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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.

A Shocking Chart on Vaccination

By Megan McArdle
Oct 31 2011, 5:52 PM ET Comment

The Waldorf School of the Peninsula seems to be aimed at very affluent children in the Bay Area. Its tuition for the lower school is $17,000 a year. The school provides the following quote on the "Spirit of Waldorf Eduction":

The Free Waldorf School was founded upon the impulse for social change, upon the need to reform society into a community that takes into account the true Being of Humanity. Into the desire for reform were sown the life-giving forces of the teacher's inner work and Rudolf Steiner's spiritual insight. The goal of this education was that, through living inner work guided by the insights of Rudolf Steiner, the teachers would develop in the children such power of thought, such depth of feeling, such strength of will that they would emerge from their school years as full members of the Human Community, able to meet and transform the world.
So I suppose I should not be surprised to see this

Screen shot 2011-10-31 at 5.44.15 PM.png
Yet I am surprised--surprised and disappointed.  This is a very dangerous level of immunization -- the level where herd immunity gets lost, disease reservoirs are established, and children emerge from their school to infect infants, immunocompromised adults, and people whose vaccinations didn't take or have waned, with potentially fatal diseases.

We spent most of the last century trying to stamp out the infectious diseases that used to cripple and kill hundreds and thousands of people every year.  Sometimes it seems like the Bobo elites plan to spend the 21st century bringing them all back.


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