Robert Eller commented on the post Flawed, Ignorant and Dangerous: A Bain Capital Partner’s Worldview on the Future of Finance blog last week that Edward Conard’s book “‘Unitended Consequences’ may turn out to be the most unintended act of patriotism of the” for the conversations it sparks and lines it draws in the sand on issues of inequality. This has surely proven true on our site this week. Over the week, the blog post John Fullerton wrote on the book has opened up a number of interesting conversations in the comments section.
Early on Tim MacDonald raised the important problem of how to address literature like Conard’s saying, “deceit… is so exhausting to unravel” that it’s hard to choose whether to act as though they don’t exist or attempt to pare them apart and likely lose your audience. Throughout the following posts, commenters agreed that work like Conard’s must be addressed and they went about detailing where “Unintended Consequences” is wrong. Among the criticisms were Conard’s not balancing resilience in the economic system with efficiency, a conflation of economic activity and human wellbeing, and a misplaced belief that financiers are more capable at running the economy than anyone else (and that they therefore should). However, commenter EastSide’s recognition that everyone contributes to the economy in a critical and irreplaceable way helped to close the conversation on a more positive note.
Join in the conversation on the blog post Flawed, Ignorant and Dangerous: A Bain Capital Partner’s Worldview on the Future of Finance blog.
