Overview

A radically original solution to our most intractable economic problems: wage stagnation, productive atrophy, and wealth inequality This sweeping and ambitious book locates the source of American economic and social decline in a simple but profound observation: the nation's forms of citizen ownership have not kept up with its sources of wealth. In the early republic, the Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian citizenry, whose productive assets lay primarily in land ownership and their own education, more or less matched the productive sources of wealth in the nation as a whole. But as we grew from an agrarian nation to an industrial one, the forms of citizen ownership did not change with the economy: instead, efforts toward land ownership were transferred to ownership in unproductive real estate—that is, homes. It is the effort to draw wealth from limited and relatively unproductive sources that makes the average American citizen fall farther and farther behind in income, and also caused the artificial inflation of real estate that led to the 2008 crash. Advancing a theory of ""income-compositional symmetry,"" Robert C. Hockett argues that in order to remedy wage stagnation, productive atrophy, and extreme wealth inequality, industrial, financial, and commercial forms of ownership need to be as universally accessible to citizens as land and education. Hockett presents a unique, financially engineered program for doing so, showing how it coheres with our political and legal traditions as well as what he calls our ""endowment psychologies.""

Full Product Details

9780300224177

Table of Contents

Reviews

“Robert Hockett’s groundbreaking new book, A Republic of Producers, shows his remarkable command of political history, philosophy, economics, and law. It is a magnum opus that makes a generational contribution to scholarship on political economy. The solutions he offers to some of our most stubborn economic problems have never been more urgently needed than right now.”—Congressman Ro Khanna, author of Dignity in a Digital Age “With pure genius and stunning American history lessons, Robert Hockett demonstrates how a new form of finance can broaden ownership for wealth opportunities for many citizens. Hockett’s plan for greater wealth security based on broadening property ownership under capitalism should be the guidepost for every investment banker and major financial services firm in the United States for the next century.”—Joseph Blasi, Rutgers University Institute for Employee Ownership, and author of The Citizen’s Share

Author Information

Robert C. Hockett is Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell University, where he specializes in the intersection of law, philosophy, and economics. He is also senior fellow at New Consensus and a consultant for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund, Americans for Financial Reform, and multiple federal and state legislators and local governments.

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