[3] Conard grew up in the Detroit metropolitan area[4] and graduated with honors from the University of Michigan with a BSE in Operations Research in 1978.

[6] While at Bain Capital, Conard took Waters Corporation, DDI, ChipPac, Innophos, and Sensata public and sat on their boards of directors.

[11] Conard is the author of two top-ten The New York Times bestsellers: Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong and The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class; a contributor to Oxford University Press' United States Income, Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality, and the publisher of Macro Roundup, a daily summary of salient economic news.

"[18] The book analyzes why the U.S. has outperformed other high-wage economies, explains the causes of the financial crisis, and makes recommendations for accelerating growth in its aftermath.

[19] Since its publication, Conard has made over 250 television appearances in which he has debated leading economists including Paul Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Alan Krueger, Austan Goolsbee, and Jared Bernstein; journalists including Fareed Zakaria, Chris Hayes, and Andrew Ross Sorkin; and politicians such as Barney Frank, Howard Dean, and Eliot Spitzer.

He has also written op-eds for The Wall Street Journal,[22] The Washington Post,[23] Foreign Affairs,[24] Harvard Business Review,[25] Fortune,[26] and Politico,[27] among others.

[29][30] The Upside of Inequality was met with positive reviews, including former president of Harvard University and economist Larry Summers, a very tough critic on the other side of the aisle, blurbed "I profoundly disagree but respect the clarity with which he makes his case..." and called it "a very valuable contribution" that will "sharpen your thinking on critical economic issues.

"[34] In 2021, Conard contributed the concluding chapter, “The Economics of Inequality in High-Wage Economies,” to the Oxford University textbook United States, Income Wealth, Consumption, and Inequality,[35] which includes chapters by Emmanuel Saez, Jared Bernstein, Richard Burkhauser, Gerald Auten, and David Splinter among others.

The chapter summarizes and updates the arguments Conard made in his previous books—that inequality has been predominantly earned and consequently accelerates the growth of middle-class incomes in the United States relative to other high-wage economies.

The Roundup, which summarizes a variety of sources, makes Conard’s ongoing research freely available to the public in a newsletter and searchable database (with entries that predate 2022).