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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.

Will Corporate Political Advertising Cannibalize Product Sales?

By Megan McArdle
Jan 22 2010, 1:33 PM ET Comment

Even if I weren't a pretty hard core absolutist about the first amendment, I don't think I'd be particularly worried about yesterday's Citizens United ruling.  They're already doing a lot of this stuff anyway, just funnelling it through various front groups, and as far as I'm concerned, I'd rather have it done directly than through increasingly arcane loopholes. And anyway, I'm unconvinced that political advertising has this enormous power to broadcast secret mind-control rays into our homes. 

Besides all that, there's a fairly hard limit on how much political advertising corporations can do.  There's only so much space on the airwaves.  And frankly, I just can't bring myself to worry that now corporations will be able to send us more junk mail we won't read. 

What I think is interesting is that in the days before elections, corporations may effectively be competing with themselves.  Do they want to spend more money advocating deregulation, or do they want to spend more money advertising their new brand of fabric-softening salad dressing?  Good for media companies.  But bad for the rest of us?  Fewer and fewer people watch commercials.  And I can't say that I believe that either ads for policy positions, or ads for salad dressing/floor wax, are so mind-shatteringly effective that I'm much worried which kind we get.


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