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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. She is currently on leave.
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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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GM: Alternate History

By Megan McArdle

Sep 22 2009, 2:15 PM ET Comment

When could GM have been saved?  In my opinion, GM started its slow motion death roll in the 1980s, when it refused to confront the unions or the brand managers and streamline the thing.  Every decision they've taken since then has been made in light of the fact that they couldn't really afford the kind of showdown with the UAW that it would have taken to strip the company down to a nimble, profitable core.  They skimped on quality and stopped taking care of the brand, mostly to feed the unions, but also to feed their bloated management structure.  By the time it became obviously suicidal to keep on as they were, it had also become almost as suicidal to try and turn things around, because the company was no longer healthy enough to take the blow.

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