Soddy's Economics
Posted: Mon Jan 17, 2005 11:41 am
Recent discussions regarding the future, future energy issues and the closely linked world economic situation and Frederick Soddy's total abandonment of science to struggle into economics, led me to obtain his book.................
"Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt", 1926, Frederick Soddy
This book was significant enough to see a modern 1983 reprint in paper back which is what I obtained.
Fantastic is all I can say! Soddy received a Noble in 1921 in Chemistry and I think he should have received another in Economics.
Soddy's foresight and prognostication has come to pass and other of his predictions seem immenant. He attacks economics as a science with a scientists cold logic. He comes up with brilliant yet often obvious suggestions which, to this day, are ignored. He labored in an effort to isolate economic factors which might hope to stabilize debt and secure geniune renewable national wealth.
His education, as a late Victorian, forces him into long and difficult sentence structures that is a mastery of the language at its peak. All such speech and narritive writting is now long lost. It will surely be a tedium for all but the most avid reader of older english works. You will not scan or speed read this work and grasp anything!
His discussion is serious, crisp and clear. We glimpse his vision for nuclear energy as endless power for either a glorious society or total ruin. He notes man's natural tendency to take all new sources of energy and weaponize it first. I am, personally, saddened that man has had the nuclear genie of Soddy's vision and has allowed it to go moribund and hold it in current stagnation, inspite of Soddy's predicted end of "the debt system" hurtling towards us at ever increasing speeds. He viewed the limitless energy of the atom as a saving system of renewable wealth for a burgeoning society.
He notes that we could just do what we always seem to do with new energy and power sources......grow more food to breed more people and then weaponize it to kill off the excess, so created, in cycles of growth and war.
This is a must read for the citizen scientist who is alert to his economic environment. One has to constantly realize that this amazing vision was written when others felt that nuclear energy was a joke and the atomic nucleus was viewed as a bizarre system of protons and electrons. (neutron had not been discovered.)
Richard Hull
"Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt", 1926, Frederick Soddy
This book was significant enough to see a modern 1983 reprint in paper back which is what I obtained.
Fantastic is all I can say! Soddy received a Noble in 1921 in Chemistry and I think he should have received another in Economics.
Soddy's foresight and prognostication has come to pass and other of his predictions seem immenant. He attacks economics as a science with a scientists cold logic. He comes up with brilliant yet often obvious suggestions which, to this day, are ignored. He labored in an effort to isolate economic factors which might hope to stabilize debt and secure geniune renewable national wealth.
His education, as a late Victorian, forces him into long and difficult sentence structures that is a mastery of the language at its peak. All such speech and narritive writting is now long lost. It will surely be a tedium for all but the most avid reader of older english works. You will not scan or speed read this work and grasp anything!
His discussion is serious, crisp and clear. We glimpse his vision for nuclear energy as endless power for either a glorious society or total ruin. He notes man's natural tendency to take all new sources of energy and weaponize it first. I am, personally, saddened that man has had the nuclear genie of Soddy's vision and has allowed it to go moribund and hold it in current stagnation, inspite of Soddy's predicted end of "the debt system" hurtling towards us at ever increasing speeds. He viewed the limitless energy of the atom as a saving system of renewable wealth for a burgeoning society.
He notes that we could just do what we always seem to do with new energy and power sources......grow more food to breed more people and then weaponize it to kill off the excess, so created, in cycles of growth and war.
This is a must read for the citizen scientist who is alert to his economic environment. One has to constantly realize that this amazing vision was written when others felt that nuclear energy was a joke and the atomic nucleus was viewed as a bizarre system of protons and electrons. (neutron had not been discovered.)
Richard Hull