Megan McArdle
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Megan McArdle (born January 29, 1973) is a New York City-based blogger and journalist who is temporarily stationed in Washington, DC. A lifetime New Yorker except for college and graduate school, she has an undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. She writes mostly about economics, finance and government policy from a libertarian perspective.
On her blog she writes under the pen name "Jane Galt". The name is a play on "John Galt", the name of a central character in Ayn Rand's Objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged. Her political perspective, though, could best be described not as Objectivist but as moderate libertarian or classical liberal.
She began blogging in November 2001; her blog was originally called "Live From The WTC", because she was working at the time for a construction firm doing cleanup at the World Trade Center site following the September 11 attacks. In November 2002 she renamed the site "Asymmetrical Information", a reference to the economics term of the same name. Currently her blog features two other occasional contributors, Zimran Ahmed (who writes under the pen name "Winterspeak") and the pseudonymous Mindles H. Dreck.
McArdle gained prominence for coining what she termed "Jane's Law", in a blog post from May 21, 2003. [1] The law, written with regard to the two main U.S. political parties, Republicans and Democrats, reads: "The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant. The devotees of the party out of power are insane." Another well-known post of hers, from April 2, 2005, discusses why she takes no position on the issue of gay marriage; she wrote, "All I'm asking for is for people to think more deeply than a quick consultation of their imaginations to make that decision... This humility is what I want from liberals when approaching market changes; now I'm asking it from my side [libertarians] too, in approaching social ones." [2]
McArdle is currently a full-time journalist and works at The Economist, with the title of Economics Correspondent, where she covers global economic issues, as well as being the main contributor to the magazine's "Free Exchange" blog. She has had book reviews and opinion pieces published in the New York Post, the New York Sun, Reason magazine and Salon.com.
