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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. More

Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero … all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

We had to destroy the village in order to save it . . .

By Megan McArdle
Sep 30 2007, 11:11 PM ET Comment

I genuinely don't get this comment. I mean, I understand that there are people who think it is immoral that the educated should earn substantially more than people who clean houses. But it seems to me that the obvious solution to this dilemma, until you have effected the radical political change you believe will rectify this situation globally, is to give away all of your salary in excess of the wage of the average housecleaner. Ideally, you would donate it either to people who clean houses, or to some organization you believe will improve their earning prospects.

If you are not going to take the obvious route (and apparently no one is), then I really do not see how you could believe that the best way to help housecleaners is to refuse to hire them. In my universe, decreasing the demand for a good or service drives the price of that good or service down, making whoever supplies it worse off. How often do you meet private contractors who are grateful not to be offered work? If you think housecleaners get paid too little, then you should be hiring as many as you can afford, in order to increase the local demand for unskilled labor, not shunning them. And if you think I'm wrong, why not ask your friendly local independant cleaning lady what she thinks?

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