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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.

I wish . . .

By Megan McArdle
Dec 29 2007, 8:09 AM ET Comment

That Ron Paul supporters would stop informing me, in ALL CAPS, that various current policies are UNCONSTITUTIONAL, when in fact those very things were WRITTEN INTO THE CONSTITUTION via the AMENDMENT PROCESS. The FOUNDING FATHERS deliberately gave future legislators the ability to AMEND the constitution, because they wisely assumed that in the FUTURE there might be circumstances they were unable to FORESEE in 1787. Whatever you may think of the income tax, it is not only constitutional, but actually in the constitution, via this very clear amendment:

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.


The complaints that I don't know what I'm talking about would be more convincing if the people making them gave evidence of having actually read the document that they claim validates their most dearly held beliefs.

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