This book advances a single, provocative claim: that the standard
neoclassical growth accounting framework — output as a function of
capital, labor, and an unexplained residual — omits a systemic variable
that the author terms the Moral Degradation Index (D). Framed as an
extended narrative from the medieval "sacred equilibrium" through the
philosophical, religious, industrial, financial, and digital eras, the
argument traces how this variable is theorized to have been introduced,
amplified, and coupled to technology and capital across seven chapters.
The book closes with an econometric chapter proposing an empirical
proxy for D and a stylized panel estimation strategy. Readers should
approach the work as a work of interpretive political economy and moral
philosophy, argued through the register and notation of formal growth
theory rather than as a conventional peer-reviewed empirical study; the
mathematics is used allegorically, to give a precise shape to a moral
argument about the West’s economic history.