Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Megan McArdle Wins Prize

Congratulations to Megan McArdle, who won the Warwick Prize for her complex, hip book The Shock Doctrine.

What's that? Naomi Klein wrote The Shock Doctrine? The same Naomi Klein that McArdle said was "completely ignorant" and "economically quasi-literate"? How can it be that McArdle's imaginary rivals get all these huge prizes and McArdle gets nothing?

From the same post, on Klein's interview of Alan Greenspan (Via):

I have to give Alan Greenspan props for doing this. The host is hostile, economically quasi-literate, allows the other guest to act as co-interrogator, interrupts him every time he says anything sensible in a desperate attempt to stop the flow of information, and beats Greenspan with weird & untrue "facts" (the Iraq war has cost trillions) that have nothing to do with his job as chairman of the Federal Reserve. My favorite moment is when Naomi Klein accuses Greenspan of having pursued a crisis of faith in capitalism through his income-inequality producing policies of privatisation, deregulation, and free trade, which is a terrific twofer: not only have none of these things been convincingly linked to income inequality; but also, none of them have anything to do with Alan Greenspan's job at the Federal Reserve Nonetheless, Greenspan a) doesn't point out that she's completely ignorant b) keeps his temper and c) tries to actually explain the problems of income inequality. I doubt I'd be so well behaved.


I, too, doubt it, having seen her blogginheads videos. But the important thing is that I was wrong; McArdle didn't win a prize after all. I deeply regret the error, although I also claim that my reasoning process was flawless and therefore the fault lies with the facts, and not with myself.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

1) So is there something special about the University of Warwick, or do you just outsource your critical faculties to whoever has the biggest medal? If the latter Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek's Nobel prizes in Economics should probably trump this.

2) As dumb as Naomi Klein is at least she isn't an actual Trotskyist, like the chair of judges for this prize, China Mieville.

Susan of Texas said...

The main point is that McArdle has been quite wrong about almost everything, yet feels free to insult those who were right. Even Greenspan admits she was wrong about Greenspan.

Watching her "enemies" get prizes for being right is just gravy.