Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking

Friday, April 24, 2009

The World's Hardest Working Econoblogger

Really, Megan?

I work 60 to 80 hour weeks doing something I love. [Wall Street bankers have] been working 30-50 hours a week more than that, doing work that no reasonable human being could claim to enjoy the mechanics of.

We know you seldom post on the weekends. You're saying that you work 12 to 16 hours a day? Really? Or maybe only 10 to 12 hours a day and another 10 to 20 hours on the weekend? You would be working from approximately 9 am to anywhere from 7 pm to 1 am. Every week day. (If you don't include time spent eating and commuting as working, you work about two hours longer.)

Really, Megan? Doing what? Editing the business channel? Then what is Conor Clarke doing? The business channel is mostly a repackaging of the same Atlantic Voices and some links. You don't even have the charts any more. Interviews? Where are the articles? Research for your research-free posts? What? I'm willing to admit error. Where is the output I'm missing?

You said once that you make a third of what you expected to make. Let's be generous and say you make $100,000/year. Which is probably extremely generous. If you work 80 hours a week, 16 hours a day, 5 days a week you are making about $275 a day. That's $17/hour, which is not a great deal . At your minimum, 12 hours a day, you work for $33/hr, which is more respectable.

However, "you" paid--let's see, 38,000/year for prep school. Starting at junior high, that's a bit over a quarter of a million dollars. Let's say another 60,000 for Penn and University of Chicago each, although that sounds very low. That's nearly 400,000 for your education. And let's not even mention all the older, successful refinery workers and plumbers and carpenters I know of who make that much money a year as well. There are a quite a few. They don't make over $250,000 like NotJoe the Imaginary Plumber, but they do very well.

I must say, it's extraordinarily big of you to be so generous about pay disparity. The average CEO makes about 262 times the pay of the average worker. They work twice as hard, according to you, but at that rate of compensation they only have to work that hard for a relatively brief period of time. Then they are set for life, while you are still getting up a 7 am to drive to the office to write posts on how you just can't see why anyone would be angry at the devastation Wall Street deliberately set loose on the economy, so they could siphon off as much money as possible and retire to Aruba or Barbados.

Because you forgot to mention all the people put out of work by the banker' greed and irresponsibility. That's why they're angry. It's not because of corporate greed. America lives in hope that one day they, too, can rise to a position of prominence and rip off the public. It's fear of losing their jobs in a sinking economy. There is no greater fear than not knowing if you will be able to feed your children and give them a safe place to live next month. We would kill for our children, we would die for them. Yet you wonder why people are angry.

ADDED: I read the blog of the local woman who ran the tea party here and popped up on Fox. Her husband will be laid off and she is lost and afraid. America wasn't supposed to be like this for people like her. (Never mind that she chose to support people with immoral backgrounds who predictably betrayed the country's trust.)

6 comments:

Malaclypse said...

Further proof that she can't even do basic math.

So, our 90+ hours per week person has an interesting schedule. I know that I don't get to count meal time or commuting as work time, so I will assume bankers can't either. Assuming a six day work week, that's:

15 hours/day work
1 hours/day basic hygeine
2 hours/day meals
2 hours/day commute
leave 4 hours per day for sleep, assuming no recreation whatsoever.

If you assume a seven day week, that still leaves only 6 hours per day for sleep, with no recreation at all, ever.

Her high end estimate of 120 hours a week means negative 1 hours a day sleep on a six-day schedule, or 2 hours a day on a seven-day schedule.

ChicagoEd said...

It all depends on how you define "work." You would think that the work product of an econblogger could be measured by the number, frequency, thoroughness, and length of her blog posts. But Megan's idea of what work entails probably far exceeds that. Emailing Matt and Ezra is work. Hanging out at bars with Cato people is work. Watching CNN is working. Talking to her friend about the names of characters that they were thinking of using on The Wire is work--after all Megan posted about that. Even making coffee is "work" since she's going to have to write her Christmas shopping list in December.

I really thought Megan would be the last person bragging about how much she works. Hilarious.

Dillon said...

Megan, if it takes you 60-80 hours a week to do your job, then UR doin it wrong!

Sully could equal your weekly production in a day and a half, with proper grammar and spelling to boot.

Susan of Texas said...

Right, when you blog about the trivia of your life, you're always working! I'd hate to see her expense account.

Mr. Wonderful said...

Susan, that 60,000 for Penn had better include mongo financial aid, free housing/books/incidentals, and donated food. I don't think Penn was as low as 15,000/year when *I* was there, and I shook Ben Franklin's hand as he left.

Susan of Texas said...

YEs, I had a feelig it was. So that would be closer to half a million. It's no wonder she feels that she must constantly talk about her education, how private educations are infinitely supreior to public ones, why everyone should have to compete for school positions and pay via vouchers and charter schools, and how superior her reasoning processes are.