Suchergebnisse

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.

This open access book provides a comprehensive analysis of the socioeconomic determinants of Covid-19. From the end of 2019 until presently, the world has been ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic. Although the cause of this is (obviously) a virus, the extent to which this virus spread, and therefore the number of infections and deaths, was largely determined by socio-economic factors. From this, it follows that the course of the pandemic varies greatly from one country to another. This observation applies both to countries' resilience to such a pandemic (which is mainly rooted in the period preceding the outbreak of the virus) and to the way in which countries have reacted to the virus (including the political choices on how to respond). Meanwhile, research has made it clear that the nature of this response (e.g., elimination policy, mitigation policy, and proceeding herd immunity) was, on the one hand, strongly determined by political and ideological factors and, on the other hand, was highly influential in the factors of success or failure in combating the pandemic. The book focuses on the situation in a number of Western regions (notably the USA, the UK, and the EU and its Member States). The author addresses the reasons why in many Western countries both pandemic prevention and response policies to Covid-19 have failed. The book concludes with recommendations concerning the rearrangement of the socio-economic order that could increase the resilience of (Western) societies against such pandemics.