll glance back at Sodom and turn into lovely pink salt.
aimai
Hi Tom, weird to interact via internet (!). I think I’d like to refine my position a little bit on Megan’s position in the ATlantic and in what passes for our discourse. Megan is a placeholder. She is literally holding the place that, in a better world. would go to someone else with an actual education and an actual brain, as well as the associated other metaphorical body parts like a heart. That matters. Why does it matter? Becuase as long as Megan holds down the spot at the Atlantic that might have gone to an intelligent center/leftist then there’s no space left for that discussion to happen. Instead we are forced to have the discussion Megan wants to have.
Now, Megan doesn’t want anything–anymore than Jonah “I can’t be bothered to do more than pick up my check” “wants” to blog. She fell down into this position because her place at the trough for MBA’s fell through after 9/11. She’s essentially underemployed for her class status. She’d be just as bad, if not worse, with more money. But she wouldn’t even be bothering to blog if she were raking in the big bucks for selling shit to senior citizens and pension funds or whatever else her MBA was for.
So what does she blog for? She blogs for money. Its a straight up quid pro quo. No ordinary Atlantic reader is interested in her pathetic ideas. They are warmed over Ayn Randian nonsense, backed up by a tissue of lies, excuses, and the lady version of Jonah’s farts. She is a paid propagandist–she’s paid to misdirect the discussion. She’s paid to bamboozle her readers. She’s paid to lie about things.
I think mistermix is right that its also a kind of soft bigotry of low expectations and that they hired her because she’s a gurrrrl and they were low on those. Just like the Times once hired Molly Ivins and then fired her because she actually knew something and was embarrassing them every week by showing up their other hacks. In Megan’s case they could be sure that Megan would never embarrass the big boys by being too far to the center/left or arguing with other people who mattered. And in this country, as far as the moneypeople are concerned, you can’t embarrass people by being wrong and on the right. Only if you are shrill and on the left. And weren’t those the choices? She’s a twofer: female and belligerently right wing. No intelligent, educated woman advocates what Megan advocates. You’d have to be a moron to write like Megan. If they hired her, they wanted her to blog for morons and to make morons happy.
aimai
Mark S.
@thomas Levenson:
But why does The Atlantic go along with this? I could see if she were writing for National Review or Reason, but why does a magazine with the pedigree The Atlantic has feel the need to cater to the knuckle-draggers?
I will give Megan credit for one thing: she’s a very good bullshitter. She knows the jargon and it makes her sound like she knows what she’s talking about. As Prof Levenson can attest, it takes a lot of work to debunk some of the things she says, since it often requires doing things like reading some technical paper to discover where she lied about what it said. Hell, last night I wasted a fair amount of time reading a CBO report because I was pretty sure she and her new boyfriend Paul Ryan were full of it. The average schmoe ain’t gonna bother with that.
That doesn’t excuse the people who hire her, though.
SiubhanDuinne
@Susan of Texas #32:
I assume this was a typo, but “corporate *taking* points” has to be one of the best things I’ve seen on this blog! Perfect!
serge
God, I love this place and the commenters (for the most part). I liked mistermix’s take, and especially liked aimai’s comment (BTW and FWIW, aimai, I remain an idolator of your grandfather).
Megan McCardle isn’t the only reason I canceled my scrip to The Atlantic Monthly, that was Jeffrey Goldberg’s doing, though I named McCardle along with Ms Flanagan, and Messrs Sullivan and Hitchens as co-conspirators in the magazine’s loss of a few bucks per year.
I’ll miss Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows and the tradition of a journal that has been published for more than a 140 years. To David Bradley I say, “Fuck you.”
aimai
Oh, bugger, the machine ate my post. First, a shout out to Susan of Texas who is the godmother of all bloggers who ever blog about McCardle. If blog posts were really on fire Megan would have been long since incinerated.
But here’s the thing. I want to add something. Well, two things. First, Megan and her position at the Atlantic remind me of something that happened when I was a teeny, tiny, undergradute at Harvard. Supposedly, a young woman I knew was fucking her way to several small fellowships. I was shocked. Not shocked that she would do it. But shocked that the tutors and other trustees of the fellowship would trade something that seemed to important (the fellowship) for something that seemed so unimportant (sex). One of my friends looked at me very pityingly when I expressed my surprise and said, very slowly, “Don’t you get it? The fellowship isn’t important, to the guys who are sitting on the committees. They hand them out every year. Sex, on the other hand, is hard to come by. And its for their own benefit.”
The analogy isn’t to sex. I’m not saying Megan slept her way to her rather unimportant position. I’m saying that whether she does it well, or ill to people like us is meaningless. We don’t matter. And her blog doesn’t matter. The gratification factor is produced, for the ownership class, by the fact that she produces to rule. To an outsider the position “blogger for the Atlantic” seems like a big deal. I mean, you are part of the ongoing public political conversation! But to the guys who cut the checks? You are just a content provider. One of dozens of nearly identical widgets. If you want to see what content they are paying her to provide you just have to see what she *is* providing. Just like you don’t look at the Zoo keeper and ask why he’s shoveling the manure out of the Zebra enclosure and not making great art. He’s not paid to make art. He’s paid to shovel the shit.
Also, bamboozlement itself matters. Recently on the online AnnLanders site I noticed a commenter observing “Obama wants to force our military men to pay for their own health care.” I’m pretty sure this is a mishearing of a Republican policy prescription. But who is to contradict it? With the amount of sheer disinformation flying around the money men who back people like Megan can be sure that either no one will call them on their lies, or that composition bias will cause them to attribute all bad policies to their political enemies. Megan’s part of that big machine of lies that makes rational discourse impossible. And that’s a goal in and of itself.
aimai
ksmiami
You forgot to mention Bloomberg. The place where Murdoch drove all the non-crazy biz types.
But their black screen is way better than their new format.
russell
OK, that makes sense.
What I want to know is WTF is she doing on public radio?
Susan of Texas
Thanks, aimai.
I had a post eaten also, that said The Atlantic is getting exactly what they want; a hack.
A hack, moreover, who depends on the goodwill and mutual back-scratching club of DC bloggers and their patrons. Who’s going to call out McArdle-Weigel, Ackerman, Klein, Yglesias, Beutler, Sanchez? They all went to her wedding.
Anne Laurie
@aimai:
I am so stealing this!
Susan of Texas
McArdle makes the mistake of trying to engage Kevin Drum and his commenters.
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2010/08/paul-ryan-flimflam-man?page=1
Tom Levenson
@aimai: Weird indeed to meet in these halls, but fun.
I think you’re on target in your sense of Megan as a negative asset — one selected to prevent something worse (better from our point of view) occupying her place and status.
I’m not sure about your pure blog-for-money analysis though; I think Megan has found she really likes aping the role of an authority (hence, imho, her truly bizarre “intellectually intimidating family” rap of a few weeks ago. No reason to go off like that if you don’t feel an element of your identity under threat.)
And finally, I do believe, as I understood you to argue to me, that she serves an affirmative function: she creates a veneer of intellectual cover (look! I’ve read the sources and understand them better than anyone!) to views that would be risible if they weren’t so deadly.
That there are others who are as or more damaging to public discourse is absolutely true. I think Brooks poses a bigger threat, for example, and there are others. I wouldn’t want to spend all my time chasing down MM’s errors, if only because she’s just too banal a writer to read that much. But she’s still a danger to the republic, IMHO, and should be treated accordingly.
Jymn
You can always tell an uptight puritanical authoritarian when they begin any statement with “I’m no prude … BUT…” And that’s just what Megs has done here.
CalD
__
Questions like this really highlight the reason why DougJ will never be Business and Economics editor of the Atlantic: He just doesn’t get it.
[/snarkasm]
Mark S.
@Susan of Texas:
Thanks for that link. One of the commenters demolishes the “CBO doesn’t estimate revenue” bullshit McMegan was peddling. I noticed Megan stopped commenting after that. I can’t imagine why.
El Cid
@russell:
Because if there’s some right wing economics hack, they get on “Marketplace.” If there’s some hack featured in the New York Times or other big papers or establishment magazines like the Atlantic, NPR will have them on like clockwork.
If you want to save yourself a lot of time from listening to “Morning Edition,” just read that day’s New York Times, and you’ll get through the same exact material much more quickly.