About: Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt

Wealth, Virtual Wealth and Debt is a 1926 book by the Nobel Prize–winning chemist Frederick Soddy on monetary policy and society and the role of energy in economic systems. Soddy criticized the focus on monetary flows in economics, arguing that real wealth was derived from the use of energy to transform materials into physical goods and services. Soddy’s economic writings were largely ignored in his time, but would later be applied to the development of ecological economics in the late 20th century.