A01=Robert C. Hockett
Author_Robert C. Hockett
Category=JPQB
Category=KCP
Category=KCZ
Category=NHK
citizen
Early Republic
economic inequality
Economy
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Founders
Hamilton
industrialization
inequality
Jefferson
land ownership
nation
ownership
wealth
Product details
- ISBN 9780300224177
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 13 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Yale University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.”
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.”
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.
