Patricia Hetter Kelso, 1937-2025

Patricia Hetter Kelso, a leading voice in the promotion of employee ownership and universal capitalism, died yesterday at 98. She was the intellectual and business partner, wife, and coauthor of numerous books on expanding capitalism with her husband, Louis Kelso. Louis Kelso had developed the idea of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) in 1956. Patricia met Louis in 1963, and they married in 1980.

Patricia served as a managing partner at Kelso & Company, which Louis Kelso created as an investment banking firm to promote ESOPs. It eventually moved away from that practice after Louis Kelso’s death in 1991; Patricia Kelso retired from the firm the following year.

Patricia’s passion, which she pursued for 60 years until near her death, was to make capitalism more universal, expanding the idea of ESOPs beyond the workplace to include consumers and community members.  She was the coauthor with her husband of Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality (1967) and Democracy and Economic Power: Extending the ESOP Revolution Through Binary Economics (1986).

The Kelsos developed the concept of the general stock ownership plan as a way for communities and/or consumers to own companies where they lived or where they purchased goods or services.  The Alaska Permanent Fund, which pays dividends to all residents of Alaska from oil revenues generated in the state, is based in part on the Kelso model. In California’s Central Valley, a consumer stock ownership plan (CSOP) allowed almost 5,000 farmers to own their own fertilizer plant.

Patricia Kelso was a passionate visionary. She argued that a capitalism that provides ownership only to those who can afford it was neither fair nor sustainable. Her ideas carry special relevance today when so much of the world’s wealth is concentrated in a very small number hands while the vast majority of population is severely wealth insecure. Patricia argued forcefully that there were practical, nonpartisan solutions to these problems.

She is survived by her two stepdaughters, Katie Balestreri and Marty Brookman, and three step-grandchildren, Julie Brookman, Trevor von Stein, and Christina von Stein.