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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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Commenter: The New System Will Enhance Entrepreneurship

By Megan McArdle

Mar 23 2010, 1:37 PM ET Comment

Meanwhile, commenter jreffell says:


As a counter: I'm in the tech industry, and I've been postponing my "strike out on my own" phase until reform was enacted. And some of the folks I'd like to strike out with are in the same boat. For us, the biggies are the end to rescission, end to annual and lifetime caps, and especially the pre-existing condition rules. 

(Megan, your distinction between consulting and startups is messy here -- there are a lot of examples where startups have used a consulting phase to bootstrap, or consultancies have generated startups.)

I think the emphasis on "young" in the above comment is revealing -- maybe now we'll see more folks with families willing to take the jump. I've definitely seen a career pattern where startups center around the before-family and after-the-kids-are-grown phases, with a big-company stage while raising kids. Much of this is probably due to non-healthcare factors, but in my case, healthcare has been the biggie.

Whether we'll actually strike out, and whether we'll be successful and transformative -- well, check back in a few years, eh?


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