Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Category: Uncategorized

  • Stack of aged manuscripts with black ink splatters and handwritten corrections

    El Espejismo de la Atenas Castellana: Por qué Salamanca no fue el “Silicon Valley” del siglo XVI

    En su ensayo Salamanca, capital del conocimiento (2024), el filósofo Pedro Insua propone una sugerente y combativa relectura de la historia académica española. Siguiendo la estela del materialismo filosófico de Gustavo Bueno (España frente a Europa, 1999), Insua sostiene que la Universidad de Salamanca tras la Reforma funcionó como una suerte de “Silicon Valley” de…

  • Curved suburban street lined with various single-family homes, green lawns, and several parked cars

    Why We Consume More Than We Need: Duesenberry’s Theory of Consumption and Saving

    Why do people continue spending even when their income falls? Why do some households feel poor despite earning relatively high salaries? And why does consumption seem to spread through society like a social contagion? These questions were addressed by economist James Duesenberry in his influential 1949 book Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior.…

  • The Myth of Universal Hispanicity: Capitalist Extractivism, Alterity, and the Internal Colony

    The narrative that the Spanish Empire executed a sort of universal charity in America crumbles entirely when propaganda is confronted with harsh demographic and historical reality. This romanticized view of the conquest attempts to sell the idea that an entire continent was unified under a single language, pioneering laws, and altruistic access to higher education.…

  • Beyond Borders: Aristotle, Leonardo and Leibniz as Models of Universal Knowledge

    Aristotle represents the first great systematic mind: he tried to organize almost every field of knowledge, from logic and ethics to politics, biology, metaphysics and rhetoric. His importance is not only that he knew many things, but that he created frameworks to connect them. Key books by Aristotle: Leonardo da Vinci represents the fusion of…

  • Capitalism as a “Mental Technology”: From Bastos to Hartmut Rosa and the social capital theories

    One of the most intensive defenses of capitalism I have recently heard comes from Miguel Anxo Bastos. In several conferences and interviews, he presents capitalism not merely as an economic system, but as a kind of “mental technology”: a way of seeing the world rationally, systematically, and productively. In his account, capitalism emerges from habits…

  • Max Weber, Hidden Behind the Clichés

    A Spanish-German colloquium on the contemporary relevance of the thinker held in Madrid Reyes Mate4 DEC 1989 – 00:00 CET Share on WhatsAppShare on FacebookShare on TwitterExpand Social NetworksAdd EL PAÍS on Google Max Weber, the most important German thinker at the hinge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seeks his place in the history…

  • Capitalism is a Technology – Miguel Anxo Bastos

    What was humanity like before we young people came to know it? How does one escape poverty? What was there before, 200 years ago? Poverty is always something relative. So, I don’t know whether people in other times felt poor as such, but rather understood that this was existence itself. That was how it had…

  • Daniel Bell and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

    Capitalism is often understood as an economic system based on markets, private property, competition, productivity, and growth. However, for the sociologist Daniel Bell, capitalism was not only an economic structure. It was also a cultural system, and this cultural dimension created one of its deepest contradictions. In his influential book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,…

  • Interdisciplinary Reflections from Katowice

    Last week I was in Katowice for a meeting of the Horizon-funded ISABEL Horizon project, where we explored the impacts of the green transition on job destruction and job creation, especially in regions historically shaped by coal industries. What struck me most was the diversity of the consortium. It brings together people from fields such…

  • The Mushroom at the en of the world

    This book tells of travels with mushrooms in order to explore indeterminacy and the conditions of precarity: life without the promise of stability. I once read that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, thousands of Siberians, suddenly deprived of state guarantees, ran to the woods to collect mushrooms. These are not the mushrooms Anna…