Daft And Dimwitted Gets You Tenured At The Atlantic
So Megan McArdle, who has been on the wrong side of every financial issue since she started with the Atlantic, whose economic abilities are on par with a second-year economics major who can spout off rehearsed appraisals of current affairs through the dim lens of free market axioms, and whose writing style consists of the kind of mealy-mouthed observations you’d usually find buried in the Metro section of the Washington Post…. has this to say about Matt Taibbi’s article on Goldman Sachs:
What I think, sadly, is that Matt Taibbi is becoming the Sarah Palin of journalism. He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that. And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites….
The more dangerous thing is that Taibbi makes a lot of people feel like they finally understand how they were conned. Taibbi’s facile use of technical terms, his lengthy explanation of little-known secrets that have been endlessly rehashed on every financial page for going on a decade, gives people the illusion that they have acquired valuable information about the financial crisis. They haven’t. They’ve acquired a bunch of disconnected vignettes.
Yes, Megan McArdle, who has spent her lifetime on earth regurgitating the talking points from Business Week on how to solve economic problems, is calling out Taibbi for misuse of technical terms (who ever said he was an economist?) and committing the egregious error of making people angry about things they should be angry about.
