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Soddy, Frederick – Soddy's role as prophet - 10 The curse of Economic theory and fiscal practice
Identifier
024777
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Frederick Soddy: The Scientist as Prophet – Professor Mansel Davies [May 1991]
Economic theory and fiscal practice
A recent reassessment of Soddy's economics has been made, in G. B. Kauffman's book, by H. E. Daly, sometime adviser to the World Bank, to the U.S. National Academy of Science, and to the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. It must suffice merely to quote Daly in his general appraisal:
Probably the most important economic treatise of the last forty years is Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process... But the fact remains that Soddy anticipated the basic insights of Georgescu-Roegen and Boulding regarding the relation of economics and thermodynamics and deserves recognition as a pioneer in a line of thinking which I believe will one day be dominant ... Knight deserves much credit for having been the only reputable economist to have taken Soddy seriously... Soddy was in many ways fifty years ahead of his time.
As in other instances, Georgescu-Roegen and Boulding fail to refer to Soddy's anticipation of their thesis.
In a volume Money Creators (1935), Gertrude Coogan, another American economist wrote:
Soddy delved into economics and immediately found that not one examination of the subject could be found which treated economics as a pure science... When Soddy finished with the subject, it had been reduced to a science. Soddy's radically novel approach to economic questions can be clearly seen to arise from his insistence on dealing with objective material facts and the universal laws of the physical world, rather than by accepting general, vague concepts--wealth, exchange value, credit, market confidence--which he characterized as 'the substitution of social and legal conventions for physical reality'.