Megan McArdle on Debt and Self-Restraint

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 7 December 2009

⏱️ 78 minutes

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Summary

Megan McArdle, who writes the blog Asymmetrical Information at The Atlantic, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about debt and the challenge of self-restraint. She discusses her recent Atlantic article on her experience at a Dave Ramsey personal finance seminar, how it affected her life, and the psychology of self-restraint. The conversation concludes with a discussion of debt and savings during the Great Depression and the current national debt of the United States.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you.
0:35.5	Today is November 30, 2009, and my guest is Megan McArdle. Her blog is asymmetrical information
0:45.1	which can be found at thelannic.com. Megan, welcome to Econ Talk.
0:48.9	Thanks for having me.
0:50.5	Our topic today is debt, both personal and national, and we'll focus on the personal
0:55.7	at least to start with. We'll see how far we go. I want to start talking about my dad,
1:00.7	whose first reaction to the current crisis was that we've obviously learned now that debt
1:05.2	is a bad thing. Now the economist in me laughed, ha, debt a bad thing, come on. That's what
1:11.2	allows businesses to thrive, but let's us own houses. But having read your recent piece
1:17.2	on Dave Ramsey and your personal experience as well as thinking some more, maybe, maybe
1:23.4	my dad, as always, might be onto something and might be right. So tell us about Dave
1:28.7	Ramsey and your experiences with debt.
1:32.8	Well, I will actually start out with my experiences with debt, and I have quite a lot of it.
1:39.5	I got an MBA from the University of Chicago in between 1999 and 2001, which cost about
1:48.6	$100,000 when you factor in living expenses and forward on income and so forth.
1:53.4	Bargain twice the price, of course.
1:56.3	Exactly. But I expected to make my first job out of business school with $525,000 a year.
2:03.0	So I expected to be able to pay this off pretty quickly, and that's what a lot of people
	...

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