Megan McArdle ✓
@asymmetricinfo · Washington, DC · joined 18 Sep 2008
Columnist at the Washington Post. Opinions my own. Email me: Megan.McArdle -at- https://t.co/0v35DOybb0 Buy my book, The Up Side of Down https://t.co/awicv1MdkX
110 941Followers
827Following
121 872Posts total
1.1MViews on collected posts
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Absolutely correct. Just not in the way they mean it.
9.6K views · 383 likes
· 11 reposts · 9 replies
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The "Iron law of institutions"--people are protecting their position within the institution even at ruinous cost to the institution's prestige and influence.
20.6K views · 523 likes
· 56 reposts · 13 replies
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Academia is cooked and it’s too bad.
Institutions not even making cursory efforts to preserve their credibility.
218.5K views · 2.6K likes
· 210 reposts · 43 replies
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Also crime. We had four or five multiple victim shootings within four blocks of my house over the space of about fourteen months
20.1K views · 194 likes
· 10 reposts · 14 replies
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Note that this trend started before Trump and DOGE in 2025. The shift to remote work was devastating for DC.
32.3K views · 57 likes
· 7 reposts · 4 replies
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Sign of the times, perhaps, in Washington DC: short sale listings seem to be back. This one is now 10% under what it sold for in 2021, still on the market. https://t.co/ygzHclaDKu
112.8K views · 90 likes
· 7 reposts · 19 replies
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Beyond grim. Commercial property tax is about 10% of total revenue.
8K views · 32 likes
· 5 reposts · 3 replies
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@asymmetricinfo Fact is, college became sleepaway camp for young adults, with a bit of education thrown in. And having now sent two kids to college, I can tell you that to a large extent its marketed that way. The very wealthy can afford to send their kids to expensive schools aw
1.6K views · 42 likes
· 6 reposts · 7 replies
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Yeah, I think part of the problem is that while colleges saw the demographic cliff coming, they assumed they could make it up with international students, and the Trump administration threw a wrench in that plan.
52.9K views · 1.1K likes
· 76 reposts · 44 replies
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@asymmetricinfo The attempt to price discriminate also - the value is more there than ever for middle class folks. Many elite schools are literally free! But otherwise "pay 90k per year for your kid per year" makes no sense, and a lot of discourse implicitly assumes that sticker
5.2K views · 35 likes
· 2 reposts · 6 replies
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@asymmetricinfo There are limits on how much you can roll back administration due to regulatory mandates. For instance, it's effectively illegal to roll back the TIX or disabilities offices to 1960s or even 1990s levels. This is much more important than the lazy rivers everyone l
5.4K views · 55 likes
· 8 reposts · 8 replies
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I think the correct formulation is that colleges are in trouble because the wage premium stagnated, but during the lag before people figured that out, colleges increased tuition to the point where expected value declined for marginal students.
This led to a proliferation of low
142K views · 849 likes
· 99 reposts · 108 replies
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The college wage premium has not fallen recently and the net cost of college has slightly fallen over the past decade+. "College is dying because it's less worth it" isn't really true. What is true is that the number of 18 year olds in the US will fall every year from now on. htt
151.4K views · 265 likes
· 43 reposts · 22 replies
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@asymmetricinfo Class is to an extent relative. If the box seats at the local MLB ballpark are going for 10x what they did a couple of decades ago, even if your income is 2x what it was then, you're now even further away from being able to afford them.
359 views · 13 likes
· 0 reposts · 1 replies
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@asymmetricinfo Idk, people seem pretty unhappy about it in the UK.
1K views · 21 likes
· 0 reposts · 4 replies
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@asymmetricinfo i’m not sure why this surprises people. absolute level of stuff is sort of meaningless in a post scarcity economy. everything really valuable is positional. housing, education, status, etc.
1.4K views · 27 likes
· 0 reposts · 3 replies
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I am starting to think that people really liked income compression, as a good independent of absolute consumption, and that this is why people are confused about the evolution of the middle class. It's not that they have less, it's that they see other people getting way more.
83.9K views · 657 likes
· 60 reposts · 81 replies
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A reminder that the middle class is shrinking because many people are getting too rich to remain middle class https://t.co/52YuMQ3rI6
227.1K views · 1.4K likes
· 178 reposts · 107 replies
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I just muted anyone who doesn’t follow me. If you want to troll me on politics, you’re going to have to endure my opinions on DC traffic and the proper way to make pie.
0 views · 2.2K likes
· 59 reposts · 585 replies
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Against accounts of the same size
13 posts from the last 90 days, next to the 100K–1M follower range. shown to more people than peers of the same size.
Median views20 578this account5 983median for 100K–1M
Reach, %18.55%this account1.49%median for 100K–1M
Engagement, %1.09%this account0.93%median for 100K–1M
| Metric | This account | Median for 100K–1M | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Median views per post | 20 578 | 5 983 | 3.44× |
| Reach (views ÷ followers) | 18.55% | 1.49% | 12.4× |
| Engagement rate | 1.09% | 0.93% | 1.17× |
Others in this range → Compare with another account → How these benchmarks are built →
Growth & engagement
How the posts we collected actually performed: views and reaction rate post by post, what the audience did with them, and where the follower count goes.
Views per post
3597 Jul
151.4K31 Aug
142K1 Sep
5.4K
5.2K
52.9K
1.6K
8K
112.8K
32.3K2 Sep
20.1K
218.5K3 Sep
20.6K
9.6K
Last 14 collected posts, oldest on the left. The scale is logarithmic: one post can outrun the rest a hundred times over.
Engagement rate per post
3.90%7 Jul
0.22%31 Aug
0.77%1 Sep
1.34%
0.84%
2.29%
3.50%
0.50%
0.11%
0.22%2 Sep
1.09%
1.34%3 Sep
2.90%
4.19%
Reactions — likes, reposts, replies and quotes — divided by views. Median for 100K–1M accounts is 0.93%.
What the audience does
Likes81.0%8 371 in total
Reposts7.5%778 in total
Replies4.8%496 in total
Quotes0.8%85 in total
Bookmarks5.9%609 in total
Share of every reaction we collected for this account. Replies mean argument, reposts mean endorsement, bookmarks mean the post was worth keeping.
The follower curve appears once this account has two daily snapshots — we take one a day, and this one is on its first.
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