HIGHLIGHTS
Greg Mankiw & Ed Conard Discuss the Upside of Inequality on C-SPAN’s Book TV Harvard economist Greg Mankiw interviews Ed Conard about his new book, The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class for C-SPAN Book TV’s “After Words.” Read More
A Proposal For Accelerating Middle Class Incomes New York Times by Edward Conard September 19, 2016 When manufacturing jobs are outsourced, economists believe that opportunistic entrepreneurs will race to employ displaced workers and competition will raise their productivity and wages. But high-tech entrepreneurs have moved to large cities and outsourced their blue-collar jobs to China, while the engineers who remain behind now design products that employ offshore workers. This brain drain slows low-skilled productivity and wage growth and depresses the wages of displaced communities for decades. Unfortunately, America can’t forego trade or innovation that lowers costs and… Read More
National Review: “The Upside of Inequality” Is The Conservative Answer to Piketty That You’ve All Been Waiting For National Review by Patrick Brennan September 19, 2016 It’s been a rough few years for conservative economics. In some arenas, such as federal policymaking, this is understandable, given who holds the White House. But the fact that we’re losing ground in the world of ideas, too, is less forgivable. In some arenas, such as federal policymaking, this is understandable, given who holds the White House. But the fact that we’re losing ground in the world of ideas, too, is less forgivable. Consider the economics books and ideas that have broken… Read More
DiCaprio and the Hypocrisy of Moral Licensing Real Clear Politics by Edward Conard May 06, 2016 This week, Time Magazine released its list of the top 100 Most Influential People and placed Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover of its magazine for the personal example he sets on climate change. How Ironic! DiCaprio is a one-man carbon-polluting machine. According to the leaked Sony documents for example, DiCaprio took six private roundtrip flights from Los Angeles to New York over a 6-week period and, a private jet to the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland. Pictures of him… Read More
Ed Conard Defeats IQ2 Motion “Central Banks Can Print Prosperity” in a Landslide Victory Squaring off against former IMF chief economist and MIT professor, Simon Johnson, Ed Conard persuaded 60% of the undecided audience members (to Johnson’s 15%) that the $3 trillion printed by the Federal Reserve has had little if any stimulatory effect on the post-crisis recovery. Last year, Ed also defeated the motion “Income Inequality Impairs the American Dream of Upward Mobility” in another landslide. Watch Ed's opening and closing statements Opening Statement Don't let our opponents hijack this debate. This is not a debate about whether the Fed should… Read More
Ed Conard on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart On the show, Jon Stewart and Ed discuss Unintended Consequences and why risk-taking isn't the enemy of a properly functioning economy. Read More
Ed Conard defeats the IQ2 Motion: “Income Inequality Impairs the American Dream of Upward Mobility” Despite a highly partisan crowd of voters, Ed defeated the IQ2 Motion: "Income Inequality Impairs the American Dream of Upward Mobility.” Thirty percent of the voters moved to Ed’s side of the motion—one of the largest swings in the history of IQ2. Opening Statement If income inequality truly impaired mobility, there would be telltale signs: Growing inequality would have reduced mobility. It hasn’t. Even Emanuel Saez, of the liberal Piketty and Saez duo, admits, the chance of a low-income child reaching any higher level of income has increased. Economies with… Read More
What Obama Didn’t Learn From the 1990s Ed Conard's Wall Street Journal op-ed on Obama's view of the economy Read More- The Long and the Short of Extending Bond Maturities Ed Conard's Wall Street Journal op-ed on bonds. Read More
Ed Conard debates Nobel Prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz Ed and Joe Stiglitz face off on economics and income inequality. Read More
The Purpose of Spectacular Wealth, According to a Spectacularly Wealthy Guy In the New York Times Magazine Adam Davidson comments on Ed Conard's new book. Read More
Ed Conard debates Alan Krueger on Obama’s economic record and if he’s to blame for slow growth on Bloomberg TV Given the last five years of economic activity, is Obama the worst president since WWII? Read More
All Articles
Official Stats Overstate Poverty by Measuring Before $1T in Government Spending on “Just the News” Ed explains that official statistics overstate poverty by measuring it before $1 trillion of government spending. So employment gains appear to have an exaggerated effect on reducing poverty and inequality. Read More- Waking Up to a Misleading Inequality Report on the Sunday Morning News If these reporters had winning arguments, they wouldn’t resort to misleading their audiences. Last week, I was briefly featured in one of the major networks’ Sunday morning news programs. The main thrust of the segment was the argument that Americans aren’t doing their fair share to help families who lost their jobs during the pandemic despite a recently published report by the Brookings Institute showing, “government policy effectively countered [the pandemic’s] effects on incomes, leading poverty to fall and low percentiles of income to rise across a range of demographic… Read More
CBS Sunday Morning Features “The Upside of Inequality” “CBS Sunday Morning” feature on inequality, which includes Hitler, Marie Antoinette, beatings, starving paupers in coffins, Thomas Piketty, and poverty statistics that don’t account for the trillion dollars America spends helping the poor, gives me 20 seconds to defend capitalism. Here are all the things I said that they chose not to use. Read More
Lies, Damned Lies, and Steve Rattner’s Statistics Lies, Damned Lies, And Steve Rattner’s Statistics If liberal economists could win the economic debate with honest arguments, they would make them. As President Reagan once joked, “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so.” In his New York Times op-ed, Steve Rattner adds his name to the list of people willing to compromise their reputation to mislead the American people. No serious economist would measure a president’s performance blindly from the day they stepped into… Read More
Ed’s CBS Interview Notes Read More
Innovation Hubs Like New York Don’t “Deserve” Federal Bailouts With the migration of America's talent to hubs of innovation, like New York, it's disingenuous to claim the hubs subsidize America and therefore deserve bailouts by other states because they pay a disproportionate share of federal taxes. Federalism is based on the notion that some taxation and spending should follow Americans wherever they live. Many of New York's highly taxed millionaires were raised and educated elsewhere and moved to New York at the expense of their hometowns’ diminished future, while Florida's retirees moved there after paying a lifetime of taxes… Read More
Ed Conard Debates Income Inequality on CBS Sunday Morning Ed’s CBS interview notes Read More
Ed Conard Featured in CQ Researcher Report “Inequality in America: Can the Growing Wealth Gap Be Closed?” CQ Researcher released its latest report “Inequality in America: Can the Growing Wealth Gap Be Closed?” featuring an interview with Ed Conard. Excerpts from the report: On incentivizing risk-taking to grow the economy: Edward Conard, a visiting scholar at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute (AEI), calls the wealth gap an inevitable byproduct of an economy that prospers by rewarding innovators and risk-takers. Before the coronavirus struck, the United States had enjoyed a strong economy with low unemployment rates and rising wages. After an 11-year bull market, the Dow Jones Industrial… Read More
Ben Shapiro Again Recommends Ed Conard’s NYT Bestselling Books Ben Shapiro again recommended Ed Conard’s 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). Read More
Kitchen Quarantine, Maverick’s Return, and the Ultimate Cuda The Land Rover Defender of Phones via FT How to Spend It read Planet Computers’ Cosmo Communicator is a smartphone that runs Google’s Android operating system but also has a QWERTY keyboard attached. shop But wait there’s more…. If the Cosmo Communicator seems a little too big (it is), checkout the F(x)tec Pro1 which features a fully integrated QWERTY Slider, faster processor, sleeker design and better camera. specs review Kitchen Quarantine: Michelin-Starred Chef Massimo Bottura Launches Cooking Classes on Instagram Live via Robb Report read “In the first few delectable episodes, Bottura showed viewers how to make a… Read More
TB x TB, Rem’s Countryside, and Eothen Dreaming Tom Terrific + Tampa Bay Bucs SB odds went from 60/1 to 14/1 via Sports Illustrated read “We all know that Brady loves to utilize his tight ends and he will have two athletic playmakers at that position who could flourish under his tutelage, Cameron Brate and O.J. Howard.” Iron Mike is on CAMEO sign him up Is This the Most Terrifying Wave Ever Filmed at Nazare? via Surfer Here’s What a Googol-to-One Gear Ratio Looks Like via DIGG more Daniel Bruin's device has a gear reduction of one googol… Read More
How Will the Coronovirus Change the Way We Work and Do Business on Fox Business News Read More
Predicting How Coronovirus May Impact the Economy on Fox Business Ed Conard joins Stu Varney to discuss the coronavirus’s potential impact on the U.S. and global economy on Fox Business’s “Varney & Co.” Will the coronavirus send us into a recession? Read More
Debating the Strength of the Trump Economy on Bill Martinez Live Ed Conard discusses the on going strength of the Trump economy on Bill Martinez Live. Read More- Thomas Philippon Claims the US Has Grown Less Competitive Than Europe. Seriously?! I Take Him to Task in My NRO Review of His Book With profits rising, productivity growth slowing, investment middling despite near-zero interest rates, and large competitors gaining market share, proponents of income redistribution insist that an increase in monopoly rents — profits earned by cooperating with competitors to raise prices and restrict output rather than competing honestly with them — has misallocated resources, increased income inequality, and slowed middle- and working-class wage growth. If cronyism increasingly misallocates resources, theoretically policymakers can redistribute income without significantly slowing growth and diminishing prosperity — the proverbial free lunch. Politicians such as Elizabeth Warren insist… Read More