Social science perspectives on climate change and development

University of Copenhagen

Xaquín S. Pérez-Sindín López

Tag: Miguel Anxo Bastos

  • 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.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Miguel Anxo Bastos — Environmental Problems, Property Rights, and State Intervention

    Environmental problems usually derive from a poor definition of property rights. Normally, when environmental policy is justified, concepts such as “externalities” are invoked. Or else people appeal to a very generic concept such as “the environment,” without defining very clearly what “the environment” actually consists of. Because, frankly, I do not know what this thing…