I wouldn't put any weight on an analysis by Megan McArdle either. I like Warren as a politician, am deeply ambivalent about her as a policymaker or regulator, have no idea about her credibility as an academic, and read McArdle long enough to know that her issue here is ideological, and that she's not particularly credible on issues that touch that ideology.
Preempting the obvious challenge to this comment: it's not that I'm going to point to any particular point in this particular blog post of hers and call BS on it (although I think it covertly lapses into subjectivity several times), but rather that her particular choices of papers and theses to take issue with aren't necessarily a fair representation of Warren, "scholar". Which is what her headline purports the post to be.
There was no way McArdle was going to be objective about Warren. That's a little bit like expecting Paul Krugman (not that I'm putting them on the same level!) to be objective about Paul Ryan.
> I wouldn't put any weight on an analysis by Megan McArdle either.
No one suggested "it's by McArdle, therefore it's good". (However, folks have suggested "It's Warren, therefore it's good".) Instead, let's look at the arguments offered.
Call me elitist, but I hardly think that a single story from a blogger/editor at the Atlantic is enough to discount all of the work of one of the preeminent scholars of bankruptcy law in the United States.
Warren has successfully defended her conclusions in academic circles for years.
We could use a bit more elitism. If the best criticism of Warren's work one can find comes from an innumerate like McArdle [1], it's probably pretty sound.
I wouldn't put too much weight on Warren's work on bankruptcy.
See http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/07/consider... .