Welcome to Capital Futures
Maintained by Robert Hockett
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.
High Theory
Noncomparabilities & Nonstandard
Logics, NeoAristotelian Philosophy of Action, Action-Theory-Informed Legal & Political Theory, Distributive Justice Theory & Meta-Theory, Distribution-Focused & Recursive Social Welfare Functions, Purging Pareto & Paretianism from Normative Economic & Political Theory, and More.
Meso Theory
Recursive Collective Action Problems, Endogenous Credit-Money Theory, Rousseauvian State Money Theory, Capital Theory, Systemically Important Price Theory, Central Banking and Public Finance Theory, the Public-Private Franchise Account of Both the Corporation and Modern Banking & Finance, and More.
Plans & Schemes
Real Arrow Securities for All, The Eminent Domain Plan for Underwater Mortgage Writedowns, Extended Fed Open Market Operations in All Markets with Systemically Important Prices, Digital Greenbacks & the Democratic Digital Dollar, 'Spreading the Fed,' the Green New Deal, Share-Spreading 'Labor Capitalism,' and More.
Legislation & Testimony
Legislation & Testimony on the Plans and Schemes Cited Above. Ranging from the Eminent Domain Plan for Underwater Mortgages, through Public 'Citizens' Ledger' Banking for All and a 'People's Portfolio' for System-Wide Price Stabilization, to Redesigning Our Public Institutions to Enable Perpetual National Development, and More
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.
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.
Posthumous Mentors
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.
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.
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