Twit Tweets Tripe

When your self-image is based on who you think you should be instead of who you are, life gets complicated.

You know who takes on enormous debt for a low-paying profession? Writers. Guess how many other voters this describes https://t.co/MLiVFwimB1

— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 29, 2016

McArdle took on enormous debt to buy entrance into the financial industry. She failed. She can hardly deny that and does not but she did not take on that debt to become a low-paid journalist.

Not that McArdle is a low-paid journalist; she is a very high-paid journalist in a field with an extreme degree of income inequality.  She did not work her way up the ladder. All her journalism jobs have been elite jobs, despite her description of herself as a self-sacrificing public servant, who gave up "highly paid professional work" to become a low-paid writer. Perhaps she is merely defending the tribe in abstract but it is more likely, given her past history, that while she admits her long-ago failure in public, in her mind she glosses right over it.