Photo: Jeff Gross/Getty Images 
 
 There was a time, not too long ago, when a fool who wandered into the world of investments could very well be separated from his money with the help of any number of dumb, overpriced, or downright fraudulent schemes. Then, in 2008, the economy went into freefall, and everyone who had money left held onto their checkbooks a little more tightly. Fear bred caution, and some of the worst offenders in the dumb-money chase were forced to close up shop, or at least become a little more discreet about their advantage-taking. 
 
 Now, with five years of air between Lehman Brothers and the present, the seal has been lifted. Athletes and virtual currencies are being traded alongside Ford and General Electric. Venture capitalists are pitching start-up stocks to the unwashed masses. And later today, the SEC is expected to propose new rules that will make it even easier for companies to fleece the unsuspecting public. 
 
 Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the age of bullshit investments is back. 
 
 Look around today’s markets and you’ll see a surfeit of senseless investment opportunities wearing the cloak of legitimacy. 
 
 You’ll see, on page one of the New York Times, a start-up called Fantex touting a new investment vehicle that allows fans of NFL running back Arian Foster to support his career by purchasing stock that gives them a share of his future earnings. (What didn’t make page one: Foster’s career-worst game the very next Sunday.) This investment opportunity, which will appeal mainly to those too young to remember Bowie Bonds, is a terrible idea on multiple fronts: It bases returns on the unpredictable performance of professional athletes, it gives stock that can only be traded on a private, relatively illiquid exchange, and its single-athlete stock can be converted into common Fantex stock whenever the company feels like it. 
 
 Look harder, and you’ll see companies like Goldman Sachs throwing millions of dollars at hare-brained schemes like Motif Investing, a “theme-based stock investment platform” that allows rank amateurs to make up “motifs” of stocks they think are going to behave in a certain, coordinated way. (Professional stock traders do this all the time, without calling it a “motif” strategy — but they don’t charge ordinary people what can amount to double-digit fees, nor do they base their investment decisions on “Companies with lots of Facebook likes,” as Motif suggests.) 
 
 You’ll see Bitcoins, the everlasting fascination of Silicon Valley crypto-geeks, being not only spoken about as an investment-grade commodity despite having higher volatility than your average Baldwin brother, but inspiring entire investment vehicles (one of which is structured by celebrity twins) that give ordinary investors as well as the tech-savvy crowd the chance to lose money when the fad runs its course. You’ll also see art dealers trying to convince you that betting on the paintings of unknown artists is a sound portfolio move. 
 
 Some of these bad ideas spring from the normal irrational exuberance that comes with an economic bounce-back, and the fact that many investors are more willing to jump into murky waters than they were in 2008. But there are other factors in play, too. The JOBS Act, for one, was a post-crisis law that was meant to make it easier for companies to raise money. Instead, by paving the way for equity crowdfunding and making it possible for private investors to hawk their services like Cracker Jack vendors at Yankee Stadium, the law opened a Pandora’s box of truly unwise investments. 
 
 Thanks to the JOBS Act, there are now crowd-funding bazaars that make gambling in the markets as easy as picking a Spotify playlist. There’s also the newest West Coast fund-raising trend, the venture capital syndicate, which makes it possible for average shmoes with little to no market expertise to enter into highly risky investments with early stage start-ups, and which has put the sentence “Miley Cyrus could be the next big tech investor” within the realm of the possible. 
 
 There’s a lot to take in, between the NFL-stock-trading and the Miley Cyrus venture capital buffoonery. But the upshot is that between the rise of the social web, the recovering economy, and the deregulatory impact of the JOBS Act, it’s now easier than ever for you to lose money in fun-sounding ways. This is fine if you have disposable income to spare, which many of the people who meet the SEC’s threshold for being an “accredited investor” (someone with a $1 million net worth or an individual annual income of $200,000) do. But other accredited investors are doctors, lawyers, and workaday tech nerds who know next to nothing about the stock markets, but are gullible enough when flashy investments are shined in their faces. For these people, no number of “treat it as casino money” caveats will suffice; they will inevitably succumb to the pitch, and they will lose money. 
 
 I’m not the only one noticing that things are getting dangerous. Felix Salmon says that years of near-zero interest rates and the JOBS Act gold rush mean that “even the smart money has started funding companies at utterly bonkers valuations.” Josh Brown, a financial advisor and CNBC regular, told me in an e-mail that the “ludicrous” investing climate “is a byproduct of the giddiness we’re seeing amongst the owners of financial assets. We’ve eclipsed the 2007 peak of household net worth but the makeup is very different. More has accrued to the upper echelon and the lesson that group has learned about the nature of investing is that even if we blow up, the Fed and Congress will ensure that come out of it in even better shape.” And the SEC has been busting record numbers of petty thefts and boiler-room schemes — many of which reflect the intersection of well-intentioned but underinformed investors with slick profiteers claiming to have access to the next big thing. 
 
 The truly scary part of what’s happening now is that it’s not a particular asset bubble, nor the sketchy practices of a coterie of bankers, that’s endangering the investment portfolios of normal people. It’s the deregulated system itself that poses the threat. Unlike in 2008, this exuberance won’t end in a sudden crash, brought on by shady practices at large investment firms. It will be a slow flow of assets from the information-deprived to the information-rich, in the form of fees and other completely legal wealth transfers. 
 
 Whatever the cause — be it interest rates or income inequality, the JOBS Act or simply the state of the S&P and the folly of man — make no mistake: The investment environment is as hostile to ordinary investors as it’s been in many years. The best course of action is simply to do very little — to invest in low-cost index funds, or just follow Harold Pollack’s now-famous Financial Advice Index Card. But if you must invest in things beyond the ordinary and boring, watch your wallet: Your next big mistake may be just around the corner. ||||| President Barack Obama signs the Bill for the HR 3606, the 'Jump start Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act.' BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty Images 
 
 Boy, do I feel like an idiot. I've been out there on radio and TV in the last few months saying that I thought there was a chance Barack Obama was listening to the popular anger against Wall Street that drove the Occupy movement, that decisions like putting a for-real law enforcement guy like New York AG Eric Schneiderman in charge of a mortgage fraud task force meant he was at least willing to pay lip service to public outrage against the banks. 
 
 Then the JOBS Act happened. 
 
 The "Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act" (in addition to everything else, the Act has an annoying, redundant title) will very nearly legalize fraud in the stock market. 
 
 In fact, one could say this law is not just a sweeping piece of deregulation that will have an increase in securities fraud as an accidental, ancillary consequence. No, this law actually appears to have been specifically written to encourage fraud in the stock markets. 
 
 Ostensibly, the law makes it easier for startup companies (particularly tech companies, whose lobbyists were a driving force behind its passage) to attract capital by, among other things, exempting them from independent accounting requirements for up to five years after they first begin selling shares in the stock market. 
 
 The law also rolls back rules designed to prevent bank analysts from talking up a stock just to win business, a practice that was so pervasive in the tech-boom years as to be almost industry standard. 
 
 Even worse, the JOBS Act, incredibly, will allow executives to give "pre-prospectus" presentations to investors using PowerPoint and other tools in which they will not be held liable for misrepresentations. These firms will still be obligated to submit prospectuses before their IPOs, and they'll still be held liable for what's in those. But it'll be up to the investor to check and make sure that the prospectus matches the "pre-presentation." 
 
 The JOBS Act also loosens a whole range of other reporting requirements, and expands stock investment beyond "accredited investors," giving official sanction to the internet-based fundraising activity known as "crowdfunding." 
 
 But the big one, to me, is the bit about exempting firms from real independent tests of internal controls for five years. 
 
 When I first read this, I asked myself: how does a law exempting a Silicon Valley startup from independent accounting actually encourage investment? If American companies have to have their internal processes independently verified before and after they go public, doesn't that give investors all around the world a big reason to put their money here, instead of investing in, say, Mobbed-Up Siberian Aluminum LLC, or Bangalore Sweatshop Inc.? 
 
 In other words, how does letting www.investonawhim.com go to market (and stay on the market for five years!) without publishing real numbers actually help the industry attract more financing in general, when the whole point of all of these controls is to make investment a less risky experience for the investor? 
 
 Get ready for the ostensible answer, because you won't believe it. Here's how CNN explained the reasoning behind that exemption: 
 
 Having 500 investors or raising $5 million previously forced a company to register with the SEC -- a costly endeavor. Filling out stacks of legal forms and undergoing independent accounting audits can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The law loosens requirements for most companies by raising several thresholds. 
 
 We needed Barack Obama and the congress to compromise the entire U.S. stock market because it's too expensive for a publicly-listed company with billion-dollar ambitions to hire an accountant? That almost sounds like a comedy routine: 
 
 SILICON VALLEY EXECUTIVE: Listen, IJustThoughtOfSomething.com is the hottest thing on the internet. We're so huge it hurts... I can't even walk to my corner bodega without women throwing me their phone numbers! INVESTOR: I'd love to invest. Can I see your numbers from last year? SILICON VALLEY EXECUTIVE: Well, that's just the thing. We painted the bathrooms last March, and then we also had that Vitamin Water machine put in the lounge. You know, the one next to the ping-pong table? So we just didn't have any money left over for an accountant. But I estimate our revenues for 2014 to be $4.2 billion. INVESTOR: Sounds hot! Where do I send the check? 
 
 There's just no benefit that the JOBS Act brings to an honest startup company. In fact, it puts an honest company at a severe disadvantage, because now it has to compete against other, less scrupulous companies that can simply make their projections up on the backs of envelopes. 
 
 This is like formally eliminating steroid testing for the first five years of a baseball player's career. Yes, you can pretty much bet that you'll see a lot of home runs in the first few years after you institute a rule like that. But you'd better be ready to stick a lot of asterisks in the record books ten or fifteen years down the line. 
 
 In the same way, get ready for an avalanche of shareholder suits ten years from now, since post-factum civil litigation will be the only real regulation of the startup market. In fact, there are already supporters talking up future lawsuits as an appropriate tool to replace the regulations being wiped out by this bill. 
 
 The JOBS Act seems like it will invite a replay of the disastrous tech-stock bubble of the late nineties. That mess was made possible by a historic collapse in accounting standards, with the great investment banks the pioneers of the collapse. In the old days, in the fifties and sixties for instance, you would never take a company public that wasn't profitable at the time of the IPO, or didn't have a multi-year track record of solid revenues. 
 
 When the banks stopped insisting on proven track records or real profitability before taking a company public, there was a sudden explosion of stock-market investment into heretofore unknown internet firms. Companies with no track records went from having literally no revenues at all to having five or six billion dollars' worth of market capitalization overnight. Banks explained that the new way to measure a company was by the quality of its ideas, not boring old indicators like revenues. 
 
 Even Alan Greenspan told the world that technology had made such great advances that the traditional laws of economics no longer applied, that there was "new paradigm," and that it was possible to have long-term growth without inflation. He essentially told the world that the bubble wasn't a bubble, because all that phony growth was not phony at all, it was just a whole bunch of people properly evaluating great new ideas, albeit before they had actually performed. 
 
 And we later found out, of course, a lot of that value wasn't value at all. And a lot of that sharp growth in the nineties was actually caused by complex fraud schemes like "spinning" and "laddering,", wherein banks artificially pumped up startup stocks in exchange for future business, or rigged the IPOs so that they would have fake "bumps" in investment at pre-arranged times. 
 
 Sometimes the companies themselves were the victims in the fraud scams, and sometimes the company executives were beneficiaries of fraud. But in virtually all of these schemes, the casual investor was the big dupe in the con. When the dot-com bubble finally collapsed, costing the world about $5 trillion in losses, the major victims were ordinary people. We can expect a replay of the same thing now, only on a much bigger scale. 
 
 The finance world is buzzing over this bill. The reactions I've heard so far range from minutes-long guffaws of dark laughter to bloodcurdling, I-can't-freaking-believe-they-went-this-far outrage. "I thought I had lost the ability to be shocked," one friend of mine, a former regulator, told me this weekend, chuckling at the sheer stones it took to push the law. "But this thing is just inspired. They broke the mold with this one." 
 
 There are some crazy side-stories that I'll get to later in the week, including the hilarious influence certain preposterous individuals had in pushing this bill (most notably Steve Case, former co-founder of AOL and a veteran of multiple accounting fraud scandals, who was recruited by both parties to lobby the bill). There are also some remarkable contradictions in the arguments the bill's supporters made when they pushed for the bill's passage. Anyway, more on this to come. 
 
 In the meantime, let's just say this is a dramatic step taken by Barack Obama. Nobody should have any illusions about where he stands on Wall Street corruption after this thing. Boss Tweed himself couldn't have done any worse. ||||| The idea that society benefits when investors compete successfully is pretty widely accepted. Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value. The Google founder Sergey Brin might be very rich, but the world is far richer than he is because of Google. Conard said Baker was undercounting the social benefits of investment. He looks, in particular, at agriculture, where, since the 1940s, the cost of food has steadily fallen because of a constant stream of innovations. While the businesses that profit from that innovation — like seed companies and fast-food restaurants — have made their owners rich, the average U.S. consumer has benefited far more. Conard concludes that for every dollar an investor gets, the public reaps up to $20 in value. This is crucial to his argument: he thinks it proves that we should all appreciate the vast wealth of others more, because we’re benefiting, proportionally, from it. 
 
 Google’s contribution is obvious. What about investment banks, with their complicated financial derivatives and overleveraged balance sheets? Conard argues that they make the economy more efficient, too. The financial crisis, he writes, was not the result of corrupt bankers selling dodgy financial products. It was a simple, old-fashioned run on the banks, which, he says, were just doing their job. There are a huge number of people in our economy who want ready access to their savings — pension-fund managers, insurance companies and you and me with our bank accounts. And because economic growth comes from long-term investments in things like housing, factories and research, the central role of banks, Conard says, is to turn the short-term assets of nervous savers into risky long-term loans that help the economy grow. 
 
 Every once in a while, this system breaks down. For one reason or another, the savers panic and demand all their money back. This causes a massive problem because the money isn’t sitting at the bank; it’s out in the world in the form of long-term loans. “A lot of people don’t realize that what happened in 2008 was nearly identical to what happened in 1929,” he says. “Depositors ran to the bank to withdraw their money only to discover, like the citizens of Bedford Falls” — referring to the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” — “that there was no money in the vault. All that money had been lent.” 
 
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 In 2008 it was large pension funds, insurance companies and other huge institutional investors that withdrew in panic. Conard argues in retrospect that it was these withdrawals that led to the crisis — not, as so many others have argued, an orgy of irresponsible lending. He points to the fact that, according to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, banks lost $320 billion through mortgage-backed securities, but withdrawals disproportionately amounted to five times that. This stance, which largely absolves the banks, is not shared by many analysts. Regardless, Conard told me: “The banks did what we wanted them to do. They put short-term money back into the economy. What they didn’t expect is that depositors would withdraw their money, because they hadn’t withdrawn their money en masse since 1929.” 
 
 Conard concedes that the banks made some mistakes, but the important thing now, he says, is to provide them even stronger government support. He advocates creating a new government program that guarantees to bail out the banks if they ever face another run. As for exotic derivatives, Conard doesn’t see a problem. He argues that collateralized-debt obligations, credit-default swaps, mortgage-backed securities and other (now deemed toxic) financial products were fundamentally sound. They were new tools that served a market need for the world’s most sophisticated investors, who bought them in droves. And they didn’t cause the panic anyway, he says; the withdrawals did. 
 
 Even though these big conclusions are at odds with most other accounts, several economists said that they see Conard’s description of the crisis as more than just an apologia for the banking class (though it certainly is that, too). Andrei Shleifer, an influential Harvard economist, told me that he thought Conard was “genuinely fantastic on finance.” 
 
 “Unintended Consequences” only mentions Romney by name once (and in the acknowledgments, at that), but Conard hopes that the arguments detailed in his book will help readers understand why it’s so crucial that his former boss — who believes the government should help the investor class — win this November. As I read “Unintended Consequences,” though, I wondered if the book would have the opposite effect. Even staunch Republicans and many members of the Tea Party might bristle at a worldview that celebrates the coastal elite and says many talented people in the middle class aren’t pulling their weight. Was Conard saddling his old boss with another example of how out of touch those with car elevators and multiple Cadillacs can be? In this time of overheated arguments between opponents who rarely listen to one another, here was a rare member of the 1 percent openly trying to make his case. How convincing is it? 
 
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 Conard and I eventually sat down at a cafe off Madison. His book is filled with a lot of abstraction, so I asked him to show me how his ideas play out in the real world. 
 
 Conard picked up a soda can and pointed to the way the can’s side bent inward at the top. “I worked with the company that makes the machine that tapers that can,” he told me. That little taper allows manufacturers to make the same size can with a tiny bit less aluminum. “It saves a fraction of a penny on every can,” he said. “There are a lot of soda cans in the world. That means the economy can produce more cans with the same amount of resources. It makes every American who buys a soda can a little bit richer because their paycheck buys more.” 
 
 It might be hard to get excited about milligrams of aluminum, but Conard says that we live longer, healthier and richer lives because of countless microimprovements like that one. The people looking for them, Conard likes to point out, are not only computer programmers, engineers and scientists. They are also wealthy investors like him, who are willing to risk their own money to finance improvements that may or may not work. There is a huge mechanism constantly trying to seek out and support these new ideas — entrepreneurs, multinationals and, crucially for Conard, investment firms and hedge funds and everyone down to individual bond traders. As Conard told me, one of the crucial lessons he learned at Bain is that it makes no sense to look for easy solutions. In a competitive market, all that’s left are the truly hard puzzles. And they require extraordinary resources. While we often hear about the greatest successes — penicillin, the iPhone — we rarely hear about the countless failures and the people and companies who financed them. 
 
 A central problem with the U.S. economy, he told me, is finding a way to get more people to look for solutions despite these terrible odds of success. Conard’s solution is simple. Society benefits if the successful risk takers get a lot of money. For proof, he looks to the market. At a nearby table we saw three young people with plaid shirts and floppy hair. For all we know, they may have been plotting the next generation’s Twitter, but Conard felt sure they were merely lounging on the sidelines. “What are they doing, sitting here, having a coffee at 2:30?” he asked. “I’m sure those guys are college-educated.” Conard, who occasionally flashed a mean streak during our talks, started calling the group “art-history majors,” his derisive term for pretty much anyone who was lucky enough to be born with the talent and opportunity to join the risk-taking, innovation-hunting mechanism but who chose instead a less competitive life. In Conard’s mind, this includes, surprisingly, people like lawyers, who opt for stable professions that don’t maximize their wealth-creating potential. He said the only way to persuade these “art-history majors” to join the fiercely competitive economic mechanism is to tempt them with extraordinary payoffs. 
 
 “It’s not like the current payoff is motivating everybody to take risks,” he said. “We need twice as many people. When I look around, I see a world of unrealized opportunities for improvements, an abundance of talented people able to take the risks necessary to make improvements but a shortage of people and investors willing to take those risks. That doesn’t indicate to me that risk takers, as a whole, are overpaid. Quite the opposite.” The wealth concentrated at the top should be twice as large, he said. That way, the art-history majors would feel compelled to try to join them. 
 
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 I first met Conard last fall, around the same period in which I was spending a lot of time in Zuccotti Park, interviewing anti-Wall Street protesters who argued that people like him were destroying our democracy. Most Wall Street leaders ignored the Occupy movement or evaded it, and I was sure Conard would be among the most silent. He had recently been stung by a 1 percent scandal of his own: setting up a company whose sole purpose was to donate $1 million to a political-action committee that supported Romney. He was being cast as the embodiment of the secretive and growing influence that the hyperrich have in our political system. If anybody was going to be shy with a reporter, I figured, it was him. 
 
 Over lunch with editors from The Times Magazine, Conard proved the exact opposite. He looks like a benign middle-aged guy until he starts making an argument. At which point, Conard stares into your eyes and talks with intense force, punctuated by the occasional profanity, in full paragraphs. He delighted in arguing over corporate-bond rates and Chinese central-bank policy, among other arcane minutiae. It also became clear that he had exhaustively thought through the role of the superrich in our economy, and he wasn’t afraid to share those opinions. 
 
 Conard’s life serves as the perfect model for his economic philosophy. Born in 1956, he grew up in a middle-class suburb of Detroit, the son of a kindergarten teacher and a Ford engineer. His childhood ambition was to be able to afford his own house in a Detroit suburb, but, he likes to say, he took a series of risks (like forgoing the more secure path of law school) that eventually led him to Harvard Business School. When Conard graduated, in 1982, he entered the burgeoning field of management consulting. He joined the prestigious Boston-based firm Bain & Company, which nine years earlier was founded with a radically different approach from the more traditional New York-based consulting firms. Those firms positioned themselves as grand thinkers, far above the fray of daily business struggles. Bain’s approach was to join its clients in the trenches, providing analysis and working with senior management to beat the competition. 
 
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 In 1990, Conard decided to pursue even greater wealth by quitting Bain to become a manager at the investment bank Wasserstein Perella, in New York. He disliked the job, though, and when his old colleague Mitt Romney took him to lunch in 1992, Conard offered his services to Bain Capital, a division that Romney helped start in order to acquire companies with the goal of improving them itself. When Romney said he couldn’t afford to match his Wall Street pay, Conard offered to work for less until Romney decided he had added enough value to deserve a bonus and stock options. His first year did not go terribly well, though Conard eventually identified an ideal takeover target, a company that made pharmaceutical-test instruments. Bain paid less than a half billion for the company. Its value has since risen to more than $7 billion. In 2000, he became the head of the New York office. 
 
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 Which leads us to what Conard said was his next big risk — leaving the business world to make his case for a new, decidedly pro-investor way to think about the economy. He seems genuinely certain that his arguments in “Unintended Consequences” will persuade a fair number of economists, politicians and thought leaders. I suggested during many of our conversations that being a public intellectual might be tricky when you freely say the sorts of things that Conard often does. During one conversation, he expressed anger over the praise that Warren Buffett has received for pledging billions of his fortune to charity. It was no sacrifice, Conard argued; Buffett still has plenty left over to lead his normal quality of life. By taking billions out of productive investment, he was depriving the middle class of the potential of its 20-to-1 benefits. If anyone was sacrificing, it was those people. “Quit taking a victory lap,” he said, referring to Buffett. “That money was for the middle class.” 
 
 There’s also the fact that Conard applies a relentless, mathematical logic to nearly everything, even finding a good spouse. He advocates, in utter seriousness, using demographic data to calculate the number of potential mates in your geographic area. Then, he says, you should set aside a bit of time for “calibration” — dating as many people as you can so that you have a sense of what the marriage marketplace is like. Then you enter the selection phase, this time with the goal of picking a permanent mate. The first woman you date who is a better match than the best woman you met during the calibration phase is, therefore, the person you should marry. By statistical probability, she is as good a match as you’re going to get. (Conard used this system himself.) 
 
 This constant calculation — even of the incalculable — can be both fascinating and absurd. The world Conard describes too often feels grim and soulless, one in which art and romance and the nonremunerative satisfactions of a simpler life are invisible. And that, I realized, really is Conard’s world. “God didn’t create the universe so that talented people would be happy,” he said. “It’s not beautiful. It’s hard work. It’s responsibility and deadlines, working till 11 o’clock at night when you want to watch your baby and be with your wife. It’s not serenity and beauty.” 
 
 Central to this investor’s work ethic is another pillar of his worldview. Unlike Romney, Conard rejects the notion that America has “some monopoly on hard work or entrepreneurship.” “I think it’s simple economics,” he said. “If the payoff for risk-taking is better, people will take more risks.” Conard sees the success of the U.S. economy as, in part, the result of a series of historic accidents. Most recently, the coincidence of Roe v. Wade and the late 1970s economic malaise allowed Ronald Reagan to unify social conservatives and free-market advocates and set the country on a pro-investment path for decades. Europeans, he says, made all the wrong decisions. Concern about promoting equality and protecting favored industries have led to onerous work rules, higher taxes and all sorts of social programs that keep them poorer than Americans. 
 
 Now we’re at a particularly crucial moment, he writes. Technology and global competition have made it more important than ever that the United States remain the world’s most productive, risk-taking, success-rewarding society. Obama, Conard says, is “going to dampen the incentives.” Even worse, Conard says, “he’s slowing the accumulation of equity” by fighting income inequality. Only with a pro-investment president, he says, can the American economy reach its full potential. 
 
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 At its core, Conard’s book addresses what is perhaps the most important question in economics, the one Adam Smith set out to answer in “The Wealth of Nations”: Why do some countries grow so rich and others stay poor? Where you come down on the answer has as much to do with your politics as your economic worldview (two things that can often be the same). Glenn Hubbard, a prominent economist and one of Romney’s chief economic advisers, takes his ideas seriously. “He doesn’t have the blinders of a model-based view of the world, which is an advantage and a disadvantage,” Hubbard told me. Others, like the progressive economist Dean Baker, were less kind. “I can’t say there was much I found compelling,” he told me. The celebrated New York University economist Nouriel Roubini went out of his way to say that he had “great intellectual respect for his sharp mind,” even if he didn’t agree on numerous points, especially the benefits of inequality. 
 
 Nearly every economist I spoke with said that Conard has too much faith in the market’s ability to reward only those who create real value. Conard, for instance, insists that even the dodgiest financial products must have been beneficial or else nobody would have bought them in the first place. If a Wall Street trader or a corporate chief executive is filthy rich, Conard says that the merciless process of economic selection has assured that they have somehow benefited society. Even pro-market Romney supporters take issue with this. “Ed ought to be more concerned about crony capitalism,” Hubbard told me. 
 
 “Unintended Consequences” ignores some of the most important economic work of the past few decades, about how power and politics influence economic growth. In technical language, this field is the study of “rent seeking,” in which people or companies get rich because of their power, not because of their ideas. This is one of the few fields in economics in which left and right share many influences and ideas — namely that wealthy individuals and corporations are able to influence politicians and regulators to make seemingly insignificant changes to regulations that benefit themselves. In other words, to rig the game. One classic example is banking. Banks have enormous resources to constantly put explicit or subtle pressure on lawmakers and regulators so that regulation can eventually serve their interests. 
 
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 Conard’s version of the financial crisis ignores much reporting and analysis — including work I’ve done with NPR’s “Planet Money” team — that shows that some of the nation’s largest banks actively manipulated customers and regulators and, sometimes, their own stockholders to profit from dangerous risk. And for many economists, rising inequality can create exactly the wrong outcomes for society over all. Rather than simply serving as an invitation for everybody to engage in potentially beneficial risk-taking, inequality can allow those with wealth to crush new ideas. 
 
 I kept raising these questions with Conard, but he repeatedly waved them off. “I don’t want to talk about rent-seeking,” he told me. “When you go off to a third-world country, there’s a dictator who says, ‘I’m giving the telephone franchise to my brother-in-law.’ It’s pretty hard to do that here.” I countered that many economists see rent-seeking in the United States as a much more subtle but still destructive process. If some rich people are able to get and stay rich by messing around with the rules, then those art-history majors will feel as if they have no chance to break into a well-connected, well-protected elite. 
 
 Perhaps concentrated wealth will inspire a nation of innovative problem-solvers. But if the view of many economists is right — that it sometimes discourages innovation — then we should worry. While Conard offers deep and well-argued analyses on almost every issue, on this one he resorted to anecdotes and gut feelings. During his work at Bain, he said, he saw that successful companies had to battle against one another. Nobody was just given a free ride because of their power. “Was a person, like me, excluded from opportunity?” he asked rhetorically. “If so, I wasn’t aware!” 
 
 I suggested that both could be true. The rich could earn a great deal of wealth through their own hard work, skill and luck. They could also use their subsequent influence to make themselves even richer. One of the great political and economic challenges of our time is figuring out the balance between wealth that benefits society and wealth that distorts. Of course we want to encourage people to take risks and find areas of productive innovation. It’s just not in the interest of the United States to allow wealth to skew the political process so that good new ideas are barred. 
 
 Are Conard’s views the uncensored, impolitic version of the man he hopes will be president? The Romney campaign said they wouldn’t comment in any way on “Unintended Consequences,” and Conard wouldn’t share with me anything about his private conversations with his old friend. Glenn Hubbard said only that at a broad level, Romney and Conard share “beliefs about innovation and growth and responsible risk-taking.” 
 
 Conard and Romney certainly share views on numerous policy matters. Like many Republicans, they promote lower taxes and less regulation for those who achieve financial success. Romney has also said that rising inequality is not a problem and that the attention paid to the issue is “about envy. I think it’s about class warfare.” The differences between these two men are also striking. Romney’s economic platform and his record as the governor of Massachusetts suggest that he is more of a centrist than Conard. Romney wants to eliminate capital-gains taxes for people earning less than $200,000 a year but keep them in place for the 1 percent, which Conard says is a good start but doesn’t go far enough. 
 
 The biggest difference is that Romney is running for president and needs more people to like him. Conard doesn’t have to worry about that. “People get very angry before they change their mind,” he said. “Economics is counterintuitive. It just is.” I told him that surely is true, but his ideas are counterintuitive even to people well versed in economics. After we spoke for one of the last times, he sent me an e-mail summing up his argument: At base, having a small elite with vast wealth is good for the poor and middle class. “From my perspective,” he wrote, “it’s not a close call.”
– Hang on to your wallets, folks, because "the age of bull---- investments is back," declares Kevin Roose at New York. The collapse of 2008 put a damper on things, but today the financial world is filled with crazy schemes and iffy start-ups designed to separate suckers from their money. Want to buy stock in a football player? Have at it. Heard of "Motif Investing"? Good luck with that. Care to join the Winklevoss twins by investing in Bitcoins? Fine. "Some of these bad ideas spring from the normal irrational exuberance that comes with an economic bounce-back, and the fact that many investors are more willing to jump into murky waters than they were in 2008," writes Roose. But he also blames the JOBS Act, put in place after the financial crisis to help companies raise money, for unleashing a wave of these dumb investments. "The upshot is that between the rise of the social web, the recovering economy, and the deregulatory impact of the JOBS Act, it's now easier than ever for you to lose money in fun-sounding ways." That's fine if you've got money to burn, but ordinary investors should pay heed. Click for the full column.