[update: sorry for the double post — I hit publish on a pre-finished version…]
That would be James Fallows, suffering the blistering assault of one Megan McArdle over this piece, the one John lauded here.
The reference to the deceased quadraped is one I’ve had occasion to return to more than once — it comes from the ferocious Labour Party debater and then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Dennis Healey, describing the experience of oratorical combat with the his successor in that post, the Tory Sir Geoffrey Howe. It may well be too kind when applied to the Business and Economic Editor of the Atlantic.
Seriously: Fallows is a seasoned and deeply knowledgeable reporter, one who actually does what folks used to do with more frequency — study, seek real sources, talk to lots of folks, master a literature, stay with a story over decades and all the rest of the things real journalists of the first rank actually do.
McArdle…
…is McArdle.
A contest of wit, literary skill, and especially knowledge and or wisdom is no fair fight…except for this:
Fallows is not one for ‘tube wars. I’ve read his stuff for a long, long time, and he says his piece and then almost always moves on to the next issue. If you check out his blog since he wrote on the piece that has offended McArdle you’ll see a great piece putting GOP Sen. Inhofe’s disastrously dangerous flying and “safety-is-for-little-people” attitude in proper context; an analysis of the non-event of the Michelle Obama waved-off landing, memories of Tim Hethering and the like. I can’t imagine that it pleases him when McArdle calls him colleague before attempting to dress him down, but life is short, and people with actual talent have better things to do with their time.
Which leaves it to me to take note of a post that once again demonstrates the axiom: Megan McArdle Is Always Wrong™.
In this case, I rather think she knows she’s wrong — or rather she has to argue an obviously false case. I say has to, because for all her grand title, her function at The Atlantic seems to be to come up with some argument-like word string that provides cover for known failures of policy, argument, and ideas.
The give away starts with her first substantive paragraph. She writes:
…they [Standard and Poor’s] do spend a great deal of time analyzing government finances, much more than James or I do.
Ahhh…the argument from authority again, one of McArdle’s favorites.
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The question, as Fallows pointed out, is not whether S & P analyzes government or private financial instruments. Here’s Fallows:
S&P knows nothing more about U.S. budget prospects than you or I do. [Italics his. Bold mine.]
I’m sure you can catch the trick McArdle hopes to play here. Fallows said nothing about anything technical to do with US government bond market operations. He’s arguing that S & P is making a judgment that they are ill-prepared to make, on the politics of the budget.
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McArdle’s assertion that the rating agencies are expert at the task of rating debt is itself a stretch — she could, perhaps, take a look at a real financial journalist’s account of the rating agencies incompetence and intellectual weakness, say, in Chapter 6 of Gillian Test’s excellent Fool’s Gold. Michael Lewis in The Big Short has some choice stuff on the agencies’ sheer bland ignorance of the instruments they were supposed to rate of, among others, S & P — see, e.g. the material in Chapter 7. She could also take a look at the comments by Warren Buffett in his 2008 letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, among other venues.
But the deeper issue is that McArdle is trying to slip in an assertion that all S & P was doing was expressing its ordinary business judgment. They are not; as Fallows points out — along with plenty of others, including S & P itself:
“we see the path to agreement as challenging because the gap between the parties remains wide.”
No financial judgment there — just one more political prognostication.
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No wonder, then, that McArdle speeds hastily by her ham-fisted opening gambit. Full tilt, she heads to a marvelous bit of disengenousness:
You make think that their opinion is crap, in which case you should say so–[Gee — thanks MM! — ed.] but I cannot understand why we’d quibble with the format in which that opinion is issued. S&P has been issuing these sorts of things for a long time, and I don’t think it would make much difference if they started doing so in blog form.
This is a display of verbal dexterity along the lines of the old joke — it was used in Calvin and Hobbes, but waaaay predates that cultural icon — about the little boy on the first day of kindergarten who spends the whole day in hope after his new teacher says, “Sit here for the present.”
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“What? No gift, after I sat there the whole *&%!# day!”
Recall what Fallows wrote:
To repeat Clive Crook’s point, S&P knows nothing more about U.S. budget prospects than you or I do. They’re saying they have an opinion on the state of Congressional-White house dealings on the budget. Fine. Go on a talk show or start a blog.
Let me channel my inner McArdle here:
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“Oh. You’re not complaining that S & P musn’t publish their reports in an easily updated, web-published format?
This is sarcasm?
Oh. I see. My bad….”
Really. I don’t have a lot of respect for McArdle’s capacity for argument at the best of times, but this is pathetic, even for her.
Next up, a tasty dish of word salad:
Moreover, their opinion does actually matter, since previous rounds of financial regulation have embedded financial agency ratings deep in the structure of our financial markets.
This is a usual bit of McArdle sleight of hand. Fallows says the S & P opinion is worthless, and wonders why the news media got so hot and bothered.
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Oh no! says McArdle: that damn fact that the financial markets deal in risk means that ratings decisions do matter (not to mention, as she doesn’t, that the quality of those decisions matters even more.) But to continue:
If James or I scream that the US debt picture is unsustainable, we will not move markets. If S&P downgrades US debt, this will trigger a sell-off, even if the people selling disagree with their assessment.
Well, this is (a) bait and switch and (b) subject to a little empirical investigation: did this statement of opinion have that result?
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To (a): A downgrade of US debt would indeed have a notable effect. But that’s not what the S&P did, of course. US government debt is still rated AAA. Were that to change…big news. But a warning that some folks in the S&P offices don’t like the way Eric Cantor is eying Tim Geithner?…not so much.
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To (b): How much not so much?
Not at all, in fact.
In the wake of the announcement by the ratings agency, the market for long term (ten year) US government debt actually went up — as revealed in this chart, posted at the site of someone who actually knows a little bit of economics.
But what about that terrifying drop in the equity markets on Monday? The NYSE closed 140 points down from Friday’s close (though up roughly 60 from a trough met in the immediate aftermath of what Fallows correctly termed hysteria at the S&P release. It went Back up another 65 yesterday; up just a whisker under 6% for since Jan. 1; up more than 10% over the last twelve months. Oh, and as of Thursday afternoon, the market had a third day in a row of gains, to the point that stock market indexes are up to peaks not seen since June, 2008 — well above the point where it was before S&P opened its big yap.
In other words: McArdle simply gets this one wrong.
(BTW: If she were to say that well, the S&P didn’t downgrade US debt, so technically, she’s not in error, see point (a) above. This would be McArdle wanting it both ways: S&P opinions are meaningful, unless they are not. Taking her at the implication she wants us to draw: the S&P opinion in this instance is more important than anything Fallows might say — well, the markets disagree, and by that judgment, McArdle’s assertion fails the test of reality. Q.E.D.)
Just about all the rest of McArdle’s post engages with Jame Galbraith, an economist whom Fallows quotes. Galbraith makes the point that unless the Republicans misjudge the speed of the oncoming train, the US simply won’t default — because “It controls the “means of production” for the dollars to pay off those bonds.” Galbraith adds:
If you’re worried about inflation, fine. But that’s a different matter, with a lot of other variables that count for more than S&P’s feelings.
McArdle, predictably, regards this thought with horror. First she indulges in a little history.
Inflation was a good way to ease the burden of our World War II borrowing–once the war was over.
It’s true that there were three years of significant inflation from 1946-48. But McArdle, no economist, is no historian either. Competent approaches to historical argument include looking for more than the convenient monocausal explanation that makes the point you don’t want anyone to examine too closely.
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What else may have had an impact on the total debt, and on the debt-to-GDP ratio?
Well, two obvious factors are a dramatic drop in government spending made possible by the end of the Second World War (down 40% in 1946) , and a sustained record of economic growth.* Tax rates (much, much higher then) also had something to do with a key fact: after the war, the US ran a budget surplus debt declined as proportion of GDP [Thanks to a kind reader for the correction) in 36 of the next 47 years.
All of which is to say that the actual history of US government obligations is intimately bound up with stories of national expenditure and budgeting, but above all, with the power of economic growth (plus a reasonably progressive tax code) to rein in any momentary expansion of the standing debt. Not that McArdle can stop to think about these or all the more finer-grained analyses of what happened back then, as that would limit the possibility of this kind of snark:
But it is not a good way to ease the burden of an increasingly expensive entitlement program that shows no signs of winding down.
This is code for Medicare and Medicaid and/or Obama’s health care reform. We’ve discussed elsewhere McArdle’s unwillingness to countenance even the stray thought that any cost cutting measure will actually work, so chalk this up to her “I’m not listening….” debate tactic.
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Moving on:
Especially since these days, the debt markets are much more efficient than they were in 1948; information about the money supply is transmitted very quickly to potential buyers of our bonds. You can pull all sorts of tricks to force bondholders to eat some losses on the money they lent you–but you can’t pull them over and over. America was able to wriggle its way out of a substantial portion of its WWII debts in large part because it was otherwise pretty fiscally sound.
Wriggle out of?…See above. This is pure word salad, to be sure, but at its core, such as it is, it’s making the same claim as above: markets will price US bonds to the level of risk that these incredibly modern, efficient institutions can now readily perceive — which is why (recall) the S & P announcement was so momentous, and Fallows was wrong to scoff.
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Well then, (a) if the bond market is that efficient what produced the catastrophic collapse of the commercial bond market, oh, all of two years ago or so? As, among others, Michael Lewis has pointed out over and over again, transparency has never been a feature of especially the more arcane corners of the market in debt….
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and (b) more precisely on point to the topic at hand, if the bond markets are so efficient these days, why is the interest of US government debt historically low and has been for some time ?
And as long as we are talking history, it’s worth remembering that government bonds have traded in a very stable fashion for a long time; the creation of a reasonably clear and calm government debt market was one of the great achievements of British finance in the 18th century — see among much else in the significant literature on this point, Fernand Braudel’s brief essay in the second volume of Civilization and Capitalism on his view that this was the foundation of British imperial wealth and power. The US inherited both that financial technology and ultimately the power that the British were able to finance through such fiscal innovation. Not everything important has happened in Megan McArdle’s life time. Just sayin.
No matter, like honey badger, McArdle don’t care:
You can argue that a small amount of inflation is preferable to the alternatives, distributing the pain very broadly in order to avoid the intense dislocations of a sudden shock. I might even agree with someone who argued this. But small amounts of inflation are not going to rid us of $10 trillion in debt.
Perhaps not, though I don’t believe anyone has argued that it would.
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In any event, (a) we don’t need to get rid of $10 trillion in debt. Historically, we’ve prospered just fine at debt levels that hang at 40% of GDP.
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To put that into current numbers: the CIA estimates 2010 US GDP at $14.72 trillion. 40% would be about $5.9 trillion. That leaves $4 trillion for McArdle to get rid of; or rather, less or zero if we assume that the US economy will actually continue to grow over time.
This is actually kind of important, so please forgive a digression into a wholly artificial, but illustrative bit of arithmetic:
If we assume a balanced budget (i.e. no net surplus or deficit over a period of years, whatever the ups and downs of individual cycles — which was the US norm for decades after WW II, and the last few of the Clinton years — a time so recent that even young McArdle may recall it), an annual growth rate of 3% would double the size of the US economy in 24 years.**
A small amount of inflation would accelerate that quite nicely (or capture additions to the debt produced by a budget net out of balance over time), as would a rise in tax rates from historical troughs — but I’m not arguing here that this trivial calculation is the reason to dismiss McArdle from any grown-up conversation about policy and the economy.
Rather, what this little exercise tells us is that one should pay no attention to McArdle because she isn’t honest. No discussion of debt trends that fails at least to nod at the implications of long term economic growth is even remotely useful. To put it another way: by her choice of what to ignore, McArdle ensures that she is talking nonsense throughout this passage.
But really — she has only our best interests at heart. By concentrating only on the debt, she gets to tell us why we have to take our medicine:
And the pain of large amounts of inflation is extremely painful–arguably, more so, not less so, than technical default…
Again, this is misdirection. You get the equivalent of default through inflation when the rate is so high as to make debt instruments effectively worthless; such events are termed hyperinflations.
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The disastrous economic and political implications of hyperinflaton are indeed well known. So, while it’s true that high conventional inflation can be deeply unpleasant (I’m old enough to remember the seventies), at least in the American experience, such inflation neither amounted to a debt default, nor did its effects resemble those suffered by Weimar Germany, for example in 1922 and 1923.
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If McArdle wants to argue that the US is currently on a path towards such hyperinflation — or the worse such event that took place in Hungary, or recent experience in Zimbabwe, and so on — then she needs to come up with some evidence that current US fiscal and monetary policy is meaningfully akin to the circumstances that attended such bursts of extraordinary declines in the value of national currencies.
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She has not — and once more, as lots of folks point out to her at regular intervals, there are no signals from those with the most skin in the game that such an event is in the offing.
Enough. I admit. There is something in McArdle’s smug disengenousness that gets my goat on a deep level, and the consequence, as you’ve seen above, just ain’t pretty.
So I’ll shut up now, but for two parting shots.
First: Jim Fallows is the real deal, a journalist and analyst of great out-there-in-the-world experience. He’s someone who is always worth reading: you learn something when you do. He has to suffer the indignity of being called — and being — Megan McArdle’s colleague at The Atlantic. But the fact that their paychecks come from the same bank account does not make them equivalent. Fallows has earned what he knows through years of effort and accomplishment; McArdle knows what she knows with great certainty and gusto — but she’s the poster child for Mark Twain’s famous jibe. There is no comparison — as I hope the above has sufficiently demonstrated.
Second: When confronted by yet another example of error and flat out bad argument by Megan McArdle the question always arises: is she dumb or deceitful?
Now I concede that she might be both a dessert topping and a floor wax. But really, while McArdle may be many things, stupid ain’t one of them.
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If you called her lazy, incurious, insecure or what have you, I’d probably agree — but I think she knows exactly what she is doing in her writing. She is a court singer, writing lays in praise of those who toss her scraps. I’m not really sure how much damage she can do at this point. I’d like to think that the schtick is growing old, and that her audience, large as it is, is now made up almost entirely of the choir to whom she preaches.
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But maybe not. Hence posts like these.
(Also, too — writing this has kept me from going medieval on her truly delightful cooking video. I’m saving that for a special treat….;)
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(And another thing: if you’ve read this far, you might want to check out a much shorter and quite lovely take down of another McArdle folly by James Bales, who blogs with me at my personal site, The Inverse Square Blog.
*Economic output in constant dollars dropped from 1945-1946, edged down a little more in 1947, and then embarked on a steady path of growth for decades.
**I’m using here the rule of thumb known as the rule of 72. It has the canonical virtue of having many divisors — which is what dictated my arbitrary choice of a 3% annual GDP growth rate. Makes the sums come out more easily, even though it may be a shade high. But the answer is the same if you use a 2.5% growth rate and calculate assuming continuous compounding, in which case you could employ the rule of 70, which slightly understates the rate at which such compounding occurs.
Images: Hans Memling, The Last Judgment Tryptich (open), 1467-71
Albert Anker, The Crèche, 1890
Mizerák István, Sweeping the pengő inflation banknotes after the introduction of the forint in August 1946
Francisco de Goya, Riña a garrotazos, 1819-23
JPL
With notably rare exception, McArdle is always wrong.
ericblair
Nice fisking of McArglebargle. We all know that the S&P “downgrade” was bullshit of the first water, served up by a company that was quite happy to call all manner of opaque garbage mortgage securities AAA sight unseen until they collapsed worthless. Their business model is to put convenient ratings on whatever random paper crosses their desk according to the wishes of who pays them at the time. So who paid them this time?
Punchy
Wow…wtl;dr
Apparently McAddled is Levinson’s Sully.
Bob
And McCardle is Sully’s crutch to lean on for his innumerate views on the economy.
Adam
You left out that it wasn’t all that long ago that she was arguing that statement like this from ratings agencies don’t matter and have no effect on yields (when Krugman complained about a prior statement).
WyldPirate
Ahhh, the smell of walking by McCardle’s Red Herring canning factory in the morning! It smells like….dumb-assery.
"Serious" Superluminar
Is she going for a lifetime achievement award in the economic paralympics?
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
I feel about MM the way I did about GW Bush: NOT stupid. Not by a long-shot. Maybe even smarter than the average bear. But this natural ability is applied by someone who is intellectually incurious, stubborn, and, owing to the ability to get by early in life just by memorizing answers, rather than learning how to do the work necessitated by solving a problem, unacquainted with any deeper understanding of how shit actually gets done. This last point is essential, as it explains why her efforts to fluff plutocrats come off as so transparent: She doesn’t realize they’re obvious canards until someone who actually knows fuck-all about a subject points out how empty her arguments are. Proof of this is how she falls back on the “authority” of S&P–she uses their widespread acceptance the way a whore uses a lamppost–for support, not for illumination.
I genuinely loathe her and cry a bit every time I realize that she’s managed so effortlessly to claw her way to the middle.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Sorry, MEGO.
Thing is, I don’t have to be convinced that McArdle has her head up her ass. But people don’t read McArdle to be informed, they read McArdle, and listen to Limbaugh, and watch FOX, to reinforce their prejudices. Takedowns of McArdle, and Sully, et al, all are very nice, but I’m not sure that these posts make the best use of the electrons used in their production.
Pretty pictures, though.
Jasper
@ericblair:
That’s also been my only question from the beginning. Seems rather convenient that the solution to this “debt crisis” advanced by our betters is for the poor and middle class to take a huge hit, with tax cuts for the big boys. If the warning advances that agenda, it’d be a win for everyone except for those us below the top 1%.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods:
If that’s original, it’s very good, and I’m stealing it; if not, it’s very good, and I’m stealing it.
jwb
As you well know, she’s really not worth the time, but I appreciate the effort nonetheless. What is the saying, it takes a lunatic to properly dismantle a moronic argument?
Valdivia
Tom Levenson: I love you.
That is all. :)
Bob
I hate this line of thought that it’s not worth the time. Anyone who has major media pull needs to be pushed back against if they’re demonstrably wrong and using logical fallacies and poor math.
If you’ve tracked Megan through the years, she’s slowly risen by having her posts get linked by Glenn Reynolds, Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Sullivan and whatnot. Every so often I go elsewhere and still see her linked to disprove stuff like GE PAID NO TAXES without anyone bothering to read her updates or corrections in the rare instances she does.
mafisto
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I loved that turn of phrase as well. Looks like it comes from Andrew Lang.
Sly
McArdle didn’t so much go after Fallows as she went after Jamie Galbraith. Kind of a bad move.
Galbraith’s essential point, reiterated by Fallows, is this:
1) If S&P downgraded Treasuries because it believes there is a chance of default, it doesn’t understand the operational constraints placed on the Federal government vis-a-vis the repayment of debts. Among the things that would remove those operational constraints are the repeal of the 14th Amendment and the dissolution of the Federal Reserve System.
2) If S&P was worried about inflation risk, and not default, it would have downgraded all dollar-denominated bonds. Corporate bonds, municipal bonds, etc, because inflation would effect the price of those bonds, too. But they only downgraded Treasuries.
So either way, Galbraith correctly notes, S&P has its head up its ass.
McMegan spends the rest of her time arguing that there will by hyperinflation resulting from a sell-off of treasuries by skittish bond-holders, situating S&P as the canary in the coal mine of the Efficient Market Hypothesis. Yet… miracle of miracles… no such thing has occured. In fact, treasury yields have fallen further since the downgrade. Everyone thinks the canary is Chicken Little.
So either the markets are wrong and McMegan’s wrong for invoking EMH on behalf of S&P, or the markets are right for ignoring S&P and McMegan’s wrong for being oblivious to the reality that they are ignoring S&P. She can’t win.
Yevgraf (fka Michael)
Getting into a blog war with McArgleBargle is like being a ringer and competing in the Special Olympics: you might get a medal for winning, but in reality you only beat a retard.
Anton Sirius
@ericblair:
I think it’s high time we stopped calling it fisking and started calling it mcardling.
Chris
@ericblair:
Actually, I suspect they did this on their own initiative for once … but alas, “their own initiative” is due not to some sort of keen political budgeting insight, but rather to an entirely different political insight: that they need a lever with which to move those who would regulate them and curb their easy access to profit via said business model.
This other “political insight” seems to have proven as keen as their mortgage bond ratings, given the way T-bill prices moved. :-)
One other note here, to Tom Levenson: I’m guessing the last two illustration attributions are reversed. Clearly the man sweeping bank notes is the Mizerák István….
wasabi gasp
Each time I read one of your posts, regardless of subject matter, I come away thinking that you speak with one of the greatest blog voices out there. You’re truly a pleasure to read. It’s no wonder why John pays you the big bucks.
alwhite
Well done sir!
My only quibble is when you try to argue that she is not stupid. She most certainly is. If she didn’t know something but could learn she would be ignorant, there is no crime in that we all have things we need to learn yet. But there are things she KNOWS she does not know and yet she refuses to even try to understand them. That is stupid, stupid beyond repair. You might argue that she thinks her position and income are better because she remains stupid; I would not disagree but would say that still argues for ‘evil’.
The lazy, incurious, disingenuous and banal all point to evil intent not ignorance.
alwhite
@wasabi gasp:
And here I thought John was getting all their work for free while he negotiated with Tina Brown for a seven figure buy out!
The Republic of Stupidity
@Sly:
That was pretty much my take on it too… little that I do know about affairs of the market as such… seeing as the stock market immediately took a dive when this bombshell hit, wouldn’t that mean money was prolly flowing INTO bonds?
Isn’t that what usually happens?
Uncertainty drives capital in search of a safer port… blah blah blah…
David Brooks (not that one)
The “sit here for the present” misunderstanding is from “Cider With Rosie” by Laurie Lee. You’re welcome.
Marmot
Owwwwwwwww. Reading even a little McArdle makes my head hurt as I try to make sense of what’s basically a series of non sequiturs.
Well, and arguments from authority and other fallacies.
FSM bless you for braving it, Tom.
I’ma beat my dead horse m_c style: The words she types aren’t supposed to logically advance a proposition — they’re battlements for protecting her team, the economic right. She suggests that bond markets are in trouble. But bonds are demonstrably fine.
She has emotional truth–the best kind of truth–in her team membership, so the falsehood of anything she says isn’t important. The words serve a larger cause, which is exploiting every opportunity to beat down us moochers, DFHs, and wealth-confiscators.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I once heard it said, but about drunks. I figured “whore” seemed more appropriate to the situation–and the incivility of the word could be a great icebreaker at the Obama-Ryan lunch at the WH.
Gus
NPR has had McArdle on as an economic expert. One of many reasons why I won’t contribute to public radio.
Bob
I keep wanting to link Sully and McArdle to logical fallacy lists since they only seem to understand Ad Hominem
Marmot
@Gus: Me too. I’ve listened to NPR commentaries and thought, “That sounds suspicious,” only to hear “Thanks Megan McArdle, economics editor for The Atlantic magazine.”
Marc
Lovely takedown, Tom, but…
I could be completely wrong about this, but it looks like the wikipedia page you link to dates this period of surpluses to the 47 years after the Civil War, not World War II.
Doesn’t change the larger point, though.
Marc
And lo and behold, this TPM article has a graph showing the surpluses and deficits in the postwar years. Looks like we only ran surpluses for about five out of fifteen years after the war–but, of course, debt dropped as a portion of GDP in the booming postwar economy.
Warren Terra
The Atlantic is really a sad shadow of its former self. Case in point: after subscribing for a decade or so, I allowed my subscription to lapse. Their short pieces had always ranged from the vapid to the objectionable – the smug complacency of their targeting lifestyle pieces to the absurdly wealthy in particular grated, along with their fluffing of initiatives like Unity ’08 – but their long pieces were often excellent. I felt that was no longer the case, and I found that my irritation over being associated by my subscription with McArdle et al had grown.
The process of becoming an ex-subscriber of The Atlantic has been interesting. First, I received three consecutive issues marked “This Is Your Last Issue EVER! Act Now!”. And then, a month or two after the last of those arrived, I got an email:
Leaving aside my distress at missing those insights – and on the crucial issues of the day, no less! – this offer isn’t just 80% off the cover price, it isn’t just 50% off the subscription price; it’s probably more like 67% off the price they initially quoted me for renewing my subscription.
High-quality intellectually demanding magazines like the Atlantic once was and purports to be are supposed to live off of their subscribers, not off of a desperate attempt to sell ads by claiming a large number of unusually privileged subscribers. This email rather gives away the game, one that should have been made plain by those absurd lifestyle pieces I derided: the Atlantic is now among those bottom-feeding magazines that desperately pretends to social graces and graspingly seeks every means to artificially inflate its circulation numbers, so as the better to sell glossy advertisements. It’s on its way down the slippery slope, and the tragedy is that by the time its behavior results in its demise people will be glad to see it go.
trollhattan
@Gus:
NPR or PRI’s “Marketplace”? I’ve heard her multiple times on the latter, never on the former (could be I’m just luckier).
Kodos, also, too, to Mr. Levenson for mucking about in the McCesspool se we don’t have to. TBogg’s even been reading the comments, and harvests some Galty beauts.
http://tbogg.firedoglake.com/2011/04/22/take-the-last-train-to-galtsville-and-ill-meet-you-at-the-station-built-with-taxpayers-dollars/#comments
trollhattan
@Warren Terra:
Reminds me of the old joke, which I’ll adapt here:
First prize: a free year of The Atlantic.
Second prize: two years of The Atlantic.
Some things cannot be overlooked and they keep The Atlantic on my “nyet” list. Similarly, TNR with Marty Peretz at the helm. Doesn’t mean I don’t love Chait and Fallows and TNC.
Larkspur
I remember “sit here for the present” from Beverly Cleary’s book Ramona The Pest (1968).
mclaren
As P. Z. Meyers notes in the Pharyngula blog:
This is why it’s arguable that McArdle is best ignored. Debunking her and bringing attention to this tiresome little airheaded twit only increases her profile and boosts her pageviews.
Halcyon
As someone who has read and loved Calvin and Hobbes his entire life, I don’t recall that actually being used in any C&H strip. I call shenanigans on that claim.
…oh, otherwise good article, though. McArdle is Always Wrong.™
Tom Levenson
@Marc: Note correction above.
Judas Escargot
@mclaren:
I disagree here: Even in todays’ (allegedly) democratized media world, there are still very few widely-audienced podiums available. And yet so many of those few slots seem to be occupied by… complete fecking morons, frankly.
IMO this is one of the biggest structural problems within our current “intellectual” culture today (such as it is).
Debunking as many of their lies/distortions/mistakes as possible is a public service.
asiangrrlMN
@Larkspur: Me, too.
Tom, your takedowns of MM2 are always magnificent, and this one did not disappoint.
I think it is important to keep debunking her because as noted above, she has traction as an economic expert. (Now you see why I’m switching parties. More monies to be made on the right).
Now, not to goad you, but TNC had a link to MM2 writing about how the story of Greg Mortenson perhaps making up his famous memoir “mystifies” her because it was her “nightmare” that a false story would enter one of her stories “by accident”.
TNC won’t let anyone write anything disparaging about one of his colleagues, so I didn’t even read the comment thread for fear that I would type, “Megan McArdle calling someone else out on telling falsehoods is figging hysterical! Bwahahahahahahhahaha!”, but here you go.
arguingwithsignposts
Tim Hethering*ton* (slight correction for your link)
Bill Murray
Moody’s has been saying the same thing as S&P since at least January 2008 (http://seekingalpha.com/article/60678-what-does-moody-s-downgrade-warning-mean) so if this were a problem, it probably is already included in prices/rates etc. and your friend Jim Bales does a good job on her too over at the inverse square.
Mo's Bike Shop
Are the some of the same faces used on each side of the Memling*?
I recently had to disabuse a meatspace acquaintance of their confidence in Ezra Klein. Yes, you’re tilting at windmills, but they’re windmills with connections.
*No, I’ve never Memled before.