Robert C. Hockett - Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal

Robert C. Hockett

Financing the Green New Deal

A Plan of Action and Renewal

1st ed. 2020

In the closing words of The General Theory, John Maynard Keynes declared: the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.

Bob Hocketts mission in this powerful treatise is to free us from defunct, orthodox thinking about the purposes of public and private finance, the supposed incompatibility of justice and efficiency, and the putative divergence of prosperity and sustainability. All of these false tradeoffs, he shows us, are just that: false. The key is to get the finance right.

An interdisciplinary tour de force.

Paul Allen McCulley, Former Managing Director and Chief Economist, PIMCO; Adjunct Professor of Finance, Georgetown McDonough School of Business

Critics of the Green New Deal, including many from the left, once objected that tackling both climate change and economic inequality simultaneously would make failure in both domains more likely. No longer. The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that the far bigger risk, as Robert Hockett has argued for years, lies in failure to meet these challenges together and now.

Many also once worried that Americans would be unwilling to undertake the required WWII-scale mobilization that a Green New Deal would entail. But because a massive infusion of public investment will be required to revive our economy in any event, we now ask, why not focus that investment on our most pressing problems?again as Robert Hockett has long asked.

Even having mustered the will to act, however, the required mobilization will be a dauntingly complex financial and logistical undertaking. In painstaking detail, Bob Hocketts masterful blueprint shows how to do it.

Robert H. Frank, Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management, Cornell University; Author, Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work

As the old saying has it, Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one. After half a century of misguided demolition of the financial architecture that underpinned shared national and global prosperity, public purpose finance has found a master builder as well as a master scholar in Robert C. Hockett.

Michael Lind, Professor, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin; Author, Land of Promise: An Economic History of the United States

State investment is often driven by a national mission to boost development or securitythink of the railway boom, the creation of the interstate highway system, or the development of the internet, all of which were fueled by the public sector. In this important new book, Robert C. Hockett lays out how to do industrial policy, American-style, and tells us why a Green New Deal is crucial to the future of not only U.S. economic growth, but liberal democracy itself.

Rana Foroohar, Global Economic Analyst, CNN; Global Business Columnist and Associate Editor, Financial Times

You might disagree with some of these proposals, as do I. But you cannot afford to ignore them. Anyone who wants a sustainable future will have to develop means of assuring it that are as creative and ambitiousas out of the boxas these.

Robert J. Shiller, Nobel Laureate and Sterling Professor of Economics, Yale University

Id like to dedicate this monograph to U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her remarkable team, whose Chief of Staff first commissioned it and whose every deed inspires it.