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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.
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The price of freedom

By Megan McArdle

Jun 13 2008, 1:02 PM ET Comment

Tyler Cowen has some perceptive comments on my posts on financial regulation. As he says, the social cost of leverage is higher than the private cost, so regulation makes sense. But there are limits to this observation. The social cost of my murder is probably higher than the private cost too, but I nonetheless have all the incentive I need to avoid it. It's probably better to ensure that the private cost of over-levering is very high than to develop ex-ante regulation to prevent it.

Is it high enough now? Well, the CEO's of Merrill and Bear are out, but the CEO of Lehman is still in. Yes, they are still rich, but at that level of performance, the money is not important of itself; it is a way of keeping score. How much money would compensate Paul Krugman for being drummed out of his profession in disgrace?

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