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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.

The death of Doha

By Megan McArdle
Jul 30 2008, 2:12 PM ET Comment

What to say about the most recent collapse of the Doha Round?  I feel like I've just gotten out of one of those relationships where you both knew it was over a year before it finally ended--practically relieved, really.  It's been obvious to me since early 2007 that Doha wasn't going anywhere, and going through the motions had become a painful parody.  The forward motion on trade has ground to a halt, because most trade in goods and services has been liberalised in the Western world.  The remaining issues are either sacred cows, like agriculture, or require much deeper integration of sensitive areas like finance and law.   Moreover, we're now at the point where poor nations can no longer simply free ride on rich country liberalization; to get further benefits from trade, they need to prise open their own markets, and few places have a political system capable of attacking those entrenched interests.

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