Welcome to Capital Futures

Maintained by Robert Hockett

Featuring

Public Finance for Perpetual
Public Progress

Welcome to Capital Futures, a Site dedicated to Financially Engineering Ever More Just and Remunerative, Labor-Owned Modes of Production and Distribution in the Spirit of Hamilton, Hilferding, Lincoln, List, Luxemburg, Marx, Perkins and Wicksell, Among Other Heroes of Human Emancipation.

Projects

Publications Catalogue

Columns, OpEds, Occasional Journalism

I'm no Marx or Keynes, but like them I do try to accompany most of my scholarly, policy advocacy, and legislative work with more accessible journalistic companion pieces. Here are some of my regular columns for Forbes, The Hill, FT, and Huffington Post, along with other occasional journalism.

Image: Ben Franklin at his printing press, 18th century Philadelphia

The Green New Deal

The Green New Deal initiative begun in 2018 marked the beginning of a return to ambitious public-private coordination in the cause of rebuilding the American economy along more just, productive, and sustainable lines. Hockett worked with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and her team from the start on the GND Resolution introduced to Congress in early 2019, then on the initiative's finance plan as well as much follow-up legislation found in the 'Legislation' Module of this site.

Image: Cover Art for Hockett's 'Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal
inspiration

Posthumous Mentors

Frances Perkins
Frances Perkins
1880-1965

Frances Perkins was a labor-rights advocate who served as the 4th United States Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945, the longest to serve in that position. Architect of at least half of the New Deal, which she first developed as then-Governor Roosevelt's State Industrial Commissioner of New York, Perkins was the first woman ever to serve in a presidential cabinet, later teaching at Cornell ILR. I later lived in her old rooms as a Faculty Fellow of Telluride House behind Cornell Law School.

Soren Kierkegaard
Soren Kierkegaard
1813-55

I fell in love with Kierkegaard during my youth - how could one *not* love a thinker who lived every moment in truth, wrote in so many voices while concealing his authorship, and was 'fuck you' enough to name one of his opuses 'Concluding Unscientific Postscript,' a flabbergasting achievement that punched me right in the face from the library shelf. THIS is how to write what you know to be true. He will never not be my favorite uncle.

View All Posthumous Mentors

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