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.