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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.

Commenter: the New System Actually Impedes Entrepreneurship

By Megan McArdle
Mar 23 2010, 1:13 PM ET Comment

Commenter DFooter writes:


As an entrepreneur that has started three tech businesses in the last 15 years, I have yet to hear of anyone who chose not to go out on their own due to health insurance concerns. I think this is due to two factors: most entrepreneurs are young and don't need insurance, or they are married and their spouse has insurance (my case). Because of the individual mandate that will force everyone to have insurance, I think that, at least in the tech industry, Obamacare will decrease entrepreneurship, as the young people who start most tech companies will now have a large, unproductive and unaffordable expense in paying for generally unneeded health insurance. That cash would otherwise go towards productive business building activities.

I hadn't thought of that, but it's at least plausible that having to buy insurance if you do strike out on your own might encourage younger people to stay in the corporate nest.


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