Lessons From Bain Capital

Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, fostering serious contempt for wealthy Americans who are stigmatized for being of touch with the average citizen and unsympathetic to the economic struggle. Edward Conard, in his book Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About The Economy Is A Lie, discusses America’s swift economic growth over the years and how this is a good thing.

“The book tries to cover a lot of ground,” Conard said at Tuesday’s Bloggers Briefing on June 26, 2012. “It tries to explain why the US economy has grown faster than Europe and Japan over the last 20 years.  It tries to explain the financial crisis, and it tries to lay out what limited things we could do to try to accelerate the recovery after the financial crisis.”

The former Managing Director for Bain Capital, Conard explained how most leftist theories for income distribution are missing the point completely by applying past economic situations to today’s economy. “We like to have general business theory but it has to be applied very situation specific because the situational factors are so important that they overwhelm the general theory,” Conard pointed out.

“I think if you don’t see the differences between what happened in 1950 and what’s happening today, you don’t come up with real economic reasons for why distribution of income has changed over time.”

As Conard notes, the economy of the 1950s was characterized by mass marketing and manufacturing, and it was not until the rise of technological modernism that risk-taking and entrepreneurialism became a source of economic growth.

Successful risk-taking has raised the bar for success, increased the productivity of the work force, and driven innovation by putting equity in the hands of successful risk-takers. These pay-offs have distanced the U.S. economy from Europe and Japan, which have been unable to fully tap into American improvements.

Despite Conard’s thorough argument, many critics on the left bash his book as a defense of the one percent and corrupt business. “I believe we’ve earned it the old fashioned way,” Conard disagreed.

“We have much higher investment, we’ve had much higher levels of risk-taking, and many more hours of work by our most talented people. All of that has paid off in a much more successful economy that for some reason I haven’t been able to get anyone on the left to agree with yet.”

Richard Thompson is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

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