10/21/10 7:54 PMDid Megan McArdle Really Graduate from a Business School? - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

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Grasping Reality with Both HandsThe Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and Even-HandedDepartment of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 7080467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu.

Economics 210aWeblog ArchivesDeLong Hot on GoogleDeLong Hot on Google BlogsearchSeptember 09, 2010

Did Megan McArdle Really Graduate from a Business School?

She writes:

On Comparing Tax Cuts to Social Security: the only reason the [CBPP's two]numbers [valuing the size of the upper-income tax cuts and the Social Securitydeficit] looked even remotely the same size was that they were using a present

value...

Did this person really graduate from a business school?

Either she needs her tuition back because they did not teach her what present value isfor, or the business school needs to revoke her degree to get its reputation backbecause its graduates do not know what present value is for, or both.

When you want to compare two streams of cash flows to see which is more valuable--to sum up how much you should be willing to pay for it in one number--you computepresent values.

That is what they are there for.

That is what they do.

That is the only reason they were developed.

That is the only reason that they exist.

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

Brad DeLong on September 09, 2010 at 05:55 PM in Information: Better PressCorps/Journamalism, Utter Stupidity | Permalink

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10/21/10 7:54 PMDid Megan McArdle Really Graduate from a Business School? - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

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Comments

Lee A. Arnold said...The fact that these are nearly equal amounts is not a new fact, by the way. Four yearsago I pointed it out -- at minute 4:25 of this sexy little animation, right here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tts2uTWt6e8

Reply September 09, 2010 at 06:06 PMMegan McArdle said...And if you have developed a way for the United States government to securitize thecash flows from repealing the Bush tax cuts over the next 75 years, that would be veryuseful.

[We do.

We have.

It is called paying down the debt.

Why are you doing this?

That is another intellectual foul.]

Otherwise, comparing a cash flow that is much larger in out years, to one that is steadystate, is going to give you a distorted idea of their relative burden on the budget,particularly if you use--as the CBPP did--a discount rate much higher than the interestthat the United States government pays on its debt.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 06:36 PMMegan McArdle said...On a side note, it's not quite cricket to snip out the rest of the sentence, which for thebenefit of your readers who won't click through* reads " . . . and a very long timeframe".

[That's another intellectual foul. All present value calculations necessarily extend overa long time frame--a time frame long enough for the cash flows in the future tobecome insignificant when discounted back to the present.

There is nothing "not quite cricket" in my excerpt. There is, it seems to me, somethingvery wrong with this comment.]

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The problem, as I mention in my post, is that the very near cash flows in SocialSecurity are very different from the later cash flows, and since PV weights close years,this has the effect of making it look as if one cash flow could be used to pay foranother, when in fact, repealing the Bush tax cuts and putting every dollar towardsdebt repayment would not generate enough money to cover the Social Securityshortfall, even using very optimistic revenue forecasts. For this reason, using the PV ofa very long forecast period gives a distorted implication.

* I am assuming, of course, that you will not delete this comment.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 06:48 PMfs said...I don't think I follow Ms. McArdle's argument.

If given the choice, an individual or business would prefer to pay a debt in the futurerather than today. The same holds for taxes. By retaining the funds that wouldotherwise be paid to the government via taxes, individuals or businesses can invest thefunds to generate greater wealth.

Imagine that the choice is between (1) the government taxing individuals andbusinesses today and stashing the money away for the payment of promised benefits inthe distant future, and (2) letting people keep their funds to invest in productiveactivities and taxing them in the distant future to pay for the benefits to be paid at thattime.

Not only would option (2) be more popular, it would also be more effective indelivering those future benefits because the government would be able to tax aneconomy that grew at a greater rate because of the investments made in earlier years.Of course, this assumes that the private market is investing its money effectively. Frommy perspective, the proper question to ask is whether the government is promisinggreater benefits than the economy will be able to deliver at that time.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:02 PMDrDick said...Megan McArdle's job is to misinform and distort. That is all.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:08 PMBrad DeLong said in reply to Megan McArdle...Re: And if you have developed a way for the United States government to securitize thecash flows from repealing the Bush tax cuts over the next 75 years, that would be veryuseful.

This is unbelievable.

Thats what the government does when it borrows.

Thats what the marketable debt of the government is.

The government takes its future expected cash flows and... securitizes them.

Thats why government bonds are called securities, after all: they are the securitizedfuture tax cash flows.

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Yours,

Brad DeLong

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:12 PMMegan McArdle said...Oops, fair enough, I see I wrote almost the same thing twice, and neglected the caveatin the first instance. But if you read the whole post, you can't possibly have thoughtthat my point was that it is never appropriate to use present value calculations.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:20 PMPaul M Gottlieb said...Sadly, not only did McArdle go to business school, she went to my business school--theUniversity of Chicago. So every time she opens her mouth, she devalues my degree alittle more. Of course Eugene Fama,Casey Mulligan, and Gary Becker are doing thesame thing. I should have sold my MBA at the market peak 15 years ago, but I didn'tsee the reputational crash coming. Yes another way my business education has failedme.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:29 PMArgle said...> But if you read the whole post, you can't possibly have thought > that my point was that it is never appropriate to use present value calculations

Nice. I hardly saw the goalposts move there.

Also, Brad, if you read the whole post you can't possibly have thought her point wasthat cows excrete peaches. WHY do you PERSIST in such ridiculous misreadings?Why?

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:31 PMzosima said...Being a certain sort of optimist, I prefer to think that McArdle is a conservative shill;willing to grasp at any straws; or worried she'll lose her readers if she doesn't tossthem some red meat...rather than dumber than a bag of hammers. But sometimes I'mdriven to question my optimism.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:38 PMBrad DeLong said in reply to Argle...Re: Brad, if you read the whole post you cant possibly have thought her point was thatcows excrete peaches. WHY do you PERSIST in such ridiculous misreadings? Why?

Because I was very bad in a previous life? Or because I was happy thinking I hadactually helped some people become better informed via cspan?

Yours,

Brad DeLong

Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:38 PMBernard Yomtov said...McArdle,

"But since the government doesn't really have any mechanism to save, it's not veryhelpful to compare present values, because current cash flows can't actually be storedup to use in the future. "

No mechanism to save? What about reducing debt?

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Reply September 09, 2010 at 07:42 PMGene O'Grady said...I don't want to be too hard on McCardle because in her Jane Galt incarnation she oncemade an intelligent response to a comment of mine on this very blog, but isn't whatshe really wants to say that the present value calculation was done with aninappropriate discount rate? Which, right or wrong, is at least a coherent argument,but she picked a very odd way to express it.

Also, the point about events in the future seems to cut the other way to what she claims(higher weight to things well in the future?), given their greater uncertainty.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 08:12 PMZach said...On a side note, it's not quite cricket to snip out the rest of the sentence, which for thebenefit of your readers who won't click through* reads " . . . and a very long timeframe".

What time frame is appropriate for comparing two policies in terms of present value?

Reply September 09, 2010 at 08:35 PMgrog said...McArdle is paid good money to comfort the comfortable, whether or not thecomforting is correct. She is the definition of a hack.

The real question is why the Atlantic is getting such low-quality hackery for its money.While I'd likely be less mannered at Georgetown cocktail parties, I can obfuscate betterthan that without an MBA.

"Thats why government bonds are called securities, after all: they are the securitizedfuture tax cash flows."

Oh, come on! Next you'll be telling me that the Social Security bonds are just as real asthose held by China, or that the OMB actually employs economists, or that F. Hayekdidn't bunk with Paul Ryan in college.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 08:35 PMJoe said...Hayek and Ryan DO share the same bunk. I don't even think the linens have beenchanged.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 09:15 PMGA said in reply to Gene O'Grady..."isn't what she really wants to say that the present value calculation was done with aninappropriate discount rate? Which, right or wrong, is at least a coherent argument,but she picked a very odd way to express it."

No, she really wants to say that the methodology does not give the answer she's lookingfor. Anyone who knows present value calcs would simply state the discount rateargument up front.

Her convoluted points about cashflow are gibberish. Yes, if the government has to paythe SSA when SSA redeems a treasury, cash comes out. And government would do soby ... issuing another treasury. There would be no increase in the debt, because it'salready accounted for.

The other people's work she cites makes a somewhat better case, that projections arehighly sensitive to assumptions - but that works both ways, and (given the long timeframes) would actually work much more in SS's favour.

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Easier and just as accurate, however, to invoke Megan's Lemma. Read Krugmaninstead. In short, you can't claim the trust fund doesn't exist or doesn't count withoutmaking the same claim she makes about taxes, that they can be changed at any time.And you can't double-count the debt by recognising the future SS outflows but not theprovisions already made for them.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 09:17 PMBrad DeLong said in reply to Zach...RE: On a side note, its not quite cricket to snip out the rest of the sentence, which forthe benefit of your readers who wont click through* reads . . . and a very long timeframe. What time frame is appropriate for comparing two policies in terms of presentvalue?

Indeed. the infinite horizon--until the cash flows zero out or at least becomeinsignificant--is kinda implied in the notion of present value.

Yours,

Brad DeLong

Reply September 09, 2010 at 09:29 PMPaul Reber said...I liked the part where she said "Oops."* I have read many a summary of hilariouslycombative threads where it takes dozens of commenters to get her to realize she hasmade a basic math error ("my calculator doesn't go to billions") and invective andinsults are merrily hurled in the meantime (by her). But note here, it took only onefollow-up comment by BDL. Perhaps people can become better informed after all, bycspan or blog. It is truly difficult to get a woman to understand something when herjob depends on not understanding it (apologies to Sinclair), but maybe it's not entirelyimpossible?

* Assuming, of course, that she said it and not an impostor.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 09:58 PMWcw said in reply to GA...'Megan's Lemma' is a pretty nice locution.

As I never tire of pointing out, my rules for The McMegan are the flip side of DeLong’srules for Krugman: 1, remember that Megan McArdle is wrong; 2, if your analysis leadsyou to conclude that Megan McArdle is right, refer to rule #1.

Her field is agitprop, not analysis.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 10:44 PMAnonymous Coward said...When I was an undergrad the B-school undergrads were occasionally referred to as"The Curve." If you'd paid any attention in class, The Curve provided you an easy pathto an A no matter how hung over you were when you took the test. Especially if thehangover phase hadn't started yet.

The graduate students were not dismissed with such levity, but instead looked on withbewilderment. In part this was because the two populations never came into contact,but in part it was because we never figured out how they managed to get graduatecredit for spending two years drunk while taking the exact same classes we got, excepttheir versions appeared to not include any math.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 10:46 PMSomeCallMeTim said in reply to Paul Reber...

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I think BDL, and MM by her response, has shown us the value of clear direct rebuttalwithout ad hominem. It's one of the distinguishing features of this site, for me at least.

But although she responded in the next comment, I didn't understand how what shesaid related to BDL's point about cash flow securitization / securities. MM, can youhelp me?

Reply September 09, 2010 at 10:46 PMPortlander said...BDL:

Thanks for posterizing McArdle. Twice.

Reply September 09, 2010 at 10:53 PMGA said in reply to Wcw...Wcw: I don't know if someone else or I came up with the 'flip side of the Krugmanlaw', but in my pathetic little world, I'm proud to have coined it Megan's Lemma, andto see that it's being used elsewhere on the interwebs.http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/04/department-of-huh-goldman-sachs-vs-sec-edition.html?cid=6a00e551f0800388340133ecd8c8d7970b#comment-6a00e551f0800388340133ecd8c8d7970b

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:02 AMGA said in reply to Bernard Yomtov...Re: the no mechanism to save and government cost of financing is the correct 'discountrate' to use. There's two pretty obvious answers to this red herring:

The 4% is quite clearly stated as long-run cost of financing. Saying that treasuries areyielding less is not a good argument for a 75-year timeframe.

Even if you do not accept the 4% as a good argument for government borrowing cost,the argument made is that a) these long-term projections are just guesses, and b) if wefinance them at lower rates, the longer-run ones would be higher. This is just plainwrong, since the discount rate has to incorporate not just the cost of finance but alsothe uncertainty.

Any b-school student would understand this on the revenue side in a business case, buthey! it applies on the liability side too. Since social security payments can be changedat any time and projections are uncertain to begin with, discounting them at a higherrate than the cost of finance is not optional - it's required by the methodology.

I think we need a new term, Metho-dodgy, for criticism consisting of casting doubt onbasic concepts you clearly didn't understand the first time around.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:14 AMzorro said...Oh my, yet another in a long string of public humiliations for McArdle :(

If I were paying the bill for McArdle's job (which is unarguably to carry water), I wouldwant much better quality of output. As a columnist, she has very high verbal aptitude,but doesn't seem to stretch for very sophisticated obfuscations of bad economics, whenshe starts with her desired conclusion and then stretches a thin veneer (sausagecasing?) of argumentation backwards to cover faulty assumptions and ricketyeconomic (or arithmetic) arguments. Certainly there's some enterprising young starry-eyed libertarian first-year graduate student blogger wanna-be who could performequally well, if not better, for less pay?

So, can't we get some better glib-ertarians? I know a few of them, and usually they

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fancy themselves among the smartest guys in any room - surely there must be a bettercandidate with more of a head for numbers/basic accounting, and with a better talentfor obfuscation / misleading economic arguments to boot? I know a couple of theseguys and they're brilliant and capable of much more subtlety than McArdle seems tobe!

Finally, here's what I really don't get: given that Those Whose Water Needs Carryingusually can't stand affirmative action hiring practices, how did we arrive here? Whyhas yet another column in a long series of flops made it to the website of a once proudpublication?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:23 AMSmokey said...Good luck with this one Brad ... CALPERS is going to be running into the long rundiscount long before you've stopped collecting social security ...

GA said:

"Since social security payments can be changed at any time and projections areuncertain to begin with, discounting them at a higher rate than the cost of finance isnot optional - it's required by the methodology."

You want to think about that for another minute before I ask if you went to businessschool?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 04:21 AMMegan McArdle said in reply to Brad DeLong...Are we now issuing a 75-year bond?

That's one reason that this formulation doesn't work. The other is that we're talkingabout the size of cash flows out, not cash flows in. We're not borrowing against ourfuture tax/social security *expenditures*. We'd have to save against them. But the USgovernment doesn't really save. The best substitute we have is paying off debt--inwhich case the discount rate should have been the sub 4% that the US pays on its debt,not the 5.25% rate that the CBPP used.

[That's another intellectual foul. Unless you believe that interest rates will remain intheir current configuration indefinitely, today's Treasury rates are inappropriately lowrates to use for long-term government present-value calculations.

Seriously: why are you doing this?]

And the numbers would have been not at all similar in size, because the relative weightof early years would be much less.

Corporations use PV because they can use financial instruments to make the cash flowsactually match over time. Since the US government doesn't do that, the comparison oftwo PVs is more confusing than enlightening.

This is all, of course, rehashed from my post. You may think I am wrong, that takingthe PV of two 75 year cash flows is in fact a useful exercise which will go a long way tohelping us with grapple our structural budget issues. I'm happy to hear argument onthis point. But you haven't made any such argument; you've simply written a sarcasticpost which implies that I somehow don't understand that present value calculationsare often useful, which is very clearly not the point of what I wrote; my point was thatusing this method incorrectly implies that over time, one cash flow could be used topay for the other.

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Since if you actually tried to do this, you would end up with a substantial deficit evenunder quite optimistic revenue projections, this is misleading. This is why corporationsdon't use the present value method for very long time frames; on the one hand, tinyerrors in your initial assumptions get grossly magnified, and on the other, discountingtends to make revenue in later years almost irrelevant unless the cash flows aregrowing very fast.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 05:27 AMsave_the_rustbelt said...Accounting and economics - never the twain shall meet.

The purpose of a modern MBA business school is to teach the students how to do dealsfor short term gain, not how to manage anything, just how to do deals and get richquick and get a BMW and get a house in the Hamptons.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 06:02 AMsave_the_rustbelt said...When I teach baby accountants and the occasional MBA class, I point out that anyNPV calculation longer than 20 years is mostly a fairy tale. I suppose an argument canbe made the federal government is different, as Brad does, and a 75 year horizon makessome sense. Not to the accountant mind though.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 06:08 AMsave_the_rustbelt said in reply to Anonymous Coward...Legend has it that Visicalc, an early spreadsheet program, was developed so MBAstudents could do their case homework faster and have more time to drink beer.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 06:10 AMBernard Yomtov said in reply to GA...What point of mine are you responding to?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 06:36 AMCraig said...Megan, if that is in fact you, why not go home, put one up in the "loss" column, and begrateful that you had to have Professor De Long explain the concept of governmentdebt to you in the relatively obscure comments section of another blog than the onethat makes you your living.

The relentless goalpoast-shifiting and ever deeper delving for caveats and mintuiae issupposed to make you look cleverer than your baldly ridiculous initial statements, butit does not. My advice to you would be to spend your time on either (a) a goodEconomics textbook--Krugman's can be had used for ten bucks or so on Amazon a lotof the time, or (b) Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play." No, Derrida won't teach youanything about economics or finance, but Deconstruction is really the best place to gowhen you want to throw mud all over an argument that you are losing just before youvanish in a cloud of smoke.

My God, this is what comes from the "Business and Economics Editor" of _TheAtlantic_. The magazine that published "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Reply September 10, 2010 at 06:43 AMRob said in reply to Megan McArdle..."Corporations use PV because they can use financial instruments to make the cashflows actually match over time"

Do you just say things you think someone might think makes sense and then write it

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down hoping to fool some people or are you fooling yourself?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 06:53 AMogmb said...The point of an MBA is to maximize the return on a limited skill set, not to expand thatskill set. Methinks Ms. McArdle is doing very well on that count.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 06:58 AMLil'D said...Listen, the gratuitous insults agains McA aren't making us look very good. She's notstupid, just often (but not always) wrong

Reply September 10, 2010 at 07:17 AMhoward said in reply to Lil'D...lil'd, on the one hand, i agree that simply insulting mccardle is a poor way to use one'stime: it's kind of a given by now that mccardle dosn't make good arguments and oftenhas but a shallow grasp of the matter at hand.

on the other hand, a prestigious magazine gives her a platform and she uses thatplatform to publish tripe on a constant basis: since the atlantic itself obviously doesn'tcare (i've written to them, and i can hardly be alone), the only place let to indicate justhow pathetic her professional efforts are is in obscure comments sections....

Reply September 10, 2010 at 07:58 AMdsquared said...Plenty of private corporations do have pension obligations by the way (there are evensome private corporations who do nothing other than manage pension liabilities!) andtherefore they do make actuarial projections on roughly the same sorts of timehorizons as Social Security.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 07:59 AMbdbd said...now that's funny!

Reply September 10, 2010 at 08:06 AMbdbd said...next up: Internal rate of return!

Reply September 10, 2010 at 08:07 AMTom Parmenter said..."Letter from the Birmingham Jail" was published in Liberation, The Christian Century,and The New Leader before it was published in the Atlantic.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 08:14 AMCalvin Jones and the 13th Apostle said...Lil'D:If she wasn't stupid, why does she keep screwing up? Is she just playing stupid becausethat's what brings home the bacon? If so, that's one crappy life. Did you see thesmack-down she got from the author of Sex at Dawn last week(it might have been twoweeks ago)?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 08:15 AMbillb said..."Corporations use PV because they can use financial instruments to make the cashflows actually match over time."

This is word salad, just like from Sarah Palin, except grammatically correct. McMegan

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is not stupid, just financially ignorant. She uses her verbal skills to cover the fact thatshe doesn't know what she is talking about.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 08:33 AMNewAlgier said...Ms. McArdle, have you never computed the present value of a perpetuity in valuing acompany? Does the dividend discount model (say) not imply perpetual cash flows? Youcan't justify any valuation for any business that DOESN'T incorporate a perpetualvalue for perpetual assets! Nor can a business "securitize" these cash flows, other thanby issuing risky equity.

You're all wet.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 08:39 AMthe idler said...I wish Megan would "Go Galt" like her hero.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 09:24 AMPhil Koop said...It gets funnier. Later in her piece, McArdle writes:

"I don't think it makes sense to include the trust fund in a comparison of the cost ofthe Bush tax cuts to the cost of the Social Security shortfall. The unified budget doesnot have a trust fund; it has assets (the bonds in the trust fund) and liabilities (thebonds in the trust fund) which exactly cancel each other out."

But this is as broad as it is long; if the assets are matched by liabilities, then theliabilities are matched by assets. By this reasoning, assets held by the trust fund shouldnot be counted as government debt and interest paid on these assets should not beincluded in deficit calculations.

More generally, it seems that any government pension must be unfunded by definitionusing the McArdle-accepted accounting principles. From a macroeconomic perspective,I kind of agree with this - with trifling exceptions, you cannot save real goods andservices, you can only save money. And money is merely a risky claim on future goodsand services. But I suspect that this is not exactly McArdle's reasoning. And whatwould be the difference compared to the aggregate of privately held pensioninvestments?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 09:40 AMSB said...What billb said. Word salad indeed.

Never mind the damage one does to the public discourse. Just make stuff up, post itand then defend it with word salad.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 09:59 AMkharris said in reply to fs...I almost was kinda about to object, till you got to the end bit about the private marketinvesting its money effectively. The whole argument about leaving money with theprivate sector so it can invest and make the economy bigger turns to dust at a time likethis, when we have more capacity to meet demand than we have demand.

But on to McMegan. One of her most favorite methods of disputation is that which Iwill call "false cleverness". Many, many childrens who grow up the smartest kid in theclass learn that they can simply toss out a sophistic argument and buffalo the rest ofthe class. So they naturally get practiced at making up such arguments and their little

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knees jerk in the direction of doing so as a result of that practice. Ms McMegan (I feelfree to make low jokey fun of her name because another of her favorite methods ofdisputation is to make fun of thoughts for which she has disdain. There appears to beless of that now that McMegan is all growed up and getting paid for confusing people,but I knew her writings back when she was an amature, when Brad was wont to praiseher cleverness.)...sorry, Ms. McMegan in this case declares that because of the patternsof the two flows being compared, net present value calculations are misleading.Um,...all non-trivial net present value calculations are misleading in just that way.When flows are closely matched over time, NPV calculations aren't all that necessary.It's because flows are often not closely matched over time that NPV calculations are souseful.

But McMegan tells us that the mismatch between flows makes NPV calculationsmisleading. And wrong. And oooh, they can't do that. Clever, falsely clever McMegan.

Remember the time she drew on her cleverness and her MBA to discern that a NobelPrize winner's poem was bad poetry, because she knew what poetry is meant to do andhis poem didn't do it (and it was anyhow contrary to her political views) so it was bad?Clever McMegan.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 10:37 AMSharon… peeking through her fingers said...Has the bleeding stopped yet?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 10:45 AMaimai said...What a pearl of a thread this is. I'm ashamed to admit that McArgle-Bargle is aimingher word salad at people like me. She can be sure that we are not economists and thatour eyes glaze over when she begins throwing shit up against the wall. She exists as apropagandist, and thrives, because the party and the corporations for which she makesshit up don't want anything better defending their political policies. Something better,someone smarter, would occasionally have to doven in the direction of reality andhonesty, would have to engage directly with her smarter and better educatedcolleagues, and would have to admit that the entire history of her libertarianphilosophy is a failure and a fantasy. If it weren't, she and the much cited asymettricalspouse wouldn't need to be potemkin philosophers, wholly paid subsidiaries of a richman's fantasy of cheap labor/high profit. They'd be paid for by the grateful pennies ofthe thousands of workers they put back to work, they educated, they enlightened.Megan and the spouse are paid shills for the Koch brothers, pandering to a prettyspecific set of corporate interests. That takes the phrase "no better than she should be"to new depths.

On the question, raised upthread, as to whether it is seemly to accuse Megan of beingwrong all the time, or getting personal with her in the insult department. I can onlysay, with Giles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in re Sarcasm "Its sort of the whole point,really." Or, with the guy at Rosh Hoshana services yesterday when reflecting onwhether he had "held back the unnecessary gibe" during the past year "No, all of thosegibes were necessary."

Here's the thing about Megan--she doesn't respond to anything but insults from peopleshe considers her peers or her social superiors. She is intellectually and morallyvacuous and responds neither to polite questions or rebuttals, facts, or reality. But shecan be piqued--piqued, repiqued and cappotted. She can't feel shame--not even therudimentary shame that kids feel when they get a bad grade--but she can feel

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humiliation, if its public enough. So, that's the reason for doing it. Because as long asshe and the spouse are paid to disinform the public on matters economic she'll keepdoing it.

aimai

Oh, and good on you, Brad. You always do us proud.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 11:05 AMblabber said...I can't believe this moron McArdle is taken seriously. She wrote some other garbagerecently about how wonderful the private health insurance market is, and gave someridiculously low price for cover. Maybe she could sell this cheap insurance through herwebsite and make money on the markups.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 11:45 AMRichard said...Her concentrations were in Entrepreneurship and Strategic Management.

Figures.

Still, I'm dismayed that anyone who took Investments has trouble with DCF.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:06 PMTooManyJens said..."McArgle-Bargle is aiming her word salad at people like me"

Does that make her a Word Salad Shooter?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:17 PMGA said in reply to Smokey...@Smokey: yep, thought about it, still factual. It's the logic behind most derivativesaccounting, mark-to-market for liabilities, etc. Lots of accounting courses don't coverit, but the logic behind present value/discount rates related to risk applies to liabilitiesas well as assets.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:18 PMSator Arepo said...What aimai said. Wow. Great thread.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:18 PMEl Cid said...I may not be a particle physicist but allow me to write a few paragraphs on why alltheir conventional beliefs are incorrect. Those of you who know differently need to justshut up, because I am an important person.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:19 PMmike said in reply to Megan McArdle...Megan,Don't you think it's true that government can borrow at lower rates than businesses orindividuals? So, shouldn't the discount rate be higher than the rate pays on it's debt?Of course, none of this matters if you object to the whole idea of using present valuecalculations to compare alternative cash flows.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:23 PMEl Cid said...I would like to write about how all the inflation is harming our economy and howgovernment spending is destroying all the jobs. Because shut up.

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Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:30 PMPhoenix Woman said...The fact that Megan McArdle is paid to write for The Atlantic and Brad DeLong justhas his own blog for a soapbox should in itself confirm for folks the power of the right-wing sheltered workshop system. This system, from whence came entities as diverse asAnn "constitutional scholar and plagiarist" Coulter, Kellyanne "My cuteness hides thefact I'm saying hateful things" Fitzpatrick, and Ben "hold still PJ while I steal yourstuff" Domenech, hatches and coddles young right-wing punditti until they can findnice safe homes for them to spew their pro-corporate agitprop without hindrance fromanyone -- except, on occasion, people who actually know their own fields of study, anddemonstrate that on their own or other people's blogs.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:32 PMdakinikat said in reply to Lee A. Arnold...Basically, watch any government securities auction. That's what the market is doing.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:35 PMEl Cid said in reply to Phoenix Woman...This is unfair. There are true experts such as Jonah Goldberg or Erick Erickson whoare also invited to the big news media for insightful discussions.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:36 PMPhoenix Woman said in reply to TooManyJens...Why, yes, yes it does.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:39 PMdakinikat said in reply to dakinikat...and that was for Megan.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:40 PMMegan McArdle said in reply to mike...I don't object to the idea of using present value calculations to compare alternativecash flows;

[Then you should use the strikethrough key on your original post, shouldn't you?]

if that is what you got out of Brad's post, then you have been misled. I think that thisparticular calculation, because the time frame is so long, incorrectly implies that if werepealed the Bush tax cuts, we would then have the cash on hand to pay for the socialsecurity shortfalls--all else ceteris paribus, of course--which is not true. That's whymost corporations don't attempt to project out their cash flows 75 years--and contraMr. Davies, as far as I know they do not usually project their benefit liability forworkers who will be hired thirty years hence.

Beyond that, the aggressive discount rate that pension funds have chosen for theirliabilities has gotten quite a number of them into a bit of a pickle over the last tenyears, so "Private pension funds do it" is not a reassuring indicator that this issomething they've managed to do "well".

Of course, in theory we price stocks on the net present value of all the futuredividends. In practice, however, if your discount rate hasn't driven the incrementalcash flows beyond fifteen or twenty years to virtually zero, then your calculation isdependent on a growth rate that you could not possibly forecast with any reasonablydegree of certainty.

Present value is great stuff! I am present value's #1 fan! But like every other financialmetric, it will occasionally give you absurd results if not watched closely. Particularly,

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as in this case, when they require aggressive assumptions about revenue growth, andthe puzzling inclusion of a trust fund that does not exist from the perspective of theunified budget deficit, to make the numbers come out to be the same size.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:43 PMPhoenix Woman said in reply to El Cid...(slaps forehead) Oy gewalt! How could I forget Jonah the Legacy Pundit Hire? OrErick, Son of Erick?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:44 PMMegan McArdle said...[Is there a point here?]

Oh, and as for government pensions? THe ones that are secured by pension fundsinvested in real assets, and protected by courts not run by the government who issuesthem are about as real as private funds, which is to say subject to the vagaries of themarket. The ones that are just secured by the goodwill of the politicians? They're realas long as the politicians continue to want to pay them. Neither of these questions,however, has anything to do with the argument over whether a 75 year PV for SocialSecurity is usefully compared to a 75 year PV for a highly volatile tax stream.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:46 PMSteve said...McArdle seems to miss the entire point of the CBPP's analysis (even though, as perusual, it was pointed out to her by dozens of commentors). The point was not "there'sno need to worry about Social Security because eliminating the Bush tax cuts will takecare of the shortfall." That wouldn't even make any sense. The Bush tax cuts arealready eliminated, they're expiring, the revenue we get by letting them expire isrevenue that was already in our calculations.

The point, and it's not that complicated, is that people who think the impact on thedeficit of extending the Bush tax cuts is "no big deal," while at the same time thinkingSocial Security faces a major major crisis, are rather silly people. That's all. If you thinkthe shortfall facing Social Security represents a mindblowing amount of money, thenyou ought to be on the phone with your Congressman screaming that the Bush tax cutsshould not be extended, because extending them would cost us that same mindblowingamount of money.

If McArdle understood this, she wouldn't be wasting her time trying fruitlessly to provethat you can't fund the Social Security shortfall by letting the Bush tax cuts expire.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 12:58 PMPeter Principle said...McCardle:"Comparing a cash flow . . . blah blah . . . particularly if you use--as theCBPP did--a discount rate much higher than the interest that the United Statesgovernment pays on its debt."

But every good supply sider knows that current record low Treasury yields are the theresult of a "bubble" in the bond market -- not because we are stuck in a liquidity trapthat renders the supply-side catchetism completely irrelevant, if not totally insane.

McCardle apparently is having trouble keeping her econ propaganda talking pointsstraight.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:05 PMPQuincy said...

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I'm really appreciating the education here (IANAE). McArdle says something that, tomy slow-following ears, might possibly make some sense. Then first Brad, and sincethen various helpful commentors, have lucidly and simply explained why Ms.McArdle's statements were word salad. It turns out that the concepts involved, thoughI have only a layman's grasp on them, are not all that complicated, and if quietly andclearly explained, help me see certain things clearly.

And then, to keep the amusement going, Ms. McArdle (who can't give up, even thoughshe keeps on being laughed at) tries again. Her most recent stab (the one making nastylibertarian-sounding statements about all government pensions, which sounds prettymuch like taking the obvious and dressing it up as right-wing propaganda: "Don'tcount on the pension: a meteor from outer space might knock your township out ofbusiness!") actually has no argument at all.

Actually it's quite re-assuring to hear a 'libertarian' say that government pensionsbacked by assets are only as good as those guaranteed by the market (because themarket, as we all know, is GOD!), but that pensions "secured by the goodwill ofpoliticians" have a different value. (I thought libertarians also fetishized contracts, too,but apparently I've been misled).

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:09 PMaimai said...If McArdle understood this...

Look, after Megan has thrice attempted to explain her reasoning, and been slappedback so hard her face is now backwards on her shoulders, you have to grasp that thevery phrase "If McCardle understood..." is a null, a void, a veritable black hole ofmeaning. It doesn't exist in this universe. "If McArdle understood" cannot co-existwith the actual McArdle who is paid specifically to publicly obfuscate the issue. If thetwo were brought together the universe would explode in something like one of thoseStar Trekkian matter/anti matter episodes. At the very least Megan would die ofshame. And that shows no sign of happening since she appears to lack the basicmechanism involved--morals. Megan can't afford to understand anything that wouldlead her to advocate the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. She is paid toadvocate for policies that advantage the wealthy. That her preferred policies uniformlyand invariably disadvantage the poor, the working class, and the middle class isprobably just lagniappe. Think of her as a corporatist remora. She knows she'll neverbe a shark, but the scraps, even those from other remoras, are just too good to pass up.

aimai

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:10 PMPhil Burk said...Mark Twain comes to mind... better to be thought a fool than open one's mouth andremove all doubt.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:13 PMhoratius said in reply to Megan McArdle...More word salad?

Steve just simplified it for you.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:22 PMbinz said...I thought McGargle had an MBA degree -- but I see now her 'MBA' meant Must BeApocryphal.

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Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:22 PMhoratius said...Dear Editors of the Atlantic,

I promise to prepare better word salads for you than Ms. McMegan and will appearhalf as silly in comments for just half her salary. Also, I'll drag your magazine's goodname through the mud half as many times as she does on a daily basis. Can I have herjob?

Thankshoratius

p.s. send me an email at horatiusonthebridge@yahoo.comp.p.s. hugs and kisses

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:29 PMhoratius said...Also, my calculator can handle trillions.

kthxbai

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:30 PMMpwdoyle said...Ruh roh, looks like Megan has unfortunately stumbled into the Department ofRedundancy Department: "all else ceteris paribus..."

To sound intelligent Megan broke out some Latin that only most undergraduate econstudents use so they can appear to be smart. However, Megan actually said, "all else allelse being equal." Once again Megan has displayed her uncanny knack for sayingseemingly important things only to later find out that she has said nothing at all.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:34 PMCackalacka said...Give her credit for not using her 'academic lineage' to buttress her assertions this time.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:50 PMEdmund said...I <3 this thread.

In addition, why shouldn't we count the social security trust fund? Its contents are asreal as any other financial asset.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:54 PMEl Cid said...I think we should hear more economic from Sarah Palin as this would help furtherflesh out these complicated issues. And maybe also Kate Gosselin and The Situation.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 01:54 PML2P said...Megan,

Here (http://www.actuary.org/pdf/pension/fundamentals_0704.pdf) is a nice littlesummary of how pension actuaries actually calculate pension liabilities. Don't worry,it's short on math - you can make it through. Just FYI.

(Since you probably won't, here's an interesting quote (note the parts about how farforward actuarial projections are made - much farther than 30 years):

The actuary calculates the expected future pension payments for each participant in theplan using the company’s participant data and plan provisions. These future benefit

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payments consider the individual’s compensation and service history, and when thatindividual might be expected to die, quit, become disabled or retire. Each futurepayment is discounted from the date of payment to today using the actuarialassumptions. Actuaries call this discounted amount the present value of future benefitsPVFB) and it represents the present value of all benefits expected to be paid from theplan to current plan participants. If assumptions are correct (and if it were allowed),the company could theoretically set aside that amount of money in a plan today and itwould cover payments from the plan, including those for service not yet rendered.Note this amount considers future service the participant is expected to earn and futurepay increases.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 02:04 PMMegan McArdle said in reply to aimai...[I think this calls for a technical foul. That's not the argument]

Your argument seems to consist of saying that since you have no idea about therelevant economics, the guy who agrees with you must be right.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 02:05 PMbinz said in reply to horatius...I can do better than that, horatius.

Dear Editors of the Atlantic,

I promise to provide an absolutely cretinous and duplicitous word salad, an ignorantimpenetrable mass of buzzwords at least as nonsensical as Ms. McMegan herselfprovides, if not better. And I will do it for FREE.

Yes you read that correctly. I will provide stupidity and ignorance -- an amount and ofa quality equal or better to McMegans' -- for absolutely FREE.

Furthermore, I promise I will not make your magazine's good name look any worse,and I am certain I will not appear noticeably more silly or more of a dumbass thanyour current Business and Economics editor.

Remember, I will work for FREE, and that represents a superlative value for yourmagazine. Why pay for the stupid you have now when you can obtain the same orbetter for nothing?

Thanksbinz

p.s. Sorry horatius. 'Free market, bitchez!' and all that, ya know.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 02:07 PMaimai said...Megan,Well, its not my argument. Just a hobby. But, yeah, ceteris paribus, of course I take thearguments of an actual Professor of Economics, whose intellectual history I happen toknow right back to undergrad days, over a well known intellectual fake like yourself. AsI believe I said previously on a blog post devoted to Joe Klein I don't despise youbecause I don't read your stuff. I do read your stuff. That's precisely why I know thatyou are full of shit. Every. Single. Time. As for the econ stuff since you basically knownothing more than I learned in Ec. 10 lo these many years ago I'm perfectly capable ofevaluating the majority of your arguments. I'm just bored trying of playing the game of"spot the incoherent and misleading argument" since that always starts at the firstword and continues right through each thread. But really, all this is besides the point.

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Isn't it time for you to remind me that you come from a family of intellectuallyintimidating academics? As I recall that is next on the list of Megan strategies.

aimai

Reply September 10, 2010 at 02:21 PMOlly McPherson said in reply to Megan McArdle...Your argument seems to be that an onslaught of verbiage will detract from the fact thatyou're wrong about the relevant economics, as usual.

What a sad thing in life, to be a paid stooge, and a bad one, to boot.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 02:31 PMPhoenix Woman said...MC Krugman has taken note of the proceedings herein and has deigned to take acouple whacks at the McArdle pinata!

From http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/in-the-long-run-some-of-us-are-very-very-confused/ --

"The basic position here is that people on the right favor high-end tax cuts that willworsen the deficit, while at the same time demanding both immediate fiscal austerityand cuts to Social Security, in the name of deficit reduction.

"They justify their tax cuts/austerity position by arguing that what’s important isholding down current deficit numbers, never mind the 10-year outlook.

"Meanwhile, they declare that it’s urgent that we act now to lock in cuts in SocialSecurity benefits that won’t take place for decades.

"Why, it’s almost as if they’re grabbing any argument at hand to justify spending cutsfor the middle class and tax cuts for the rich, regardless of the inconsistency."

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:01 PMRyan W. said in reply to aimai...I'll admit that I don't have the economic background sufficient to score points in thisbattle. I read McArdle regularly, as much for the discussion in her comment thread asanything else, which has a better tendency to get at truth than any article a singleperson might write. But a few points regarding aimai's particular comment;

"her libertarian philosophy is a failure and a fantasy."

If you think McArdle is a libertarian you haven't read her very much. She may haveasserted libertarian values at one point in time, but her policy recommendations don'tseem to correspond. She may be libertarian compared to a press corps that votes 90%Democrat, but that's about as far as such a statement can be salvaged.

"wholly paid subsidiaries of a rich man's fantasy of cheap labor/high profit. They'd bepaid for by the grateful pennies of the thousands of workers they put back to work,they educated, they enlightened. Megan and the spouse are paid shills for the Kochbrothers, pandering to a pretty specific set of corporate interests."

You know that she claimed to have voted for Obama? And was pushing for Democratsin the previous election to punish Republicans?

"Here's the thing about Megan--she doesn't respond to anything but insults frompeople she considers her peers or her social superiors. "

Whether she's right or wrong, she replies frequently in her comments thread. She'sadmitted to being incorrect on a number of occasions. If her motives were really asnefarious as you imply, she'd have axed her comments section a long time ago, as the

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general propagandists seem to do. I'm not claiming she's inerrantly accurate. Certainlynot. What speaks most poorly about Aimai's comment, however, is its accusations ofbad faith.

Do you really think that McArdle's views on economics have changed that radicallysince she was writing Asymmetrical Information?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:03 PMSteve said...Is Brad known for deleting comments, by the way? When I see a statement likeMegan's "I am assuming, of course, that you will not delete this comment" it alwaysseems like a sadfaced exercise in martyrdom ("It's possible, of course, that you will notbe able to handle the TRUTH represented by this comment") but maybe Brad actuallyis known for suppressing dissent, or something. Of course, I'm assuming he will notdelete this comment.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:06 PMPhoenix Woman said in reply to Steve...I'm hoping he doesn't -- why try to save her from herself? Much more fun to let herkeep digging. After all, she is a Randian, and pitying the weak isn't their thing, youknow.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:28 PMcamp said...But it's not trivial guys. She's done so much damage. Megan's blog was the place to gofor the entire country to truly discuss reforming medicare, which is the only issue thatreally matters when it comes to America's long-term finances and the well-being of themiddle class. She had everyone's attention, from physicists in minnesota tobusinessmen in texas. Instead of pulling the discussion toward something creative, andgood for the country, - in other words leadership - Megan insisted week by week thatthe whole effort was 1)not going to pass. 2) stupid. 3) a threat to the nation's medicaladvancement. Meanwhile, speaking as someone who lends to the biotech industry, thereturn to biotech is the privatized return on the investment in research funded by NIH.It's us. Through the government. She was like my parents in Florida with their "keepyour hands off my medicare" sign, even though dad has been on government providedhealth care since he was admitted to Anapolis at the age of 18. It's belief in magic, Ithink. Magic market. But it worked in discrediting the effort at medicare reform, andso here we are again. Full sneer, blowing smoke. I just don't understand why her circlewants to see the country with a political economy that looks like Mexico or Greece.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:30 PMjames c said...It certainly is a strange article. It reads as if she is making it up as she goes along.Butshe is far from the worst Literature graduate writing junk economics. That accolademust go to Amity Shlaes.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:44 PMUncertaintyVicePrincipal said in reply to Phoenix Woman...Well, you better hope that Megan McCardle is a Libertarian, since almost all of herarguments are right wing Conservative viewpoints disguised as something else- whichis the definition of Libertarian, for those of us who are neither Libertarian or rightwing Conservatives.

I figured that that was the only saving grace whatsoever, that she really believed this

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Libertarian pose, which explains why she's baffled that this right wing snake oil getssuch a harsh and dismissive reception in non-right wing blogs and forums such as this.She really believes, I assumed, that she's not just repeating the same conservativetalking points ("Democrats are hypocrites for thinking that the struggling poor needtax breaks but the insanely rich don't!") but espousing something slightly different.

Put another way: If she's justifying the positions of the super-rich by accident andreally didn't mean to, they she's even more inept and clueless than most of us thought.

I'd go with the Libertarian thing, if I were you.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:44 PMUncertaintyVicePrincipal said in reply to Ryan W....Sorry, my post above was a post to this one by Ryan W., not Phoenix Woman. Clickedthe wrong thing.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 03:47 PMSusan said...You mean that a correspondent with a major magazine has no idea what she's talkingabout? Noooo... Sadly, this is to be expected since the field of economics & finance is socomplex that few understand it and most are easily bamboozled with printed nonsense.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 04:23 PMDownpuppy said in reply to Ryan W....McArdle didn't claim to have voted for Obama.

She said she would have, except she forgot to register.

The incompetence is central to Meganism.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 04:26 PMdegret said...Jeez, I hate to admit to being so juvenile, but I'm getting this little crush on aimai.Stop! I'm spoken for!

McArgle-Bargle: I chuckle to myself just thinking it. I still like aimai's pricelesscomment of yesterpost, the one where she mentioned her own Noble pedigree as anon-argument. For my money that one stands out like as if a moonbeam struck a dimein the dirt. A beaut! Oh aimai... vixen!

When McArgle is disagreed with, she becomes emBargled, and her reflex is simply todig deeper and never give an inch. I think Zosima, another world-class Commenter,said it well when she merely asked Megan why she reflexively exacerbates flame warsrather than de-escalating them. Maybe Megan is getting the picture - this time aroundshe seems a bit more subdued...

Reply September 10, 2010 at 04:27 PMdegret said in reply to degret...ugh, Nobel, as in No-bell, you goof.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 04:30 PMSyz said in reply to Ryan W....>> She's admitted to being incorrect on a number of occasions.

Rarely. Reluctantly. And only after insulting everyone who disagrees with herrepeatedly. Even then her 'apology' entails shifting the blame to her accusers, hersources or her calculator.

I don't know why it is "nefarious" to believe that McMegan is beholden to those who

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pay her bills. One of her favorite lines is "incentives matter." Would you believe that apolitician who receives their funding largely from one industry is biased towards them?Why would your standard be different for a journalist?

Reply September 10, 2010 at 04:32 PMvhh said...It is hard for me to believe that the Atlantic is actually paying Ms McArdle to makesuch a long winded fool of herself and them that Paul Krugman can both explain anddemolish her argument in 115 words. (see the link noted above, for convenience here itis again)

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/in-the-long-run-some-of-us-are-very-very-confused/

I therefore conclude that the Atlantic is either not paying her or is being reimbursed bythe Manhattan Institute, Heritage Foundation, or Regnery.

BTW, in the technology area, I find Jim Manzi (an MIT grad like me) to go in forsimilar long winded, labored and fundamentally wrong puffery. One of his gems was toassert that developing a device or system that does the same thing as an existingsystem but is smaller, cheaper, or less energy efficient is not in fact an innovation.Thus the laptop is not an innovation over the typewriter, the mobile phone is not aninnovation compared to the hand cranked phone or early shortwave radio, a ToyotaPrius is no different than a Stanley Steamer, and so on.

There is a common cause for these behaviors, and it's the same disease that got us intotwo endless wars in Ithe Mideast, etc. Ideology that reaches conclusions without or inspite of evidence. It used to be a specialty of left wing politics (see the USSR andnumerous crazy US left wing groupings) with the occasional outbreak amongconservatives (see McCarthy era). But it has now seized most of the US right wing, it'slike a plague.. Megan, Goldberg and even Ann Coulter are the mild eggheads of the lot.The new Ernst Roehm this week looks to be Newt Gingrich with his War on Islam.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 04:41 PMSilver said...That can't actually be the Megan, it has to be people pretending to be her.

No one can be that fucking stupid. I call shenanigans.

Reply September 10, 2010 at 05:18 PMShow more comments...Comments on this post are closed.

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Me: Economists:

PaulKrugmanMark ThomaCowen andTabarrokChinn andHamiltonBrad Setser

Juicebox

Mafia:

Ezra KleinMatthewYglesiasSpencerAckermanDanaGoldsteinDanFroomkin

Moral

Philosophers:

Hilzoy andFriendsCrookedTimber ofHumanityMarkKleiman andFriendsEricRauchwayand FriendsJohn Holboand Friends

I Want the Facts: Ray Griggs' I Want Your Money reviewedMedia Matters for America - Oct 19, 2010In a November 17 post on his personal blog, University of California-Berkeleyeconomics professor Brad DeLong wrote, "Private investment recovered in a very ...Related Articles » « Previous Next »

economics DeLong

10/21/10 7:54 PMDid Megan McArdle Really Graduate from a Business School? - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

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10/21/10 7:54 PMDid Megan McArdle Really Graduate from a Business School? - Grasping Reality with Both Hands

Page 25 of 25http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/did-megan-mcardle-really-graduate-from-a-business-school.html