14 responses to “Megan McArdle Hired as WaPo Columnist”

1. 

   Moosebreath

   February 13, 2018 at 7:14 pm

   “she’s unfailingly polite, not discernibly partisan, and bends over backwards to acknowledge the merits of competing viewpoints.”

   This only gets 1 out of 3 if she gets a point for “not discernibly partisan” for only being a Libertarian about 3/4 of the time (with the rest of the time being pro-Republican). She is typically rude to those she disagrees with, and never backs off, even when shown errors in simple mathematics, much less in being the only Libertarian I have ever heard who believes not merely in assuming that planned demonstrations will turn violent, but that the proper way to deal with them is for the government to use force before they turn violent.

   15
2. 

   Moosebreath

   February 13, 2018 at 7:27 pm

   Further and more specific response outsourced to Scott Lemieux at LGM

   10
3. 

   dmichael

   February 13, 2018 at 7:48 pm

   I would like Dr. Joyner to respond specifically to the post by Scott Lemieux linked by “Moosebreath” above. It contradicts all but the personal anecdotes he made in this post.

   5
4. 

   Sleeping Dog

   February 13, 2018 at 8:44 pm

   The Peter Principle at work.

   1
5. 

   Argon

   February 13, 2018 at 9:05 pm

   She’ll draw clicks. It doesn’t matter that she’s frequently wrong. That’s the feature, not a bug.

   2
6. 

   Just ‘nutha ig’nint cracker

   February 13, 2018 at 9:48 pm

   “Megan offers one of the liveliest, smartest, least predictable takes on policy, politics and everything else, from the history of washing machines to essential rules for living,” said Fred Hiatt, Editorial Page editor for The Post.

   Well, he has to say something to justify it, I suppose, this is as good as any other lie exaggeration.

   3
7. 

   Dave Schuler

   February 14, 2018 at 8:27 am

   I agree that Megan is smart. I find her takes pretty predictable, though.

   I guess they’re unpredictable if you’ve never encountered any libertarians.

   6
8. 

   MarkedMan

   February 14, 2018 at 9:10 am

   I hadn’t read McArdle in years, finding her views shallow. More importantly, whenever she happened to write on a topic I knew about she had essential facts wrong or made a big deal out of something that might strike an outsider as odd but a knowledgeable person would realize was a triviality. To paraphrase an example from a better writer than me: she was the type of (foreign) reporter who would spend a couple of days in the US BS’ing with the taxi drivers taking her between bars and counting them as interviews, then return home and deliver 800 clever and insightful words detailing her discovery that even thought the US dime was smaller than a penny, it was worth more.

   Her name came up on this blog a couple of months ago and after slamming her, I felt that I should check out some of her more recent stuff. I looked at two of her columns. The first concerned Pharma and asserted things that simply were not correct and then spent the rest of the column snarking about those things. And here’s what I said about the second:

   The second is pure Megan. Basically it goes like this: “Hey, me and my Libertarian Bros knew it all 15-20 years ago and endlessly mocked those who didn’t see that vouchers were the only intelligent way to make sure the magic of the market transformed our schools. Who wudda thunk it, but it turns out we wrong about that! I don’t really have the time to look into it, but here’s a scribbled off thought: maybe it would’ve worked great but poor kid’s parents are stupid losers who don’t know what’s best for their children.”

   Read more: https://drjjoyner-cmlud.wpcomstaging.com/blogger-recommendations/#ixzz575jRWBHV

   And in 2012, again on this blog, I said

   when she was writing about something I happened to know about she was often wrong, and wrong in the most elementary ways. In the kind of way that often occurs when some fairly smart person has a clever insight about something they know only a little about, then proceeds to have a debate in their heads where they reinforce the clever insight and make their imaginary opponent say dumber and dumber things.

   Read more: https://drjjoyner-cmlud.wpcomstaging.com/megan-mcardle-the-covert-republican-party-activist-so-covert-she-endorsed-obama/#ixzz575iondF5

   7
9. 

   JohnMcC

   February 14, 2018 at 12:32 pm

   Here I dropped in to say that I have found Ms McArdle neither particularly smart nor amusing in presenting her ideas nor particularly interested in debate. And a bunch of people had said it so much better.

   7
10. 

    grumpy realist

    February 14, 2018 at 4:27 pm

    Ms. McArdle is notorious for getting her math wrong. For someone who claims to be so brilliant, she certainly doesn’t show it.

    3
11. 

    MarkedMan

    February 15, 2018 at 10:48 am

    FWIW, what I (self) quoted above about McArdle matches my feelings about libertarians in general.

    In the kind of way that often occurs when some fairly smart person has a clever insight about something they know only a little about, then proceeds to have a debate in their heads where they reinforce the clever insight and make their imaginary opponent say dumber and dumber things.
12. 

    Jay

    February 15, 2018 at 5:52 pm

    It’s been said about so many people before (i.e, David Brooks), but McMegan is the quintessential stupid person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.

    2
13. 

    Ebenezer_Arvigenius

    February 16, 2018 at 3:33 pm

    To add an outside view:

    As a European I never had the chance to form a previous opinion about her. But I got a viscerally negative reaction to her writing in pretty short order.

    She is exceedingly shallow. She is basically the published version of that insufferable mid-level manager who loved his economics 101 course a decade back and spends all of his time at parties explaining to the plebs (a lot of whom actually have better formal knowledge or spent more time actually thinking about the topic) how the invisible hand of the market would cure all possible ills if only it were unfettered.

    As several people pointed out above, judging by the areas I am well versed in (European history and law mainly), nothing she says can be trusted. She is frequently either badly wrong or prone to come to false conclusions due to a lack of systematic knowledge. What is worse, she is one of those “intellectuals” who would rather spend all their brain power on making their pre-existing notions look believable rather than acquiring the knowledge to tell the actual truth. She just seems indifferent to knowledge as long as she has got enough material for a witty quip or takedown.

    To add insult to injury, she has (to me) a very dismissive tone to her writing. She’s basically the conservative caricature of a liberal made flesh, just with libertarian positions.

    What makes me so bilious, I think, are two things:

    Firstly, that she paddles truthiness. While I really dislike Alex Jones and his ilk, they are basically low-brow entertainers. They sell sh*** for money.

    By the education, positions and accolades she receives, McArdle should be one of the people who counteract the negative effects people like Jones have on the body public. Instead she chose to pollute it in a slightly more high-brow manner. In a way she’s traitor to intellectualism.

    The second one is the reaction she receives. Like in your article, she is generally considered intelligent, nonpartisan (for no reason that I can discern – her bias is pretty obvious) and able to regularly get new gigs at reputable news sources. She’s “one of the boys”. If she were a beauty blogger or restaurant critic all of the above would be excusable. But the fact that she is where she is constantly highlights unpleasant truths about the the constant failure of US journalism over the last decades to play its necessary role.

    And I think that last one is where a lot of the vitriol comes from: every time she gets a new column, our hopes that the broken pol/media system might get better soon are dashed on the rocks of reality again.

    3
14. 

    steve

    February 17, 2018 at 7:45 pm

    She is sometimes interesting, but she is nearly always wrong about healthcare issues.

    Steve