Chemistry Nobel Winner Fredrick Soddy's "Crank" Thermodynamics Inspired Views on Economics

[NNadir]

This morning some aspects of the chemistry of protactinium were on my mind and as I poked around and drifted, and as one can do in free association, I wandered into thinking about Fredrick Soddy, who won the 1921 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on explicating the decay series of uranium, which includes protactinium.

I ended up on his Wikipedia page where I found this:

In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a "campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships",[21] offering a perspective on economics rooted in physics – the laws of thermodynamics, in particular – and was "roundly dismissed as a crank".[21] While most of his proposals – "to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort" – are now conventional practice, his critique of fractional-reserve banking still "remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom" although a recent paper by the IMF reinvigorated his proposals.[21][22] Soddy wrote that financial debts grew exponentially at compound interest but the real economy was based on exhaustible stocks of fossil fuels. Energy obtained from the fossil fuels could not be used again. This criticism of economic growth is echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.[21]

I think he understood something about fossil fuels and the economy that we missed.

We are now entering an age of the celebration of ignorance, fear, racism, and other aspects of our worst impulses, a very dangerous time, but the paragraph on Soddy, seems to suggest that something of wisdom may yet survive these times.

At the end of my life, I want to die with a shred of hope for the future, as dire as it seems, that "crank" wisdom can be discovered to be exactly that, wisdom.

[CoopersDad]

1. Recommended. nt

[erronis]

2. Thanks for sharing your "wanderings" with us. Soddy sounds like a real genius.

and probably was labeled a crank since his views threatened the established ones.

[Turbineguy]

3. I think the Federal Reserve could learn from

PID Control systems. Neel Kashkari should put his engineer hat on and check it out.

&t=14s

We are now in the derivative phase of the interest rate process.

[NNadir]

4. Thank you for that. I liked the way it was presented. n/t.

[Turbineguy]

5. I use that one in my classes on automation.

[NNadir]

6. A nice, clear and simple way, to get the kids started I think. Nothing intimidating, and actually fun to watch using...

...a wonderful example.