Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Category: Uncategorized

  • Living Futures

  • Supermarket produce aisle with global maps, shipping routes, and fruit labels

    The Sociology of an Ordinary Saturday

    Sociology has a strange habit of making ordinary things look complicated. A trip to the grocery store, for example, seems like one of the least interesting things we do. You walk through the aisles, pick up some food, pay, and go home. But there is a lot of society hidden inside that simple journey. Take…

  • Subway train stopped in a cavernous industrial station with many stairways

    Reading Camus as a Sociologist

    I recently read Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus. I had somehow managed to avoid it until now, despite its reputation as one of the most accessible texts associated with existentialist philosophy. What caught my attention almost immediately was its opening question: suicide. It is a striking way of entering philosophy, because Camus does not…

  • The Great Paradox of the French Revolution

    One of Bastos’s central arguments is that the French Revolution destroyed forms of authority and social organization that had evolved over centuries, replacing them with an abstract, homogeneous, and centralized political model. According to this interpretation, the old provinces, charters, jurisdictions, and local communities were replaced by artificial administrative divisions conceived by the central power…

  • Disadvantages of using powerpoint

  • Beyond Hayek: Can Social Science Understand Dispersed Knowledge?

    Few schools of thought have been as influential in contemporary debates about markets, planning, and the role of the state as the Austrian School of Economics. Thinkers such as Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Israel Kirzner developed a powerful critique of central planning that continues to shape discussions about public policy, economic…

  • 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…