{"product_id":"the-moral-ecology-of-collapse-1","title":"The Moral Ecology of Collapse","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan style=\"color: #1f1f1f; font-family: Roboto, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 0.2px; white-space-collapse: preserve-breaks; background-color: #f9f9f9;\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Moral Ecology of Collapse\u003c\/em\u003e positions inequality not as a single “distribution problem,” but as a system-level driver that reconfigures incentives, institutions, and collective expectations. In today’s debate, scholars and policy groups increasingly frame inequality as a catalyst for downstream failures—political capture, weakened public goods, and erosion of social trust—while global inequality data continue to underscore how extreme and persistent wealth concentration can become in many democratic countries. In this book, the author treats inequality as an ecological pressure on moral norms and civic reciprocity: when extraction becomes rational, meaning and legitimacy become scarce, and the social contract shifts from shared commitment to strategic survival. This discussion adds real conceptual leverage by bringing complexity science to the foreground: democratic societies are complex adaptive systems with feedback loops, nonlinearity, and threshold effects. That lens reframes “polarization,” “institutional decay,” and “narrative fragmentation” as coupled dynamics that can self-amplify—small shocks become regime shifts, local opportunism becomes systemic capture, and multiple equilibria emerge (including bad ones). In this framing, collapse is rarely a single event; it is the loss of stabilizing feedback, so that the slow disappearance of dampeners (trust, rule consistency, shared reality) leads the system to drift toward an attractor defined by resentment, opportunism, and coercion. Finally, the book sits squarely inside the most urgent strand of contemporary democratic-fragility research: the argument that advanced democracies can undergo gradual autocratization driven by polarization, disinformation, collective illusions, political capture, and moral decay. Research on the societal effects of inequality points to a long-running wave of autocratization and global democratic instability. \u003cem\u003eThe Moral Ecology of Collapse\u003c\/em\u003e contributes a unifying thesis to that debate: inequality is not merely correlated with backsliding—it changes the game, altering payoffs so that democracy’s maintenance becomes collectively irrational precisely when it is most needed. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lawrence R. Kunkel","offers":[{"title":"Case Bound - Cloth","offer_id":50770279498032,"sku":"9798218920968","price":25.9,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk\/products\/the-moral-ecology-of-collapse-1","provider":"The Great British Bookshop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}