Edward “Ed” Conard is the author of two top ten New York Times bestselling books: The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class (2016) and Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong (2012); and a contributor to Oxford University Press’ United States Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality (2020).
He is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Previously, he was a founding partner of Bain Capital, where he worked closely with his friend and colleague, former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
In May of 2012, Conard published Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong. The book was featured on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine and went on to become a New York Times top ten non-fiction bestseller. Because of the publicity surrounding the publication of his book, Conard was the tenth most searched author on Google in 2012.
Since its publication, Mr. Conard has made over 250 television appearances in which he has debated leading economists including Greg Mankiw, Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Alan Kruger, Austan Goolsbee, and Jared Bernstein; journalists including Jon Stewart, Fareed Zakaria, Chris Hayes, and Andrew Ross Sorkin; and politicians such as Barney Frank, Howard Dean, and Eliot Spitzer.
Prior to Bain Capital, Conard worked for Wasserstein Perella & Co., an investment bank that specialized in mergers and acquisitions, and Bain & Company, a management-consulting firm, where he led the firm’s industrial practice.
Conard has a master of business administration degree from Harvard Business School and a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the University of Michigan.