The book analyzes socioeconomic through the lens of a lawyer. In the past decade the world has
witnessed some severe financial and economic crises especially the financial crisis of
2007-2008 and the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The author states that the
socio-economic order has in the past four to five decades been thoroughly redesigned generally
favouring models that prioritize the free market over the public interest or even more
generally government operation. He works out that during four to five decades globalized
capitalist societies are facing a multiplicity of fundamental problems such as: (1) increasing
debt that severely burdens both the private and public sectors (2) persistent poverty and an
ever-increasing polarization between rich and poor in addition to (3) intractable
environmental problems that fifty years after the Club of Rome's report entitled 'Limits to
growth' (1972) has dragged the world into what in recent years has been referred to as climate
change. The book explains why all this is the direct result of value choices made from the late
Middle Ages onwards when in the Western world the societal models of that time were
increasingly abandoned for a societal model that came to rely on the primacy of economic
interests. The book not only subjects the ethical choices but also examines various problems it
has caused and probes for possible ways out. This is an open access book.
