By Won-Yong Oh

By 2050, roughly one in six people worldwide will be aged 65 or older. Fewer workers, rising welfare burdens, and weakening local communities are no longer abstract projections. They are real economic costs unfolding right now. And they bring us to a critical question: Who will pay for them?

That fundamental question—who pays?—is the driving force behind my new book, Market Capitalism and Social Responsibility: Profits, Perils, and the Future of Business.

Demographic shifts are just one piece of a much larger puzzle. Today, modern capitalism is facing a perfect storm of systemic disruptions: climate instability, eroding social trust, widening economic inequality, and rapid technological upheaval. At the center of almost all these “grand challenges” stands the modern corporation—an institution traditionally built to maximize profit, yet increasingly called upon to answer for the perils facing society.

Perils that are not only external

A central argument of my book is that these societal perils are not simply random “bad weather” hitting businesses from the outside. In many cases, they are the direct or indirect consequences of corporate choices. Social media platforms can algorithmically deepen political polarization. Aggressive corporate cost-cutting widens economic inequality. The long-held doctrine of shareholder value maximization privatizes profits while socializing risks.

None of this means that corporations are villains. Businesses generate jobs, innovation, prosperity, and solutions to many social problems. They have been among the most powerful engines of economic development and human progress. Yet acknowledging these contributions should not prevent us from asking a difficult question: when corporate activities create broader social costs and risks, who ultimately bears them?

When corporations push the limits of excessive profit-seeking, society is often left to pick up the check. Can this long-standing logic of shareholder primacy still guarantee a stable future for us all?

My book does not offer easy, pre-packaged answers. Instead, it invites readers to reframe the debate: redefining the purpose of the corporation is not merely a technical or economic calculation—it is a fundamental moral choice about the kind of world we want to build.

A Map of the Journey: What the book covers

To make sense of these complex dynamics, the book unfolds in four parts and twelve chapters.

Part I, Functioning of Markets and Institutions, examines market failure and government failure, the ethical challenges of the financial system, and the changing global trade order. It asks what businesses should do in the space between failing markets and failing states.

Part II, Social Challenges and Inequality, turns to issues such as economic inequality, declining social trust, the erosion of social capital, political crises, and the economic challenges associated with aging and shrinking populations.

Part III, Business and Social Responsibility, takes up corporate social responsibility, the contrast between shareholder and stakeholder capitalism, corporate governance and power, and industries of contested value.

Finally, Part IV, Technology and the Future, considers whether AI signals the “end of work” or a new evolution of it, the just transition in the climate crisis and energy transition, and the duties we owe to future generations. Here the book draws on the idea of intergenerational justice to ask how much responsibility we bear for the economic, social, and environmental consequences we leave to future generations.

Who Should Read This Book?

I wrote this book for scholars, policy experts, and students who want to connect abstract management theories with the pressing problems firms face on the ground. Equally, it is written for business leaders and executives striving to navigate the shifting societal expectations of modern enterprise. To keep the content accessible, each chapter opens with a concise summary and includes clear comparison tables, (for example, shareholder versus stakeholder capitalism), making it easy for readers to dive straight into the topics most relevant to them.

This book examines how accelerating social, technological and environmental disruptions are reshaping the institutional foundations of modern capitalism. Won-Yong Oh explores how, in the context of eroding social trust, shifting demographic structures and deepening climate instability, corporations face growing pressure to reconcile profit‑seeking with broader responsibilities to society. This tension raises a fundamental question: Who pays for tomorrow?

An Invitation to Think Together

Today’s grand challenges are too complex for any single sector—whether government, market, or non-profit—to solve alone.

I did not write this book merely to repeat conventional ideas about corporate social responsibility, such as obeying environmental rules or doing local charity work. Instead, my intention is to ask the deeper, more urgent questions about the root institutional problems facing both business and society, and how we can address them together.

The decisions we make today will shape the structural foundation of the world our children and grandchildren inherit. If these questions matter to your research, your classroom, or your strategic vision, I invite you to join the conversation and read on.

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Won-Yong Oh is Lee Professor of Strategy, Department of Management and Entrepreneurship, Lee Business School, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA.