Pun Salad

Another book obtained via UNH Interlibrary Loan, from Brandeis. Surprisingly, I'm not the first borrower! I know, because some previous borrower wrote illegibly in pencil here and there. Might be Spanish? Can't tell.

Anyway, the author, Edward Conard, was Mitt Romney's business partner at Bain Capital. His first book, Unintended Consequences, was published in 2012; there, he discussed what he saw as the underlying causes of the 2008 financial crisis. As he admits, his relationship with Romney gave the book a lot more attention and controversy that it would have otherwise received.

This book seems to be, more or less, a continuation of that debate, covering what has turned out to be a rather lackluster recovery from the Great Recession.

Specifically: although the book's title might lead you to believe that it's mainly about inequality, it's really more about the macroeconomic state of the US; inequality is just one of the manifestations of that, and not (in Conard's mind, and I'm in agreement) a very important one.

The inequality bit is also easiest to dispose of: Conard argues, convincingly, that it's a natural occurrence of today's economy that concentrates on scalable mass services. To the extent that it is a problem, it's caused by two major factors: trade imbalances and low-skilled (legal and illegal) immigration.

Other than that, the book is wide-ranging and not always "conservative". For example, most free-market economists I read aren't that concerned with the US's long-running trade deficits. Conard is; he argues that what we "get back" from other countries as a result is "risk-averse savings" (a phrase he invokes tirelessly), which we neither need or want in such volume. He proposes a statist fix: if someone wants permission to import $X dollars of goods from country Y, they'll need to arrange for Y to buy an equivalent amount of product from US. (Or some other country, Z. These licenses could be traded off.)

He's also in favor of putting the thumb on the immigration scale, getting as many high-skilled immigrants to come to the US as possible. He argues that one of the causes of our current doldrums, a constraint on economic growth, is the lack of "properly trained talent".

The book is marred by Conrad's writing style, which is coma-inducing. (The Commentary review by John Steele Gordon says it's "well-written". Lie! The National Reviewer deemed it "rousing". Wrong!) Example: Amazon's "search inside the book" feature counts 60 occurrences of the phrase (noted above) "properly trained" (usually "properly trained talent" but sometimes "properly trained workers"). This gets tedious around repetition number five or so.

That said, I'm reluctant to judge Conard's arguments and proposals on their merits. He writes authoritatively, but turgidly, and I'm pretty sure I lost the thread a number of points along the way. I won't say I gleaned nothing from the book, but I'm maybe not his audience. (It was a NYT best-seller, so I'm wondering how many of those readers feel the same way.)