Former Bain Capital executive Ed Conard, who TPM readers might know for donating $1 million anonymously to a pro-Romney super PAC through a dummy corporation, is back in the news. He’s the subject of a lengthy New York Times magazine profile this week explaining his new book, “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” which purports to explain why the 1 percent deserve every penny they have and why increasing income inequality is actually a good sign for the economy.
In one passage of the profile, Conard mocks Americans who don’t want to become ultra-wealthy entrepreneurs as lazy and unambitious:
A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs.
Romney’s campaign isn’t touching the book, but it’s not hard to envision it entering the campaign if its release makes a splash. Already Democratic National Committee communications director Brad Woodhouse is tweeting out the article.
