Louis Orth Kelso (/ˈkɛlsoʊ/; December 4, 1913 – February 17, 1991) was a political economist, corporate and financial lawyer, author, lecturer and merchant banker who is chiefly remembered today as the inventor and pioneer of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP), invented to enable working people without savings to buy stock in their employer company and pay for it out of its future dividend yield.

This legislation, still in force, defines economic policy in the United States 170 years after the official birth of the Industrial Revolution as the right to a job.

Two years later Kelso and his co-author, the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, explained the macro-economic theory on which the ESOP is based in The Capitalist Manifesto (Random House, 1958).

In The New Capitalists (Random House, 1961), the two authors present Kelso's financial tools for democratizing capital ownership in a private property, market economy.

Kelso gained that worldly knowledge from his work as a corporate and financial lawyer, and later as senior partner in the law firm he founded.

This fact was the key to understanding why the private property, free market economy was notoriously unstable, pursuing a roller coaster course of exhilarating highs and terrifying descents into economic and financial collapse.

This missing fact, which Kelso had uncovered over years of intensive reading, research and thought, drastically modifies the classical paradigm which has dominated formal economics since Adam Smith.

Differential productiveness over time concentrates market-sourced income in the hands of those who will not recycle it back through the market as payment for consumer goods and services.

The symptoms of dysfunction are capital concentration and inadequate consumer demand, the effects of which translate into poverty and economic insecurity for the majority of people who depend entirely on wage income and cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck.

All of Kelso's financing tools and economic proposals are designed to correct the imbalance between production and consumption at its source, in conformity with the private property/free market principles identified by Smith and his followers.

In a biographical summary written for the National Center for Employee Ownership in 1988, Kelso described "the area in which first I alone, and then, beginning about 25 years ago, Patricia and I, have made our contribution to the world of economics and corporate (and other) finance.