Read the comments — she shows up, gets her ass spanked, tries to save face and only succeeds in digging the hole deeper.
Megan McArdle: Wingnut welfare at its finest. The conblogger for the Cons who think they think.
5.
El Cid
@dmsilev: ‘Just because I’m stupid and uninformed and contradict myself is no evidence that I’m a worthless fraud idiot as a public intellectual. Also, shut up.’
Why would he want to delete any comments of hers? Especially when she’s doing such a signal job of shooting at her own feet.
7.
dmsilev
Favorite comments:
McArdle: “And if you have developed a way for the United States government to securitize the cash flows from repealing the Bush tax cuts over the next 75 years, that would be very useful.”
Brad DeLong: “This is unbelievable.
Thats what the government does when it borrows.
Thats what the marketable debt of the government is.
The government takes its future expected cash flows and… securitizes them.
Thats why government bonds are called securities, after all: they are the securitized future tax cash flows.”
Has that woman ever been correct about *anything* beyond excessively expensive sea salts?
She has the Sarah Palin approach to criticism. Never met an insult she could just ignore, so digs herself in even deeper and makes herself look even dumber to ‘set the record straight,’ apparently not realizing her record speaks pretty clearly for itself.
I would love to know what her fellow Atlantic columnists think of her and the constant, legitimate criticism she attracts…
9.
Dave L
Favorite comment:
McCardle: “Oops.”
10.
beltane
It’s not fair. I would be The Atlantic’s professional idiot for half of what they’re paying McDipshit. Why won’t they give me the job?
11.
NonyNony
Wow. That is some McArdle fail in that blog entry.
What is McArdle’s degree actually in? Because I know that government debt is a securitization against future cash inflow. And I’m not a fancy-shmancy business school graduate or anything. I just pay attention to how the national debt works and know that the phrase “stealing from our grandchildren” isn’t just a marketing slogan around election time but is actually a phenomenon that is paying for our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (thanks to Bush preferring to run his wars on credit instead of raising taxes to pay for them like every other War President(tm) has).
Is her degree really in Economics? Or does she speak from the authority of someone with a graduate degree in Marketing or something?
ETA: Dear Grod I looked it up. Wikipedia says she has an MBA from Chicago Booth School of Business. No wonder she flails about basic economics. And I apologize to all those marketers I unfairly maligned with my guess that she had a graduate degree in Marketing.
12.
Crashman
@dmsilev: Holy crap those comments are priceless. I literally laughed out loud. Made my day.
@dmsilev: Agreed. The comments section is fine holiday fun!
14.
liberal
@jacy:
Actually, in the case of Brad DeLong, it’s a reasonable concern. I stopped reading BDL’s blog (except occasionally when following links from other blogs) because he’s such a douche about deleting comments that he disagrees with (on both the left and the right).
15.
El Cid
How about a job in right wing talk radio where I could talk about all the inflation and how hyperinflation is coming no matter how contrary to fact it is? Also, buy gold.
16.
liberal
@beltane:
Insufficient inclination to prostitute yourself for the rich and powerful? Just a guess…
17.
The Moar You Know
Sigh. I clicked. I shouldn’t have.
I had the misfortune to be raised around a lot of rich, private-school kids. Including some that are on the wingnut welfare circuit right now.
McArdle isn’t one of the ones I knew personally, but goddamn if she doesn’t sound exactly like them. So sure of the bullshit that their professors taught them, regurgitating arguments that they don’t really understand and that would never have any applicability to the real world, degenerating into defensive goalpost moving when proven wrong and then, as McArdle does in the linked article, quit the field of combat entirely when the inevitable handing of the ass to oneself occurs. It is truly embarrassing, as one commenter over at DeLong’s place notes, that some of us went to the same schools that these people did. They directly harm the value of our degrees. And it seems the more “educated” they are, the stupider they get.
Funny thing about people like my old high school friends, and people like her; they are utterly, completely useless in the real world. You couldn’t train them to work at a Starbucks or a Denny’s, as they’d fuck it up so badly that it would necessitate their firing within a day. They are literally unemployable.
And they’d be telling you why you were wrong to fire them, and wrong to run your business the way you do, as you walked their sorry asses out the door. They’re no damned good for anything at all, and yet have the unmitigated gall to whine about how other people are useless and a drain on the economy.
As a society, we pay far less for some homeless unemployable drunk pouring a 40 down his throat than we do for people like McArdle. She’s a representative of the cancer that is killing America.
18.
John S.
@NonyNony:
No offense taken. Those of us in advertising and marketing are accustomed to being deemed odious due to our endless task of shining shit for business executives.
19.
jl
I agree, people should read the comments, they are a short course in the rationale behind, the uses, abuses and approaches to sensitivity analysis of, present value analysis.
And McArdle does not seem to understand any of it, though she does not respond to some of the later comments, so it’s unfair to extend that observation to the whole thread.
Now, present value analysis, evaluation of its robustness to critical assumptions (hint: use of arbitrary time horizons and and choice of discount rate) should be a core skill in anyone with a business degree.
The MBAs who worked in real estate and pensions I dealt with when I worked in finance had that stuff down cold, they could do it in their head and then even write their mental analysis down on paper when requested.
Krugman in his blog today has a post where he addresses the problem with the McArdle school in using inconsistant and arbitrary time horizons to get the answers they want.
@The Moar You Know: On the contrary, it takes extreme amounts of insight and entrepreneurial spirit to choose to whom to be born and the elite peer group promotion system which this engenders.
Wow. Just wow. At what point does the Atlantic decide that the cumulative embarrassment of McMegan’s nonsense (“X”) outweighs the potential loss of face from firing her ass (“Y”)?
Hopefully they’ll include some conservative projections of her future foul-ups, discounted at a reasonable rate, in X.
Wow. Just wow. At what point does the Atlantic decide that the cumulative embarrassment of McMegan’s nonsense (“X”) outweighs the potential loss of face from firing her ass (“Y”)?
You’re assuming that the Atlantic editors don’t think that Megan’s nonsense “X” is a positive value.
I think that assumption is wrong. They pay Megan to spout nonsense because Megan spouts the nonsense they want her to spout.
We’re talking about a woman who used to blog under the name “Jane Galt” here. The Atlantic knew exactly what they were getting when they hired her, and we have to assume that that’s what they wanted.
24.
Joshua
Brad’s first response to McMegan, where he points out that the government actually does securitize its debt (in the form of this fancy pants financial instrument called a “bond”), sums it all up for me. I mean… look at her first two in the comments. She tried so hard.
Valid point. Pity TNC for having to pretend to take her seriously. (Sully’s too thick on economic matters to know any better, IMO.)
26.
Ash Can
@Hugin & Munin: Oh, go jump in the lake. This was one of the most entertaining links I’ve clicked on in ages.
McArdle must be sleeping with someone on the editorial board of The Atlantic, or the Koch brothers have incriminating videos, or both. I can’t imagine how she keeps her job otherwise; she’s obviously in way over her head.
ETA: aimai hit one in the comments that was still going up when it cleared the outfield fence, and hasn’t landed yet.
27.
Shinobi
Sometimes I wonder if McArdle is just a sock puppet being used to discredit the abilities of women in the field of economics.
Good God in heaven! The comment thread count is up to about 100 over there, and McMegan is STILL in there throwing wild haymakers:
“Present value is great stuff! I am present value’s #1 fan! But like every other financial metric, it will occasionally give you absurd results if not watched closely. Particularly, as in this case, when they require aggressive assumptions about revenue growth, and the puzzling inclusion of a trust fund that does not exist from the perspective of the unified budget deficit, to make the numbers come out to be the same size.”
– Is it possible that these posts are counterfeits, pastiches constructed by somebody with a picture-perfect command of Megan’s voice? She could sue for libel, except that she presumably agrees with this nonsense.
30.
Omnes Omnibus
The sad thing is, I want to like The Atlantic. In theory, it is exactly the type of magazine to which I should subscribe and which I should read. An entertainingly written, intelligent journal with a liberal editorial slant and wide ranging subject matter, not to mention its history… Woohoo! In practice, however, it employs McMegan as Business and Economic Editor and provides a “respectable” home for Jeffrey Goldberg’s warmongering. This sucks.
31.
Marc
I would have felt embarrassed for her if she showed any evidence that she was capable of the same emotion.
She’s throwing around jargon in the hope that people will be impressed. If you actually know what the words mean, on the other hand, it’s a convincing demonstration of utter ignorance.
An analogy that I give my students is that they wouldn’t answer a history exam question, such as “Trace the causes of the War of 1812” by writing “The Germans provoked US entry into the war by landing on June 4th at the beaches on D-Day singing “Over There, Over There”. The British didn’t help matters by having the redcoats march on Lexington and Concord, alienating the colonials by fighting the pirate captains defending the cities…”
That’s what it reads like when you throw together scientific, or economic, ideas together in a heap without understanding what they mean or even whether you’ve used them properly.
32.
El Cid
@The Moar You Know: In the Bush Jr. administration such lack of skill and competence would earn you a medal.
33.
El Cid
@Marc: Okay, well, maybe, if you limit “the War of 1812” to the beginning of the 19th century. A more expansive view would include early 20th century developments as a way of interpreting and thus retroactively including those latter developments as reverse causes of the War of 1812. And I write that simply because I just saw a Discovery Channel documentary about WW1 and I don’t know anything about the War of 1812 except that little song.
34.
Shinobi
@Fergus Wooster: I think you’re forgetting “Z” traffic acquired by people linking to Megan’s posts and goggling at her stupidity.
35.
Omnes Omnibus
@Marc: Well, the British marching on Lexington and Concord were a cause. No American Revolution, no War of 1812.
Wow. Just wow. At what point does the Atlantic decide that the cumulative embarrassment of McMegan’s nonsense (“X”) outweighs the potential loss of face from firing her ass (“Y”)?
They don’t. Even her idiocy generates page views as people point out her continuing stupidity and link to her posts at the Atlantic. Page views=advertising revenue=good in the minds of her Atlantic overlords.
She’d have to publish something that put her overlords’ financial stability in peril to have her job security threatened. Either that or a dead boy/live girl scenario. Does that work with women or would the live girl thing just be considered hot?
37.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: You did that far too well. Seek help or start drinking heavily… but I repeat myself.
38.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: This is too sensible. You’re going to have to do worse in order to argue like McMoran.
39.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ve seen some pretty bad essay question answers to college exam topics by people who had no idea what the question even referred to. Their only hint would have been “United States” and “1812”, and they’d roll from that.
Creative! That’s actually pretty typical for what we see from struggling science students. They know, for example, that Newton had three laws, and so did Kepler, and there were a few properties of light that we talked about. So when trying to explain why the surface of Jupiter is colder than that of the Earth they toss together things which are irrelevant with those that are wrong and those which are sort of right but garbled. Like those tricky inland pirates…
42.
El Cid
@Marc: Jupiter is colder because it hasn’t had the global warming that the Earth has and also because it’s bigger so it’s harder to take its temperature.
43.
ploeg
@Violet: Does the Atlantic actually make a profit? I didn’t think that they made a profit even in the pre-Internet glory days.
@El Cid: I haven’t done this in years, but I am guessing: trade and shipping conflicts; disputes over expansion into the Ohio valley and beyond; and tensions between US and Canada in general due to British concentration on defeating Napoleon and the US try to push for advantage?
Does the Atlantic actually make a profit? I didn’t think that they made a profit even in the pre-Internet glory days.
I don’t know if they make money or not, but they must make some money because they’ve got advertisers. Didn’t they also have the Mercedes tent at the Aspen Ideas Festival, or something like that? It was all rather hoity toity and ridiculous sounding.
When the story broke about the Washington Post holding those dinners where DC types could meet with power brokers, or whatever, didn’t Sully admit that The Atlantic also did/does something along those lines? I think he called it a “salon” and yes, they charged money for it.
49.
Hugin & Munin
Zandar: Like everything else on the Family Guy, that joke was stolen.
50.
Ash Can
Megan McArdle is the Florence Foster Jenkins of economics.
51.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, that would have sounded like a researcher of the early 19th century US and British foreign policy compared to the off-the-cuff crap I’ve seen. Including McMoron. You know, “1812 was in a difficult time because it was very early in the US’ history” and so forth.
@Zandar: Fitting, as some of her economic assertions are similar to “You’re doing the same thing that Mia Farrow did to that Chinaman that Woody Allen brought home from the circus!”
53.
ploeg
@Violet: You can have advertisers and sell subscriptions and still not make a profit. Even in the best of times, the function of a magazine like the Atlantic is to give the publisher a prestige title that the publisher can use to hobnob with the rich, famous, and powerful.
54.
The Moar You Know
Two words: Dunning Kruger.
@slag: been looking for that all my life. Thank you!
I have long seen it called a “vanity” publication that gets grouped in with things like the Weekly Standard and TNR because it operates in the red and depends on a sugar daddy.
56.
Sentient Puddle
McArdle on Goolsbee:
Goolsbee was one of my favorite professors at the University of Chicago
Apply Megan’s Lemma and…bummer. I’m actually a fan of Goolsbee.
Although to be fair, she relates a story about how he totally eviscerates her. So there’s that.
57.
fasteddie9318
I wonder if Megan thinks that those places that will buy annuities for lump sums are all charities. After all, the only reason it looks like they’re buying those annuities at a tidy profit is because they’re doing a present value calculation, which she’s demonstrated is total bullshit. They must simply be in it for the thrill of helping people.
@ploeg:
Yes, I should have been clearer. They obviously take in some money because of the advertising, etc. Whether that’s enough for it to make a profit is something else entirely.
I see a vanity publication as somewhat different than, say, a non-profit type enterprise. The Atlantic would probably love to make a profit, but they don’t/can’t.
60.
shecky
Ouch, that smarts! McArdle clearly had her ass handed to her painfully. Reading the comment section, it started to hurt me. Please, Megan, learn to recognize a defeat gracefully.
61.
abscam
Just read it through and laughed my ass off. Kudos to our own El Cid and aimai for their contributions.
62.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I love it when she really digs in on the stupid, her responses get word-saladier (we do get to make up words now, right?) and she tosses in the BIG words just to flex her intellectual midgetry. Maybe Atlantic keeps her because she draws more hits than someone who makes sense?
It was heartening to see that of the respondents to a text poll on the Mr. Ed Show, 81% agree that President Obama is doing everything he can to help the American people.
I bet Mr. Ed haz a sad.
63.
Sly
And if you have developed a way for the United States government to securitize the cash flows from repealing the Bush tax cuts over the next 75 years, that would be very useful.
Business and Economics Editor, folks.
64.
Comrade Kevin
McArdle is like “Sally Jockstrap” in the British magazine Private eye:
a fictional sports columnist who is incapable of correctly reporting any sporting facts. Her articles are usually a mishmash of references with several sports, along the lines of “there was drama at Twickenham as Michael Schumacher double faulted to give Arsenal victory”.
65.
MikeBoyScout
I’ve never commented on Brad’s post… before today… because I took him very seriously (not to be equated with Very Serious People).
Anywho, for those who enjoy the comic train wreck which is McMegan criticism, Megan McArdle Really Hates Sex at Dawn is an instant classic (h/t Sadly No!) right up there with the Kwanzaa gift of premium elite fine-grain classic rose-colored Himalayan salt.
ps. I am not buying that it is actually McMegan commenting on that thread. At best it is a stoned McMegan staff member.
66.
lawnorder
I was reading that and immediately came here to share but you guys saw it first.
She reminds me of my college roommate who at a college test and asked something so absurd the teacher sat right behind him and watched him like a hawk. There was no way that guy knew any of the topics after that dumb question!
@Ash Can: cetaceans paramours, Megan McArdle is the Piltdown Woman of economics. Pieced together from parts that don’t really go together but sufficiently well to fool those that want to be fooled
69.
sparky
IMO aimai’s analysis is correct. M. is paid for her work as a shill, that is, for generating strings of words that appear to make sense. that they don’t is largely irrelevant, as her production is designed for ease of assimilation not accuracy. consequently, as aimai noted, there is no alternative other than, unfortunately, demonstrating, repeatedly, that lullabies are not, after all, identical to the laws of the physical world.
as for myself, i think she is not at all dumb. she does appear to have conflated being clever with being smart, but as she seems to have figured out a living by doing that i’m loath to say she’s not smart.
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Hugin & Munin
McUnsurprising.
You and DougJ need new hobbies.
Try masturbation, is more useful then McWrong-gazing.
dmsilev
The comments in that thread are wonderful. Especially once McArdle shows up and tries to defend herself.
dms
jacy
The bestest part is that McMegan throws herself all over the comments repeatedly like a chunky Reese Witherspoon and then adds with an asterisk:
Phoenix Woman
Read the comments — she shows up, gets her ass spanked, tries to save face and only succeeds in digging the hole deeper.
Megan McArdle: Wingnut welfare at its finest. The conblogger for the Cons who think they think.
El Cid
@dmsilev: ‘Just because I’m stupid and uninformed and contradict myself is no evidence that I’m a worthless fraud idiot as a public intellectual. Also, shut up.’
Phoenix Woman
@jacy:
Why would he want to delete any comments of hers? Especially when she’s doing such a signal job of shooting at her own feet.
dmsilev
Favorite comments:
McArdle: “And if you have developed a way for the United States government to securitize the cash flows from repealing the Bush tax cuts over the next 75 years, that would be very useful.”
Brad DeLong: “This is unbelievable.
Thats what the government does when it borrows.
Thats what the marketable debt of the government is.
The government takes its future expected cash flows and… securitizes them.
Thats why government bonds are called securities, after all: they are the securitized future tax cash flows.”
Has that woman ever been correct about *anything* beyond excessively expensive sea salts?
dms
Mickey7
She has the Sarah Palin approach to criticism. Never met an insult she could just ignore, so digs herself in even deeper and makes herself look even dumber to ‘set the record straight,’ apparently not realizing her record speaks pretty clearly for itself.
I would love to know what her fellow Atlantic columnists think of her and the constant, legitimate criticism she attracts…
Dave L
Favorite comment:
McCardle: “Oops.”
beltane
It’s not fair. I would be The Atlantic’s professional idiot for half of what they’re paying McDipshit. Why won’t they give me the job?
NonyNony
Wow. That is some McArdle fail in that blog entry.
What is McArdle’s degree actually in? Because I know that government debt is a securitization against future cash inflow. And I’m not a fancy-shmancy business school graduate or anything. I just pay attention to how the national debt works and know that the phrase “stealing from our grandchildren” isn’t just a marketing slogan around election time but is actually a phenomenon that is paying for our adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (thanks to Bush preferring to run his wars on credit instead of raising taxes to pay for them like every other War President(tm) has).
Is her degree really in Economics? Or does she speak from the authority of someone with a graduate degree in Marketing or something?
ETA: Dear Grod I looked it up. Wikipedia says she has an MBA from Chicago Booth School of Business. No wonder she flails about basic economics. And I apologize to all those marketers I unfairly maligned with my guess that she had a graduate degree in Marketing.
Crashman
@dmsilev: Holy crap those comments are priceless. I literally laughed out loud. Made my day.
slag
@dmsilev: Agreed. The comments section is fine holiday fun!
liberal
@jacy:
Actually, in the case of Brad DeLong, it’s a reasonable concern. I stopped reading BDL’s blog (except occasionally when following links from other blogs) because he’s such a douche about deleting comments that he disagrees with (on both the left and the right).
El Cid
How about a job in right wing talk radio where I could talk about all the inflation and how hyperinflation is coming no matter how contrary to fact it is? Also, buy gold.
liberal
@beltane:
Insufficient inclination to prostitute yourself for the rich and powerful? Just a guess…
The Moar You Know
Sigh. I clicked. I shouldn’t have.
I had the misfortune to be raised around a lot of rich, private-school kids. Including some that are on the wingnut welfare circuit right now.
McArdle isn’t one of the ones I knew personally, but goddamn if she doesn’t sound exactly like them. So sure of the bullshit that their professors taught them, regurgitating arguments that they don’t really understand and that would never have any applicability to the real world, degenerating into defensive goalpost moving when proven wrong and then, as McArdle does in the linked article, quit the field of combat entirely when the inevitable handing of the ass to oneself occurs. It is truly embarrassing, as one commenter over at DeLong’s place notes, that some of us went to the same schools that these people did. They directly harm the value of our degrees. And it seems the more “educated” they are, the stupider they get.
Funny thing about people like my old high school friends, and people like her; they are utterly, completely useless in the real world. You couldn’t train them to work at a Starbucks or a Denny’s, as they’d fuck it up so badly that it would necessitate their firing within a day. They are literally unemployable.
And they’d be telling you why you were wrong to fire them, and wrong to run your business the way you do, as you walked their sorry asses out the door. They’re no damned good for anything at all, and yet have the unmitigated gall to whine about how other people are useless and a drain on the economy.
As a society, we pay far less for some homeless unemployable drunk pouring a 40 down his throat than we do for people like McArdle. She’s a representative of the cancer that is killing America.
John S.
@NonyNony:
No offense taken. Those of us in advertising and marketing are accustomed to being deemed odious due to our endless task of shining shit for business executives.
jl
I agree, people should read the comments, they are a short course in the rationale behind, the uses, abuses and approaches to sensitivity analysis of, present value analysis.
And McArdle does not seem to understand any of it, though she does not respond to some of the later comments, so it’s unfair to extend that observation to the whole thread.
Now, present value analysis, evaluation of its robustness to critical assumptions (hint: use of arbitrary time horizons and and choice of discount rate) should be a core skill in anyone with a business degree.
The MBAs who worked in real estate and pensions I dealt with when I worked in finance had that stuff down cold, they could do it in their head and then even write their mental analysis down on paper when requested.
Krugman in his blog today has a post where he addresses the problem with the McArdle school in using inconsistant and arbitrary time horizons to get the answers they want.
slag
@The Moar You Know: Two words: Dunning Kruger.
El Cid
@The Moar You Know: On the contrary, it takes extreme amounts of insight and entrepreneurial spirit to choose to whom to be born and the elite peer group promotion system which this engenders.
Fergus Wooster
Wow. Just wow. At what point does the Atlantic decide that the cumulative embarrassment of McMegan’s nonsense (“X”) outweighs the potential loss of face from firing her ass (“Y”)?
Hopefully they’ll include some conservative projections of her future foul-ups, discounted at a reasonable rate, in X.
NonyNony
@Fergus Wooster:
You’re assuming that the Atlantic editors don’t think that Megan’s nonsense “X” is a positive value.
I think that assumption is wrong. They pay Megan to spout nonsense because Megan spouts the nonsense they want her to spout.
We’re talking about a woman who used to blog under the name “Jane Galt” here. The Atlantic knew exactly what they were getting when they hired her, and we have to assume that that’s what they wanted.
Joshua
Brad’s first response to McMegan, where he points out that the government actually does securitize its debt (in the form of this fancy pants financial instrument called a “bond”), sums it all up for me. I mean… look at her first two in the comments. She tried so hard.
Isn’t The Atlantic paying her $200,000 a year?
Fergus Wooster
@NonyNony:
Valid point. Pity TNC for having to pretend to take her seriously. (Sully’s too thick on economic matters to know any better, IMO.)
Ash Can
@Hugin & Munin: Oh, go jump in the lake. This was one of the most entertaining links I’ve clicked on in ages.
McArdle must be sleeping with someone on the editorial board of The Atlantic, or the Koch brothers have incriminating videos, or both. I can’t imagine how she keeps her job otherwise; she’s obviously in way over her head.
ETA: aimai hit one in the comments that was still going up when it cleared the outfield fence, and hasn’t landed yet.
Shinobi
Sometimes I wonder if McArdle is just a sock puppet being used to discredit the abilities of women in the field of economics.
Phoenix Woman
@The Moar You Know:
That, sir, is a blog post.
Dave L
Good God in heaven! The comment thread count is up to about 100 over there, and McMegan is STILL in there throwing wild haymakers:
“Present value is great stuff! I am present value’s #1 fan! But like every other financial metric, it will occasionally give you absurd results if not watched closely. Particularly, as in this case, when they require aggressive assumptions about revenue growth, and the puzzling inclusion of a trust fund that does not exist from the perspective of the unified budget deficit, to make the numbers come out to be the same size.”
– Is it possible that these posts are counterfeits, pastiches constructed by somebody with a picture-perfect command of Megan’s voice? She could sue for libel, except that she presumably agrees with this nonsense.
Omnes Omnibus
The sad thing is, I want to like The Atlantic. In theory, it is exactly the type of magazine to which I should subscribe and which I should read. An entertainingly written, intelligent journal with a liberal editorial slant and wide ranging subject matter, not to mention its history… Woohoo! In practice, however, it employs McMegan as Business and Economic Editor and provides a “respectable” home for Jeffrey Goldberg’s warmongering. This sucks.
Marc
I would have felt embarrassed for her if she showed any evidence that she was capable of the same emotion.
She’s throwing around jargon in the hope that people will be impressed. If you actually know what the words mean, on the other hand, it’s a convincing demonstration of utter ignorance.
An analogy that I give my students is that they wouldn’t answer a history exam question, such as “Trace the causes of the War of 1812” by writing “The Germans provoked US entry into the war by landing on June 4th at the beaches on D-Day singing “Over There, Over There”. The British didn’t help matters by having the redcoats march on Lexington and Concord, alienating the colonials by fighting the pirate captains defending the cities…”
That’s what it reads like when you throw together scientific, or economic, ideas together in a heap without understanding what they mean or even whether you’ve used them properly.
El Cid
@The Moar You Know: In the Bush Jr. administration such lack of skill and competence would earn you a medal.
El Cid
@Marc: Okay, well, maybe, if you limit “the War of 1812” to the beginning of the 19th century. A more expansive view would include early 20th century developments as a way of interpreting and thus retroactively including those latter developments as reverse causes of the War of 1812. And I write that simply because I just saw a Discovery Channel documentary about WW1 and I don’t know anything about the War of 1812 except that little song.
Shinobi
@Fergus Wooster: I think you’re forgetting “Z” traffic acquired by people linking to Megan’s posts and goggling at her stupidity.
Omnes Omnibus
@Marc: Well, the British marching on Lexington and Concord were a cause. No American Revolution, no War of 1812.
Violet
@Fergus Wooster:
They don’t. Even her idiocy generates page views as people point out her continuing stupidity and link to her posts at the Atlantic. Page views=advertising revenue=good in the minds of her Atlantic overlords.
She’d have to publish something that put her overlords’ financial stability in peril to have her job security threatened. Either that or a dead boy/live girl scenario. Does that work with women or would the live girl thing just be considered hot?
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: You did that far too well. Seek help or start drinking heavily… but I repeat myself.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: This is too sensible. You’re going to have to do worse in order to argue like McMoran.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: I’ve seen some pretty bad essay question answers to college exam topics by people who had no idea what the question even referred to. Their only hint would have been “United States” and “1812”, and they’d roll from that.
Omnes Omnibus
@Violet: Hot, probably.
Marc
@Omnes Omnibus:
Creative! That’s actually pretty typical for what we see from struggling science students. They know, for example, that Newton had three laws, and so did Kepler, and there were a few properties of light that we talked about. So when trying to explain why the surface of Jupiter is colder than that of the Earth they toss together things which are irrelevant with those that are wrong and those which are sort of right but garbled. Like those tricky inland pirates…
El Cid
@Marc: Jupiter is colder because it hasn’t had the global warming that the Earth has and also because it’s bigger so it’s harder to take its temperature.
ploeg
@Violet: Does the Atlantic actually make a profit? I didn’t think that they made a profit even in the pre-Internet glory days.
Napoleon
@Shinobi:
If so my money is on it being Larry Summers, with his history.
Fergus Wooster
@Violet: Probably hot. It would take a dead boy.
Omnes Omnibus
@El Cid: I haven’t done this in years, but I am guessing: trade and shipping conflicts; disputes over expansion into the Ohio valley and beyond; and tensions between US and Canada in general due to British concentration on defeating Napoleon and the US try to push for advantage?
Zandar
So, McArdle is Peter Griffin.
“Whatever your instincts tell you, DO THE OPPOSITE. If your instincts tell you not to do it, THEN IT’S PROBABLY A GREAT IDEA.”
Violet
@Fergus Wooster:
Or an underage girl.
@ploeg:
I don’t know if they make money or not, but they must make some money because they’ve got advertisers. Didn’t they also have the Mercedes tent at the Aspen Ideas Festival, or something like that? It was all rather hoity toity and ridiculous sounding.
When the story broke about the Washington Post holding those dinners where DC types could meet with power brokers, or whatever, didn’t Sully admit that The Atlantic also did/does something along those lines? I think he called it a “salon” and yes, they charged money for it.
Hugin & Munin
Zandar: Like everything else on the Family Guy, that joke was stolen.
Ash Can
Megan McArdle is the Florence Foster Jenkins of economics.
El Cid
@Omnes Omnibus: Yeah, that would have sounded like a researcher of the early 19th century US and British foreign policy compared to the off-the-cuff crap I’ve seen. Including McMoron. You know, “1812 was in a difficult time because it was very early in the US’ history” and so forth.
Fergus Wooster
@Zandar: Fitting, as some of her economic assertions are similar to “You’re doing the same thing that Mia Farrow did to that Chinaman that Woody Allen brought home from the circus!”
ploeg
@Violet: You can have advertisers and sell subscriptions and still not make a profit. Even in the best of times, the function of a magazine like the Atlantic is to give the publisher a prestige title that the publisher can use to hobnob with the rich, famous, and powerful.
The Moar You Know
@slag: been looking for that all my life. Thank you!
Napoleon
@Violet:
I have long seen it called a “vanity” publication that gets grouped in with things like the Weekly Standard and TNR because it operates in the red and depends on a sugar daddy.
Sentient Puddle
McArdle on Goolsbee:
Apply Megan’s Lemma and…bummer. I’m actually a fan of Goolsbee.
Although to be fair, she relates a story about how he totally eviscerates her. So there’s that.
fasteddie9318
I wonder if Megan thinks that those places that will buy annuities for lump sums are all charities. After all, the only reason it looks like they’re buying those annuities at a tidy profit is because they’re doing a present value calculation, which she’s demonstrated is total bullshit. They must simply be in it for the thrill of helping people.
Mark S.
That comment thread is brutal.
As for the Atlantic, I read once it operates mostly in the red and the company that owns it makes their money selling $1,000 subscriptions to dipshits for the privilege of reading Richard Cohen and Major Garrett.
Violet
@ploeg:
Yes, I should have been clearer. They obviously take in some money because of the advertising, etc. Whether that’s enough for it to make a profit is something else entirely.
I see a vanity publication as somewhat different than, say, a non-profit type enterprise. The Atlantic would probably love to make a profit, but they don’t/can’t.
shecky
Ouch, that smarts! McArdle clearly had her ass handed to her painfully. Reading the comment section, it started to hurt me. Please, Megan, learn to recognize a defeat gracefully.
abscam
Just read it through and laughed my ass off. Kudos to our own El Cid and aimai for their contributions.
Odie Hugh Manatee
I love it when she really digs in on the stupid, her responses get word-saladier (we do get to make up words now, right?) and she tosses in the BIG words just to flex her intellectual midgetry. Maybe Atlantic keeps her because she draws more hits than someone who makes sense?
It was heartening to see that of the respondents to a text poll on the Mr. Ed Show, 81% agree that President Obama is doing everything he can to help the American people.
I bet Mr. Ed haz a sad.
Sly
Business and Economics Editor, folks.
Comrade Kevin
McArdle is like “Sally Jockstrap” in the British magazine Private eye:
MikeBoyScout
I’ve never commented on Brad’s post… before today… because I took him very seriously (not to be equated with Very Serious People).
Anywho, for those who enjoy the comic train wreck which is McMegan criticism, Megan McArdle Really Hates Sex at Dawn
is an instant classic (h/t Sadly No!) right up there with the Kwanzaa gift of premium elite fine-grain classic rose-colored Himalayan salt.
ps. I am not buying that it is actually McMegan commenting on that thread. At best it is a stoned McMegan staff member.
lawnorder
I was reading that and immediately came here to share but you guys saw it first.
She reminds me of my college roommate who at a college test and asked something so absurd the teacher sat right behind him and watched him like a hawk. There was no way that guy knew any of the topics after that dumb question!
And she keeps on digging!
Jaim
My god, she’s an idiot.
Bill Murray
@Ash Can: cetaceans paramours, Megan McArdle is the Piltdown Woman of economics. Pieced together from parts that don’t really go together but sufficiently well to fool those that want to be fooled
sparky
IMO aimai’s analysis is correct. M. is paid for her work as a shill, that is, for generating strings of words that appear to make sense. that they don’t is largely irrelevant, as her production is designed for ease of assimilation not accuracy. consequently, as aimai noted, there is no alternative other than, unfortunately, demonstrating, repeatedly, that lullabies are not, after all, identical to the laws of the physical world.
as for myself, i think she is not at all dumb. she does appear to have conflated being clever with being smart, but as she seems to have figured out a living by doing that i’m loath to say she’s not smart.