Megan McArdle

[Magda Hassan]

• 
  
• SHILLS FOR: Koch Industries Wall Street PHARMA Health Insurance Industry Republican Party.
  
• "I don't see any evidence offered that Koch money funds FreedomWorks, or any astroturfing organization . . . "
  "...from what I know of [the Kochs], astroturfing doesn't really seem like their style."
  
  From McArdle's attack on an investigative article exposing the first Tea Party protest as a Koch/FreedomWorks Astroturf campaign; February 2009
  
  "I've seen Koch [sic] in action at private events, and though I'll respect the privacy [sic], I'll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, [Charles Koch] displayed rather a mania for honest dealing."
  
  McArdle on the Kochs' moral character; February 2009
  
  "My husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch Foundation, and works for Reason Magazine, which has been a recipient of funds from Koch charitable organizations."
  
  McArdle issues a partial disclosure about her husband's Koch ties; February 2012
  
  "I also disagree with the notion that the concentration of wealth is a large political problem. ... while the wealthy certainly have the ear of politicians, and also give a lot of money to those politicians, it's not clear to me how tightly these things are linked on matters of broad national policy."
  
  McArdle isn't bothered by economic inequality and concentration of wealth; February 2008
  
  "consumption inequality, not income inequality, is what matters. If the rich have access to broad classes of goods that the poor can't have, I find this worrying. On the other hand, if the problem is that Bill Gates has a really awesome 80 inch flat panel television, while the poor have to be content with a 32 inch CRT, well, I can't say my heartstrings are plucked very tight by this injustice."
  
  On why she doesn't believe in income inequality; July 2009
  
  "Borrowers were not brought down by predatory lending. . . . Borrowers were brought down by a willingness to gamble on rising home prices--exactly the same thing that knocked out Lehman Brothers. At least Lehman Brothers had the excuse that ten years of rising prices had completely screwed up their default models."
  
  McArdle on why homeowners were more to blame than bankers for tanking the economy; September 2008
  
  To me, the unsung villain of the mortgage crisis is the 30-year fixed rate self-amortizing mortgage with no prepayment penalty...The 30 year fixed rate mortgage was ultimately at the heart of the Savings and Loan crisis.
  
  McArdle discovers another red herring to blame; July 2010
  
  Am I suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for occupation expenses? Nope. We can afford it, and there's something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator. But most of that $2t, if it is any sort of a real number, will be stuff for Iraqis: roads, schools, hospitals, government buildings, power plants and sewers and all the good stuff that lets us live like citizens of the 21st century. That stuff should come out of Iraqi oil revenues.
  
  McArdle belittling Iraq war critics Eric Alterman as "nuts" and economist James Galbraith as "paranoiac" for (correctly) predicting the war would cost trillions; March 2003
  
  "I love Cato. I love school choice. I read their stuff all the time, and I think a lot of it is great. I cite it and use it."
  
  McArdle on the quality of Cato Institute's scholarship; May 2008
  
  "For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.
  
  McArdle argues against rushing to legalize gay marriage, which she described as "a bedrock of our society" and compared gay marriage rights to a government welfare program; April 2005
  
  "One of the dividing lines between me and a lot of the commentators on the Wall Street crisis is that I am not outraged by their pay."
  
  McArdle explains her position on exorbitant Wall Street bonuses; April 2009
  
  

  McArdle on Science

  "Here's the thing: humans aren't like bonobos. And do you know how I know that we are not like bonobos? Because we're not like bonobos."
  
  McArdle explains why she's not convinced by evolutionary biology; August 2010
  
  "I've basically outsourced my opinion on the science to people like Jonathan Adler, Ron Bailey, and Pat Michaels of Cato . . ."
  
  McArdle on where she gets her climate change information; February 2012. (Pat Michaels admitted on CNN he gets 40% of his funding from the petroleum industry.)
  
  

  Undisclosed Koch Work

  View full IHS anniversary dinner brochure (pdf file)
  Megan McArdle frequently speaks at and moderates conferences and events hosted by Koch-funded organizations, including Cato Institute, Mercatus, the Institute of Humane Studies and many others. Here is a partial list (in reverse chronological order):
  • In June 2012, McArdle spoke at a Koch-linked Students for Liberty "Women for Liberty" event held at the Institute for Humane Studies. McArdle was described as a "shining" role model that "young women in the movement should look up to."
    
  • In 2012, McArdle served as a judge for the Reason Foundation Bastiat Prize, awarded to libertarian media pundits.
    
  • In 2011, McArdle took part in a Cato Institute panel called "U.S. Debt and the Millennials: Is Washington Creating a Lost Generation?" She described Social Security and Medicare as a "gigantic space alien that's larger, like five times the size of earth."
    
  • In 2011, McArdle served as emcee at the Institute of Humane Studies' 50th Anniversary gala event, introducing her patron Charles Koch onto the stage. View the full brochure of the IHS anniversary dinner (pdf file).
    
  • In February 2011, McArdle was the keynote speaker at the annual International Students For Liberty Conference, where she delivered a talk titled "Building the Case for Liberty in the New Century." The conference included a sneak preview of the film Atlas Shrugged.
    
  • In 2011, McArdle was a guest lecturer at the Institute for Humane Studies' "Journalism & the Free Society" summer seminar program. The program addressed such topics as "Is an "objective" press possible or even desirable?"
    
  • In 2010, was a moderator at a Mercatus conference about credit card regulation.
    
  • In June 2009, McArdle served as moderator at Cato Institute's healthcare reform conference. The title of McArdle's panel was: "Should Congress Mandate Coverage?"
    
  • In Spring of 2009, McArdle served as a judge for a Koch-funded blogger contest held to identify "young conservative and libertarian talent who wish to pursue careers as journalists and writers." The winner received a $10,000 prize. Other judges included Cato/Reason's Radley Balko, Jonah Goldberg, and libertarian economist Jonathan H. Adler...
    
  • In January 2009, McArdle was a speaker at an America's Future Foundation (AFF) event that featured "young libertarians and conservatives who have taken a leadership role in . . . re-branding the Republican party." AFF is a libertarian organization that exists to "identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders." It has close ties to the Koch-funded think-tank network, including Mercatus, ALEC and Institute for Humane Studies.
    
  • In September 2008, McArdle took part in a panel discussion at AFF about "who should libertarians and conservatives support."
    
  • That same month, McArdle was a featured speaker at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her talk focused on how "government regulation actually contributed" to the financial meltdown.
    
  • In March 2007, McArdle partied at Reason magazine's "Happy Hour" with David Weigel, Radley Balko, as well as The Wall Street Journal's John Fund.
    

Megan McArdle

Special correspondent on economics, business and public policy; Newsweek/Daily Beast

Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs' flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her "leadership role in ... re-branding the Republican party." McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.

The recovered history of Megan McArdle

• Megan McArdle built her career on bashing public servants and government, but her father's taxpayer-subsidized work in government and as a government lobbyist funded her upbringing as a "child of privilege" as she described herself. McArdle's father, Francis McArdle, was a career public servant in the New York City administration who took the revolving door to the private sector as chief lobbyist for the union-busting General Contractor's Association of New York, where her father represented private contractors "primarily engaged in construction of public buildings and plants." In 1987, the head of the New York state Organized Crime Task Force accused Francis McArdle's clients of pervasive corruption, bribery, racketeering and union-busting. Thanks to New York's lucrative public construction projects, Megan was able to attend Riverdale Country School, the most expensive prep school in America, according to Time magazine. Today, annual tuition at Riverdale runs over $40,000.
  
• In the early-mid 1990s, McArdle attended the University of Pennsylvania. She converted from "ultraliberal to libertarian" in her junior year, after working as a canvasser and field manager for Ralph Nader's Public Interest Research Groups, which she called "the most deceptive, evil place I've ever worked." [ 1 ]
  
• In 2001, after her job offer in management consulting was "rescinded", McArdle was given a day job in the construction industry, which her father was lobbying for at the time, and started blogging free-market Republican propaganda under the Ayn Rand-inspired pseudonym "Jane Galt." McArdle claimed she did not use her real name for fear of being persecuted for her libertarian views: "I lived in the Upper West Side so I couldn't discuss these things with anyone. I would just stew." Her first blog post to go viral in the conservative blog network argued for scrapping corporate taxes. [ 2 ]
  
• In 2002, McArdle applied for a job in the Foreign Service but was rejected, which she blamed on asthma. "Apparently, they don't want a foreign service full of people who are, like, Well, I can only go to Paris,'" she told the Koch-funded AFF newsletter, Doublethink.
  
• In 2003, The Economist hired McArdle as a blogger. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, McArdle gleefully advocated the use of violence to suppress antiwar demonstrations, writing: "I'm too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it's applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner."
  
• In 2003, McArdle attacked economist James Galbraith as "paranoiac" and critic Eric Alterman as "nuts" for suggesting that the Iraq war could cost $2 trillion. McArdle declared the Iraq War "is not going to run us several trillion dollars (though even if it did, that would work out to less than 0.1% of GDP over the next 20 years.)...But making up ridiculous numbers in order to support your predisposition isn't helpful -- and when the war doesn't cost us $2t, people are going to remember that the next time you talk about the costs of a program you don't like." In 2008, Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calculated that the Iraq war cost at least $3 trillion.
  
• McArdle received journalism training from the right-wing Institute for Humane Studies, headed by Charles Koch since the 1960s. According to the IHS, its journalism program "places talented writers and communicatorswho support individual liberty, free markets, and peaceat media companies and non-profit newsrooms" and offers "mentoring and job placement assistance." The program currently includes a $3,200 stipend, as well as travel allowance.
  
• In 2011, McArdle returned to her Koch alma mater as a guest lecturer and instructor at the Institute for Humane Studies' "Journalism & the Free Society" summer internship program. The program tackled such topics as "Is an 'objective' press possible or even desirable?" Other faculty members joining McArdle that year included Radley Balko, then-editor at the Kochs' Reason magazine
  
• In a sign of just how close and trusted McArdle is to the Kochs, in October 2011, she was chosen to emcee Charles Koch's 50th Anniversary gala celebration of his flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, featuring Charles Koch as the keynote speaker and guest of honor. McArdle and Koch were joined by hundreds of leading GOP donors and activists. An IHS newsletter wrote of her performance: "Emcee Megan McArdle wove a humorous narrative through the program." The IHS attempted to hide McArdle's involvement, scrubbing her name from the dinner announcement page. (See side bar for more info on the gala event.)
  
• In 2006, McArdle published an article in Reason, a magazine controlled by the Kochs since the 1970's, headlined, "The Virtue of Riches: How Wealth Makes Us More Moral". McArdle's article argued that wealth makes people "more tolerant of minorities, more welcoming to immigrants, more solicitous of their fellow citizens, more supportive of democratic institutions, and just plain better specimens of humanity." In fact, studies show that the wealthiest Americans are more likely to lie and steal, while the poor donate proportionally much more of their incomes to charity.
  
• In August 2007, The Atlantic hired McArdle as a business and economics blogger.Her first post, titled "Dont panic!" [sic], wrongly predicted that the liquidity shock that hit the financial system earlier that month was nothing to worry about: "Having a nasty market contraction does not mean that your economy automatically goes down the tubes."
  
• In September 2008, as the financial markets collapsed, McArdle gave a talk at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University focusing on how "government regulation actually contributed" to the financial meltdown. [ 3 ]
  
• That same month, in September 2008, McArdle transformed her blog at the The Atlantic into a feverish Wall Street crisis-management propaganda outlet. She argued that bankers were largely innocent, blamed government regulators and homeowners for tanking the economy, and mocked news of a criminal investigation into Wall Street crimes, writing, "For what, I have no idea." McArdle also bizarrely claimed that bankers were victims of the real estate bubble, while blaming borrowers for being greedy profiteers: "You know who made most of the money on the subprime bubble? Anyone who bought a house in the last ten years. Yes, that's right, you, with your low fixed interest rate on a reasonably sized house. You're the profiteer who laughed all the way to the bank." The truth is that rampant fraud and predatory lending had decimated homeowner net-worth, leaving people substantially poorer and more in debt than they had been in decades.
  
• McArdle's position on financial regulations was in perfect sync with Koch Industries. The company is a major player in financial markets and emerged as one of the most powerful forces lobbying against financial reform following the crash, according to Bloomberg. Just in the last four months of 2008, Koch Industries spent over $7 million on lobbying efforts, much of that directed at fighting various financial regulation bills. Despite blatantly promoting the Kochs' political and business agenda, McArdle failed to disclose her numerous Koch conflicts of interests.
  
• In 2008, McArdle argued that the recession had a silver lining for liberals and the 99%, claiming the economic downturn would reduce wealth inequality because it hurt the rich more than middle- and lower-income Americans: "Recessions are bad for everyone, but they're worse for the wealthy." In fact, wealth inequality has substantially worsened since then.
  
• McArdle proposed permanently ending inheritance taxes on the super-wealthy, citing her own experience as a "child of privilege" which gave her insight into how the super-rich never paid their taxes anyway, so why waste money forcing them to offshore their earnings. She also claimed that "estate tax may actually cost the treasury money."
  
• In January 2009, McArdle was singled out for her "leadership role" by the Koch-connected America's Future Foundation and took part in a panel of GOP strategists and top conservative activists pushing for "re-branding the Republican party." McArdle's strategy speech argued that so long as unemployment remained high and housing prices remained low in 2010, the Republicans would win the mid-term elections, and it would be easier to shift blame for the 2008 economic collapse onto Democrats and Big Government.
  
• McArdle spent the next two years criticizing proposals that threatened to improve voters' lives before the 2010 elections. She pushed hard against health care reform, mortgage relief, financial consumer protection and unions.
  
• In February 2009, McArdle led a propaganda campaign in her Atlantic blog to discredit investigative journalism exposing the first Tea Party protest in February 2009 as an Astroturf campaign backed by the Koch brothers and FreedomWorks. McArdle wrote of the Kochs: "from what I know of them, astroturfing doesn't really seem like their style. I've seen Koch in action at private events, and though I'll respect the privacy, I'll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, he displayed rather a mania for honest dealing." The Tea Party was launched in February 2009 to oppose a White House bill providing mortgage relief to struggling homeowners, and thereby stabilize housing prices. In the "Republican rebranding" campaign, it was important to present the Tea Party as completely autonomous and grass-roots, rather than backed by the Kochs and FreedomWorks. Thanks in large part to McArdle's efforts discrediting the exposé, the media spent the next year-and-a-half misrepresenting the Tea Party as an authentic grassroots uprising rather than a Koch-sponsored Astroturf campaign. [ 4 ] [ 5 ]
  
• A year before the Tea Party, in 2008, McArdle's fiancé Peter Suderman worked on an identical Astroturf campaign for FreedomWorks called "AngryRenter.com", a fake grassroots movement launched by FreedomWorks' wealthy Republican donors designed to kill proposed legislation to provide mortgage relief to homeowners, which then-President Bush opposed. In May 2008, the Wall Street Journal exposed AngryRenter.com as a fake campaign funded by Republican donors and lobbyists: "Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It's a fake grass-roots effort -- what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign." McArdle did not disclose that her fiancé worked on FreedomWorks' AngryRenter.com Astroturf campaign when she attacked the 2009 exposé on the Tea Party as a FreedomWorks/Koch project.
  
• In May 2009, McArdle led a smear campaign against New York Times reporter Ed Andrews who published a book about how he went broke under the weight of mortgage and credit card debt. To "prove" that Andrews' bankruptcy story was really his own fault, McArdle obtained his wife's records showing she had declared bankruptcy in the past, and used that to paint the author as untrustworthy and profligate. In fact, his wife was forced to file for bankruptcy before she met Andrews, when she had been a single mother with an ex-husband who refused to pay court-ordered child support. However, the damage was done; numerous publications attacked Andrews' credibility, effectively blunting the effect his book might have had on the public discourse on debt and bankruptcy.
  
• In June 2010, McArdle married fellow Koch activist Peter Suderman. Suderman spent much of his adult career on the Koch payroll, rotating through positions at America's Future Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, as well as the Moonie-owned The Washington Times. Suderman is currently a senior editor at Reason magazine.
  
• In 2010, McArdle wrote about how she bought a house in a low-income black neighborhood in Washington DC that was in the process of being gentrified, and claimed she'd met an anonymous black man on a bus who told McArdle he (and presumably many more) blacks fully approved of their neighborhoods being gentrified and pushed out by wealthier whites. McArdle quoted the anonymous pro-gentrification black man telling her: "'You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don't want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don't own a city.' He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. 'Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!'"
  
• In December 2010, McArdle attacked a New York Times investigation into the dangerous effects of formaldehyde, which causes cancer in humans. McArdle mocked those dangers: "It's a chemical! Indeed it is. You're surrounded by chemicals. Your couch is made of chemicals. So is the table. So is the hand-carded wool sweater you bought from the woman who raises her own sheep on organic feed. Distilled water is a chemical. Fine wine is full of them." Once again, McArdle ran cover for Koch Industries' business interests: According to an investigation into the Koch family by New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer, "Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a 'known carcinogen' in humans." [ 6 ]
  

---

Notes:

• McArdle's breaking point with the group came after she was assigned to canvass a poor suburb of Philadelphia, which she described as full of "welfare mothers, elderly people collecting the minimum Social Security payment, young men on disability." [↩]
  
• McArdle's first blogging partner was another pseudonymous right-wing blogger, Andrew Hofer, a banker with Brown Brothers Harriman and graduate of Exeter, Yale and Columbia, who denounced Bush's critics as "elitists." [↩]
  
• Koch Industries funneled a combined $3.7 million to Mercatus in 2007 and 2008. The Wall Street Journal called the Mercatus Center "the most important think tank you've never heard of." [↩]
  
• The investigate piece that McArdle smeared was authored by S.H.A.M.E founders Yasha Levine and Mark Ames. [↩]
  
• The Tea Party was central to the Republican Party rebranding strategy that McArdle helped map out in January 2009. [↩]
  
• The company has long been involved in funding front groups and fighting against laws that would classify it as a carcinogen. [↩]
  

Updated on October 3, 2012

http://shameproject.com/profile/megan-mcardle/

[Magda Hassan]

Mortgage Bailout Infuriates Tenants (And Steve Forbes)

'Angry Renter' Web Site Has Grass-Roots Look, But This Turf Is Fake

• By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS
  

WASHINGTON -- AngryRenter.com looks a bit like a digital ransom note, with irregular fonts, exclamation points and big red arrows -- all emphasizing prudent renters' outrage over a proposed government bailout for irresponsible homeowners.
"It seems like America's renters may NEVER be able to afford a home," AngryRenter.com laments. The Web site urges like-minded tenants to let Congress feel their fury by signing an online petition. "We are millions of renters standing up for our rights!"
Angry they may be, but the people behind AngryRenter.com are certainly not renters. Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It's a fake grass-roots effort -- what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign -- that provides a window into the sleight-of-hand ways of Washington.



The housing crisis has sparked broad financial and economic distress. The House of Representatives responded last week by passing a bill that would provide up to $300 billion in federal insurance to help refinance troubled mortgages. President Bush has threatened to veto it, calling the measure a reward for speculators. On Thursday, key Senate Democrats and Republicans reached an agreement in principle on a compromise housing-rescue bill.
This week, officials from FreedomWorks, the organization behind the site, delivered to Senate leaders antibailout petitions signed by 44,500 people who clicked their agreement on AngryRenter.com, at least some of whom thought its grass was real.
AngryRenter.com does get to the center of the housing debate: Who deserves help and who pays for it? The average U.S. home price fell 12.5% between the second quarter of 2006 and the first quarter of 2008, according to Fiserv Inc.'s Case-Shiller Home Price Index and Moody's Economy.com. Prices are projected to fall another 12.5% by the second quarter of 2009, before they rise again, Economy.com forecasts.
As interest rates on some mortgages rise, many homeowners are unable to make their payments or refinance into cheaper loans. An estimated 2.5 million Americans are expected to lose their homes between this year and next, more than twice the pace during normal times, according to Economy.com.

• AngryRenter.com
  
• FreedomWorks
  

FreedomWorks officials say the current housing bill is just the beginning of what could be an onslaught of election-year bailout legislation. By providing relief to mortgage holders, the site argues, the government will prop up housing prices and reward people who borrowed more than they could afford to buy more house than they needed. That will continue to freeze out renters who were sidelined as home costs soared.
"We are the class that has been ignored in this debate," the site says.

Heavy Dose of Innocence

FreedomWorks puts its copyright on AngryRenter.com and discloses on the back pages that it is the source of the effort. The site is nonetheless designed to look underdoggy and grass-rootsy, with a heavy dose of aw-shucks innocence.
"Unfortunately, renters aren't as good at politics as the small minority of homeowners (and their bankers) who are in trouble," the site says. "We don't have lobbyists in Washington, DC. We don't get a tax deduction for our rent and we don't get sweetheart government loans."
FreedomWorks and its affiliated foundation took in $10.5 million in revenue in 2006, the last year for which filing data are available. Much of the income came from large donors the group declines to identify. A spokesman described the secrecy as "standard D.C. practice."
FreedomWorks President Matthew Kibbe, a former top aide to a Republican lawmaker, says the site is an effort to "reach out" to renters who share the free-market views of Messrs. Armey, Forbes and others. Mr. Kibbe owns his own home on Capitol Hill in Washington, valued by local tax authorities at $1.17 million. "I'm an angry homeowner who pays his mortgage," Mr. Kibbe says.



Mr. Forbes -- the chairman and chief executive of Forbes, a former Republican presidential candidate and an unpaid FreedomWorks board member -- owns a 7,966-square-foot house on 9.5 acres in Bedminster, N.J., assessed by county tax authorities at $2.78 million. He owns 111.8 more acres next door, registered as farmland and assessed for tax purposes at $45,500. The county lists at least half a dozen other Forbes properties in the area. The Forbes family has sold off its private island in Fiji and palace in Morocco, but still owns a château in France.
Mr. Forbes didn't respond to repeated interview requests through his spokeswoman.
Mr. Armey, FreedomWorks's chairman, left Congress in 2003 and now lobbies his former colleagues as a senior policy adviser at DLA Piper, an international law and lobbying firm. He earns $100,833 a year for four hours a week working for FreedomWorks Inc., the organization's advocacy arm, and an additional $403,333 for 32 hours a week working for FreedomWorks Foundation, its tax-deductible, educational wing, according to federal tax filings.
Mr. Armey owns a house on 78.5 acres in Denton County, Texas, north of Dallas. In response to a public-information request, local authorities revealed that the land and house are worth a combined $1.7 million.
Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the Financial Services Committee and author of the housing bill that passed the House last week, says he finds it amusing that Mr. Armey is portraying himself as a champion of the tenant class. "I worked a long time trying to improve the condition of renters," says the Massachusetts Democrat. "Dick Armey has usually been on the other side."

'Bad Judgment'

Mr. Armey says he's looking out for "the poor devil" who can't afford to buy a house. "From our point of view, we have an industry in which people were very careless, very reckless -- both lenders and borrowers," says Mr. Armey. "What various policy makers are saying is we need to rush in here with a program to protect people from the consequences of their own bad judgment."
As for the site's grass-roots facade, he says, "It's a wholly voluntary thing -- you can either sign up for it or not."
AngryRenter.com does seem to be tapping a vein of genuine public ire. Rich Toscano, a renter who is a financial adviser with Pacific Capital Associates in San Diego, initially thought the site was an authentic, popular enterprise. "It looks like a young person did it," he says.
He was instinctively sympathetic, having started his own blog: Professor Piggington's Econo-Almanac for the Landed Poor, a celebration of foreclosures and other misfortunes suffered by real-estate brokers who he says helped inflate the local bubble. Though Mr. Toscano realized later that FreedomWorks was behind AngryRenter.com, he says the message is more important than the identity of the messenger. Everyone should be angry about any bailout, he says.
Among the renters who work at FreedomWorks is Chris Kinnan, who designed the site. He says he's not in the market to buy a house. "I'm a renter," he says. "I'm not an angry renter."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB12109016...us_pageone

[Magda Hassan]

Media Stunner: Atlantic Editor Megan McArdle Admits She's Outsourced Her Thinking to Cato's Pat Michaels

By Joe Romm on Mar 6, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Megan McArdle, senior editor for The Atlantic, has made the most jaw-dropping admission on climate I've seen in years from a journalist. It deserves attention because it unintentionally illuminates why the "status quo" establishment media's coverage of global warming is so fatally useless.
In explaining why she (supposedly) doesn't post a lot on the problem of global warming, McArdle writes:

The first reason I don't post a lot is that I'm not an expert, and I'm not planning to become one. I've basically outsourced my opinion on the science to people like Jonathan Adler, Ron Bailey, and Pat Michaels of Catoall of whom concede that anthropogenic global warming is real, though they may contest the likely extent, or desired remedies.

To paraphrase my mother (and countless others): Megan, if Pat Michaels told you to jump off a cliff, would you? Because that is certainly what he wants humanity to do.
I'll come back to the fact that the Cato Institute, originally the Charles Koch Foundation, is in the process of being officially taken back by the Kochs and McCardle, in the disclaimer at the end of the piece, notes, the current Charles Koch Foundation "sponsored a journalism fellowship for my husband." Such is the nature of modern-day "journalism."
I'll also come back to the fact that McArdle actually manages to post a whole lot of pieces on climate, document authentication (!) and other subjects she is no expert on.
Here's the folks McArdle has outsourced her thinking on climate science to:

• Jonathan Adler is a law professor (who has been funded by the Charles Koch Foundation)
  
• Ron Bailey is Cato Institute Media Fellow with a penchant for "pulling a Lomborg" he likes to cite references that say "the opposite of what he implies."
  
• Pat Michaels makes crap up on climate for a living and the Cato Institute (and fossil fuel industry) pays him a lot to do so.
  

It is almost beyond belief that the senior editor for a major magazine would outsource her thinking on the major issue of our day to a guy like Michaels and then actually admit it! As Skeptical Science has detailed, Patrick Michaels is a "Serial Deleter of Inconvenient Data":

Despite his clear conflict of interest (Michaels has estimated that 40% of his work is funded by the petroleum industry), many people continue to rely on him as a reliable source of climate information. This is an unwise choice, because Michaels also has a long history of badly distorting climate scientists' work. In fact, not only does Michaels misrepresent climate research on a regular basis, but on several occasions he has gone as far as to manipulate other scientists' figures by deleting parts he doesn't like.

As they show in 3 different instance, "Michaels has deleted the data which contradict his constant arguments that the planet will warm less than most climate scientists expect, and thus that global warming is nothing to worry about."
One of those cases is the notorious smear Michaels made against the nation's top climatologist. NASA's James Hansen said this about Patrick Michaels' distortion of his work:

"Pat Michaels, has taken the graph from our 1988 paper with simulated global temperatures for scenarios A, B and C, erased the results for scenarios B and C, and shown only the curve for scenario A in public presentations, pretending that it was my prediction for climate change. Is this treading close to scientific fraud?"

This fossil-fuel-funded disinformer is the guy McArdle outsourced her thinking on climate science to. You can find many more debunkings of Michaels online and here.
Just a minute or two Googling would have told McArdle that Michaels is the last person she should outsource her thinking on climate science to.
Whatever happened to the notion of actually talking to recognized experts in the field say, some of the top 10 climate scientists? They aren't really hard to track down for any serious journalist. But why bother if you're not going to write on the story of the century, unless, of course, you are.
McArdle provides more of her "reasoning":

If they say the planet is warming, then I trust that this is very likely to be truenot just because I like them, but because if you've convinced leading libertarians that humans are contributing to global warming, you've convinced me.

Climate skeptics are going to call this a cop-out and I understand why, but here's the thing….

Actually climate skeptic disinformer Steve Milloy has written a post, "Megan McArdle: Too stupid to opine on global warming," which notes, "what libertarianism has to do with whether greenhouse gases are measurably changing the climate for the worse is anybody's guess." Duh. He of course is annoyed that McCardle supposedly believes in "global warming alarmism."
For Milloy and the denier purists, agreeing with Michaels makes you an alarmist. Seriously! In fact, McArdle is a mostly an anti-alarmist, as we'll see.
Note: I don't think she's stupid. No, this is all confirmation bias as her startling admission makes clear. She listens only to the people who agree with her, people who not only aren't credible climate experts but indeed who misinform people for a living. I do think the post reveals she doesn't understand this is in fact the story of the century and one she ought to be far better informed on. But again that doesn't make her stupid. It just makes her one of the media herd, the 99% of journalists who just don't get it.
She continunes:

… I cannot be an expert on everything. I don't know what the speed limit should be, how we should redesign the military to counter 21st century threats, or the best way to allocate scarce water resources between competing claims, even though I recognize that in a modern society, these are all the proper concerns of the government; even though I think that these questions are important, I am willing to leave them to experts on traffic patterns, national defense, and water rights. So with global warming. Time spent brushing up on the science is time spent not reading up on things where I have greater comparative advantage, like tax policy or the budget.

Yes, global warming is no different an issue than traffic patterns! The irony that global warming is going to affect scarce water resources and 21st century military threats more than any other single factor is apparently lost on her. She continues:

So I don't blog about the science, because what am I going to say? "This article I don't understand very well sure sounds convincing?" And I don't blog about the economics because they're so. damn. depressing.

Except that McArdle has blogged on the science and the economics. For instance, she wrote a long piece on a 2010 study I blogged on (see "Nature Stunner: "Global warming blamed for 40% decline in the ocean's phytoplankton").
Her headline was, "Phytoplankton Panic" and not only does she blog on the science (mostly to downplay it), but she also blogs on the economics, which she gets quite wrong (as TP Green explained at the time). She argues that the claim it will cost 2% of GDP to fix global warming isn't true:

if this is true, 2% of GDP isn't going to cut it. We'd better get back to an emissions level around 1940, or earlier, and stay there. Being that we now have about 2.5 times as many people in the country, and the world, as we did then, that's going to be tricky.

It is going to be "tricky," but in fact 2% of GDP is really the total shift in investment needed from dirty, inefficient energy infrastructure to clean, efficient sources. That 2% doesn't actually represent lost GDP, just money spent differently. Multiple independent economic studies make clear that the actual cost is closer to slowing annual global GDP growth by 0.1% not counting co-benefits (see "Introduction to climate economics: Why even strong climate action has such a low total cost"). In its definitive 2007 synthesis report of the literature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded:

In 2050, global average macro-economic costs for mitigation towards stabilisation between 710 and 445ppm CO2-eq are between a 1% gain and 5.5% decrease of global GDP. This corresponds to slowing average annual global GDP growth by less than 0.12 percentage points.

So global GDP drops by under 0.12% per year about one tenth of a penny on the dollar even in the 445 ppm CO2-eq case (through 2050). And this is for stabilization at 445 ppm CO2-eq, which is stabilization at 350 ppm CO2 (see Table SPM.6). And that is even deeper than the cuts McArdle worries about (getting emissions back to 1940 levels).
So it turns out McCardle has just enough time to get the same things wrong that Michaels gets wrong, but not enough time to spend getting things right.
The bizarre thing is McCardle asserts that she supports a "hefty" price on carbon, but mostly she does this for the same reason many confusionists do so she can say she is concerned about an issue that she really isn't while she goes about parroting what Michaels and Cato think on the subject.
Indeed, the headline on this unintentionally revealing post is "Why We Should Act to Stop Global Warmingand Why We Won't."
Except of course it isn't a post about why we should act to stop global warming. It's a collection of Cato-inspired misinformation. She disses the European Emissions Trading System even though it clearly worked. She claims "it's still having a spot of trouble" but that's a Lomborg-Bailey-esque link to a February article about the fact that "Prices in Europe's cap-and-trade system dropped to a record last month because of oversupply"!
The Europeans found it too easy to cut their emissions and then the rest of the world (especially the U.S.) refuses to take action (thanks in part to the efforts of Michaels, Cato and the Kochs) and the price of CO2 drops. This is McArdle's evidence for why the economics of mitigation are "so depressing"!
She writes:

So why do I still support actionespecially, climate skeptics demand, when the science is so uncertain?
Well, because we've only go (sic) the one climate. I don't like running large one-way experiments on vital systems we don't know how to fix.
The risk of a catastrophic outcome may be small, but it would be pretty darn terrible to find out that hey, we hit the jackpot!
Of course, in some sense, this is a cheap belief, because I don't think that we're going to do anything about itnay, not even if Megan McArdle spends all her time advocating for such an outcome. The forces arrayed against action are just too powerfuland no, I don't mean the Cato Institute.

What she fails to realize is that the risk of catastrophic outcome isn't small if we don't act. That's Michaels' and Cato's and the Kochs' disinformation. If we take no action, the chances of avoiding a catastrophic outcome is small, as the recent scientific literature makes painfully clear. She might start by taking a glance at the definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts, which warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year and that isn't the worst case, it's business as usual!
I'm glad McCardle admitted it is a "cheap belief" since in fact she spends all of her time undercutting it.
She is certainly right that the forces arrayed against action are powerful but what a shock that she completely exonerates Cato, the disinformers, and the vast fossil fuel interest arrayed against action, including the Kochs.
Now it seems worth mentioning that for someone who supposedly doesn't have the time to do extended technical analysis on climate, someone who likes to stay in her area of expertise, tax and budget policy, she managed to find the time to write over 5000 words (!) on a detailed "analysis" of why the Heartland Climate Strategy document leaked by Peter Gleick must be a fake, as Heartland claims. And people say I write long posts! I challenge anyone to read that whole post and not conclude McArdle doesn't have plenty of time on her hands.
The thing is, McArdle is not known to be an expert on document authentification, a far more specialized area of expertise even than climate science. As an aside, Shawn Otto noted last week that the deniers urged people to use stylometry and textometry to shed light on the author of that document using a "a well-regarded open source java app called JGAAP." Otto did so and let's just say the results aren't what McArdle's 5000-word hand-waving analysis shows. Hmm. Maybe she should skip all technical analysis.
Relevantly, McArdle has a long discussion of the issue of Heartland funding by the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. She adds this disclaimer:

Full disclosure: One of the donors in the apparently authenticated documents is Charles Koch, and my husband did a year-long fellowship with the Koch Foundation. However, nothing I'm going to write either defends or indicts Mr. Koch, who's actually pretty incidental to both Heartland's funding, and this story.

But her new post does effectively defend Mr. Koch, somehow failing to mention that, for instance, a 2010 report found Koch Industries now outspends Exxon Mobil on climate and clean energy disinformation. Or that the Kochs are major owners of Cato! No, no conflict there.
McArdle's final sentence betrays her Cato-esque view of the subject:

No, the debate is about how unpleasant it would be to prevent itwhich really isn't much of a debate, either, because the obvious answer is "very, except maybe for DINK urbanites". And that's where the discussion pretty much stalls out.

"Obvious"? Only to those who don't study the issue or who say they don't have time to study the issue because they're not going to blog on it.
If McArdle in fact spend any time talking to real climate experts rather than posers, she'd know that avoiding global warming is infinitely more pleasant than letting billions suffer.
Her headline is unintentionally revealing. If we don't act to stop global warming, it won't because of what McArdle is trying to say in this piece, that it's too unpleasant, it'll be because of what she actually said in this piece, that media mavens are too lazy to learn the real truth of the high costs of inaction and low costs of action and because of what she didn't say about the owners of Cato and other fossil fuel companies, who have captured just enough of the political system and the media to block action.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/03...?mobile=nc

[Magda Hassan]

The Atlantic's McArdle Problem.

Paul Waldman
September 2, 2009

















A colleague points me to this, from a WaPo chat with The Atlantic's Megan McArdle:

Anonymous: You said that medical innovation will be wiped out if we have a type of national health care, because European drug companies get 80% of their revenue from Americans. Where did you get this statistic?
Megan McArdle: It wasn't a statistic--it was a hypothetical.
However, whenever I have been able to find pharma financial statements that break down their profits by region, the lion's share always comes from the US.

Before we get to why this is worth taking note of, let's be clear that on the factual question, she's simply wrong. As my colleague noted:

As a statement about geographical breakdowns of revenues, and assuming "the lion's share" means "at least half", this is not true about Pfizer, GlaxoSmithkline (pharmaceuticals sales), Sanofi-Aventis, Bayer (healthcare division) or Hoffman-LaRoche. It is true about the "Pharmaceuticals" division of Johnson & Johnson, but not about the "Medical Devices and Diagnostics" division (combined, the US is almost exactly half of sales, 53%).
As a statement about operating profits (the original question was about revenues but the answer talks about profits), it is not true about GlaxoSmithkline (on a location of subsidiary basis rather than final customer basis) or Sanofi-Aventis; the rest of them don't give the operating profit split, but the margins ex-USA are not noticeably lower.
It is not difficult to look these things up; all the big 6 pharma companies have their report and accounts on the web, and all of them have searchable pdfs in which one can find the geographical breakdown of sales really quickly.

Here's the thing. If I were the editor of one of the most important magazines in the history of this fine nation, which has been publishing since 1857 and probably has to rent out a separate facility to house all the awards it has won, and I was thinking of hiring an economics columnist, I might see if I could find someone who understood the meaning of terms like "statistic" and "hypothetical."
More after the jump.
http://prospect.org/article/atlantics-mcardle-problem

[Magda Hassan]

Megan McArdle's Hack Post on Elizabeth Warren's Scholarship

Posted on July 27, 2010 by Mike
So Megan McArdle wrote a long post attacking Elizabeth Warren as a scholar. What's surprising is how little "there-there" there is to her critique. I would love to see nomination hearings based around how expansive of a definition to use for medical bankruptcies and watching Warren rip the face off of Senators when it comes to empirical methods. I doubt it is going to come to this, but I'll go ahead and respond. (I've been waiting for part two to respond, which I assume may not show up.)
Because that isn't what this is about. It's about giving the impression that Warren is a weak scholar. Given that Warren is considered "the leading authority in the country on bankruptcy law," being called a hack by McArdle, of all people, is something. Especially when we get a gem of a major screwup like this right out the door in the post:

Megan McArdle, blog post: 2. The response rate on their survey was only 20%. Given the deep shame surrounding bankruptcy, you have to worry that they got an unrepresentative sample. And how is that sample most likely to be unrepresentative? Well, one pretty likely way is that people who went bankrupt through no fault of their ownfolks who got whacked by large and unpayable medical bills or a business closurewere more likely to respond than the people with drug or alcohol problems, profound depression that left them unable to work, compulsive gambling issues, and so forth….
Katie Porter, comments: Also, I would like to correct the misstatement, I believe of a commentator, that Ms. McCardle reproduces in her article above, that the response rate to the survey was 20%. The response rate was right at 50%, or just under that, depending on the exact metric for response rate used. More detail on the response rate for the written survey, as well as on the bias checks that were performed for sample selection bias, is also available in the above articles.
Megan McArdle, comments: They had a 50% response rate on the questionnaires, but by the time you got to the interviews, they were down to 20%. It's in the article.

I have no idea what to make of this. Megan opens her critique by saying that there's a massive bias in the data sample implied by the low response rate of 20%. A commenter politely responds that the response rate is 50%. She is very polite as the 50% is on the front page of the 2009 study. Megan then says she meant the interview rate.
Nobody is perfect, especially on the blogs. I've messed up data on this blog before, I've confused terms that I knew but didn't catch in a proofread, and I've used data and terms that I thought meant one thing that turned out to mean another thing. Anytime someone points this out I correct it, or pause and double-check what I thought, or quietly ditch using that information. Humility is usually the best antidote to being a hack.
But notice how Megan just keeps on going. This is one of the major planks of her argument, that the sample is corrupted, and when someone points out that what she stated was factually incorrect she just changing the terms and keeps on going as if she what she wrote wasn't wrong. How is a reader supposed to read this? Did she mean to say interview rate in the beginning? Does she think that a 50% response rate is too low? Useless without a 50% interview rate? Did she know at the time of writing the difference between the two terms? Does she want to reconsider her argument?
(It's pretty similar to the classic McArdle instance of "It wasn't a statisticit was a hypothetical" when it came to US profits of pharma.)
Which is a shame. Like the hypothetical case there's no pause, no reflection, so as a reader I just want to assume bad faith and move along.
But I won't. Let's continue.
Causes, Contributes
"4. Their methodology is quite explicitly designed to capture every case where medical bills, or medical loss of income, coexist with some other causal factorbut the medical issues are then always designated as causal in their discussion…If you're a plumber who has a stroke, you may well end up in bankruptcy simply because you lose income while you can't work (the medical bills may or may not play a large causal role)."
Another problem Megan has with Warren's research is that Megan believes it says medical debt is the cause of bankruptcies instead of something that contributes to bankruptcies. Instead of simply being a contributor among many multi-causal problems Megan states that Warren believes that medical debts are the sole cause ("always designated as causal") instead of a contributor among a multi-causal set of items.
Is that true? Let's look at the title of the paper that kicks off this line of research: "Illness And Injury As Contributors To Bankruptcy." (my bold, italics, and underline.) It's in the #@$%@# title that it's a contributor and not the sole cause!
From the abstract of the 2007 paper Megan hates: "Our 2001 study in 5 states found that medical problems contributed to at least 46.2% of all bankruptcies…CONCLUSIONS: Illness and medical bills contribute to a large and increasing share of US bankruptcies." (my bold, italics, and underline.)
This may look like a little nitpick but it is important: bankruptcies are multi-causal, and as far as I can tell Warren's research has always emphasized this. Certainly the titles and conclusions of her paper place emphasis on this. Megan is trying to imply a con job, that Warren is an ideologue who manipulates her results and her conclusions to be stronger than they deserve. That's not true.
Data Data Everywhere
There's a lot of this: "The authors have an odd tendency to ignore what the respondents themselves say. 32% of those surveyed about their 2007 bankruptciesnot 62%reported that medical problem of self or spouse was reason for bankruptcy.'"
Notice what is going on here. Warren and her co-authors realize that there are a lot of ways to interpret the data and, ethically, put the data out there so others can disagree and make counter-arguments. All the data results are there. Megan does make these counter-arguments but gives off the impression that something is being hidden, or a sneaky move is being made.
Which gets to the bigger complaint Megan has about the paper: "As I discussed at the time, early 2007 is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time to do any sort of study on bankruptcy… Bringing me to my next point: the paper thoroughly obscures the point that by their own calculations, the number of medical bankruptcies fell quite dramatically between 2001 and 2007."
I still don't get this complaint. There was an absolute overhaul in the way bankruptcy is carried out in 2005. Comparing the absolute numbers before and after wouldn't be an apple-to-apples comparison. You can argue that no valid research could possibly done and that any empirical statistics should never be carried out on post-2005 data, which is what I think Megan argues, or that you acknowledge the data limitations, do your best to compensate and provide additional information, which Warren and the rest do under the section "Changes in the Law", and carry on. I'm in the second camp.
I'm in Delaware.
"A pretty convincing paper argues that the single best predictor of bankruptcy is simply how much debt you've accumulatednot income, job loss, divorce, or what have you."
This paper Megan finds convincing is a study of the population of the state of Delaware. Delaware. Nevermind that it puts together Delaware bankruptcy records with data from the Survey of Consumer Finance in a way designed to exacerbate data differences and corrupt instruments, which is a major problem. Are we comfortable thinking that Delaware can substitute in for the nation, especially when we have a representative nationwide sample with a 50% response rate like the one Warren uses?
And as Thomas Levenson points out:

But as McArdle completely failed to acknowledge, Zhu does so while using somewhat more stringent standard for counting medical expenses as a factor in bankruptcy than other scholars employed as he explicitly acknowledges. He concedes the continuing significance of medically -induced bankruptcy. He acknowledges what he believes to be a weak underweighting of that factor (because some people pay for medical expenses on credit cards). And he notes that a number of other studies, not limited to those co-authored by Warren, come to different conclusions.
In other words: McArdle correctly describes one conclusion of this paper in a way that yields for its readers a false conclusion about what the paper itself actually says.

Megan herself says that she thinks health care costs contribute to a real number of bankruptcies. The question is how to best go about defining what constitutes a health care cost related bankruptcy. If you read McArdle's post you would think that they use similar data and use similar methods but find different results. Instead, the study she likes uses Delaware and a consciously described more exclusive definition.
How you rate bankruptcy rates from medical conditions is going to be a function of how strictly you define a medical bankruptcy. Zhu has a higher-filter than Warren's, so these results aren't surprising. I could see using a stronger filter than Warren's. The question is whether or not Warren's filter is a good one. If you read Warren's 2009 paper you see that her results are robust to alternative specifications: "Adopting an even more stringent threshold for medical debts (eg, eliminating those with medical debts below 10% of family income) would reduce our estimate by <1%."
That Zhu paper is part of a dialogue that Warren started about the role of medical debt in bankruptcy. It's weird for Megan to call Warren a hack but then applaud Zhu's paper: it's all part of the same continuum of research. If she likes Zhu's paper she should thank Warren for starting the discussion.
Data Undercounting
Before moving on I want to point out that the coolest new research is that the 2007 data Warren uses is probably undercounting medical debt significantly. From Jacoby and Holman's Managing Medical Bills on the Brink of Bankruptcy:

This paper presents original empirical evidence on financial interactions between medical providers and their patients who go bankrupt. We use a nationally representative sample of people who filed for bankruptcy in 2007 to compare two popular but hotly contested methods of measuring medical burden. By applying both methods to the same filers, we find that nearly four out of five respondents had some financial obligation for medical care not covered by insurance in the two years prior to filing as measured by the survey method. The court record method paints a different picture, with only half of the cases containing identifiable medical debt, and of substantially more modest amounts. We test several theories to explain the discrepancy and find we can account for it to a significant extent by filers' methods of managing medical bills that make it difficult or impossible for the court record method to detect them. For example, we find the highest rates of mortgage and credit card use for medical bills among respondents with the largest discrepancies between the survey method and the court record method. Respondents who report medical bills as a reason they filed for bankruptcy mortgaged their homes for medical bills at nearly four times the frequency of other filers, and were about a third more likely to use credit cards for medical bills. We also find disparities by age, sex, race, and housing tenure that skew the court record measure. Our findings suggest that the advice offered by experts in "medical practice management" reduces providers' financial exposure from patient liabilities. One implication of this "success" is that the court record method of measuring medical bills should not be used on a standalone basis to measure the impact of medical bills on financially distressed families. Also, the court record method should not be used to refute survey estimates of medical burden in debates over health care or bankruptcy reform.

It look like the 2007 data that Warren uses for the 2009 paper undercounts medical debt. The creditors from bankruptcy aren't always clear on what is and is not medical debt so these authors hit the data to re-examine it. So the results are probably stronger. Cool.
Two-Income Trap
If you made it this far, I feel terrible for you. I feel like Virgil leading you through a Glibertarian Inferno.
As far as I can tell, Megan thinks the book Two-Income Trap is a good book. She has three critiques:
1) "The first is that Warren simply fails to grapple with what her thesis suggests about the net benefits of the two-earner family." I'm not sure I understand what this means. I think, and there's certainly nothing in the book to discount this, that Warren believes women having careers is a major net benefit both to women themselves and society as a whole. (Warren is a pretty accomplished person, after all.)
What she points out is that as a rising costs for certain goods (health care, education, and housing in particular) there isn't a safety net if one income is lost via illness, divorce, or death via the family's work structure. As someone familiar with risk management it makes perfect sense.
2) "Warren kind of waves her hands and mumbles about social programs and more supportive work environments. There is no possible solution outside of a more left-wing government."
I completely grant that this books identifies a major problem for the economic security of the middle class but doesn't completely solve it. True. Is that a serious knock? It is also true to me that the obvious solution is something like single-payer health care and free college. But one could also imagine a solution of a Hong Kong style health care, or more competition/consolidation of health care across state lines. I don't think those are good solutions, but maybe you do. If the right wants to become relevant again, addressing these insecurities is incredibly important.
Side note: Is Warren a crazy left-winger? As Thomas Levenson brings up in a must-read beatdown of that post, Warren's essential final point in the book is that "…families need to safeguard themselves". If you read this story from her money-planning guide "All Your Worth" she advises a family to be clearer in separating discretionary from non-discretionary spending and budgeting accordingly. Is this the sound of the proletariat seizing the means of production? Comrades: rise up and plan your monthly budget in a smarter way!
3) "Warren argues that housing consumption hasn't actually increased much in the last few decades: by less than a room per house." Housing price increases have vastly outstripped housing price consumption; housing prices have tripled since 1987. That easily surpasses a 20% increase in housing consumption, and that's all that's necessary for Warren's point to carry. Ed Glaeser's work actually supports Warren's point. If housing supply is inelastic, then of course as populations grow the price of housing will be bid up. But again, if this is the biggest attack on the book I think it's safe to declare it a victory.

I actually came across Warren from this 2005 issue of The Boston Review, where Warren argued against the myth of overspending contra people like Juliet Schor and others who thought Americans were on a luxury fever trip. Warren pointed out that people actually spend less on clothing that they used to as a result of globalization and technology, but that the real squeeze on middle-class families came from increases in health care, education and housing.
This made me prepared for the wave of "consumption inequality isn't that bad" arguments that washed over the internet last year. Because if you just look at discretionary spending, they are right! People get more cheaper. But if you look at the whole picture of what constitutes middle-class security, it is actually getting much more expensive. Now the big paper quoted by the consumption inequality camp only looked at discretion income. Christian Broda and John Romalis's "The Welfare Implications of Rising Price Dispersion" is mostly about food. When pieced together, the idea that people are eating cheaper food to keep discretionary spending tight, are eating cat food to pay for health care, is a much different picture than simply looking at how cheap you can get a nice stereo.
http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/07/2...holarship/

[Magda Hassan]

Video: Taibbi vs. McArdle on Goldman




POSTED: May 16, 10:03 AM ET

Wanted to post the video for an appearance I did this weekend on "CNN Your Money" with Ali Velishi, in which I was invited to debate the Goldman issue with Megan McArdle of The Atlantic. Megan and I have a long history, which I don't need to get into here, but I'll say this: her ragged intellectual poverty could not possibly have been laid any more bare than it was in this appearance. In it, she actually argues that Goldman did not have any more responsibility to see that their clients made money than, say, The Atlantic magazine has a responsibility to see that Rolling Stone makes money.

I will leave it to the reader to figure out how exact a correlation there might be between a bank that sells a multibillion-dollar pool of mortgages to a client with whom it has an written contractual commercial agreement an agreement struck under the umbrella of an extensive series of securities laws and two magazines that have absolutely no business relationship whatsoever.

The rest of this interview is self-explanatory, I think.

VIDEO HERE:

[Jan Klimkowski]

What a complete Koch....