Mis libros y citas

  Breves respuestas a las grandes preguntas Stephen Hawking Creo que estamos actuando con imprudente indiferencia hacia nuestro futuro en el planeta Tierra. En este momento no tenemos otro lugar adonde ir, pero a la larga la especie humana no debería poner todos sus huevos en una sola canasta o en un solo planeta. Solo espero que hasta entonces podamos evitar que la canasta se caiga.  

  What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets Michael J. Sandel Most of our political debates today are conducted in these terms - between those who favor unfettered markets and those who maintain that market choices are free only when they're made on a leveled playing field, only when the basic terms of social cooperation are fair. But neither of these positions helps us explain what's troubling about a world in which market thinking and market relationships invade every human activity. To describe what's disquieting about this condition we need the moral vocabulary of corruption and degradation, and to speak of corruption and degradation is to appeal, implicitly at least, to conceptions of the good life.  

  The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal Jared Diamond Geography sets ground rules for the evolution both biological and cultural of all species, including our own. Geography's role in determining our modern political history is even more obvious then its role in determining the rate at which we domesticate plants and animals.  

  Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet--And How We Fight Back Kate Aronoff Neoliberals have always operated within a world of contradictions, arguing in public that the market offers freedom and that it needs to be insulated from democracy, painting the marker as a natural part of human existence while pushing to pass policies that keep it functional. Just like climate denial, there are some dupes who truly believe in laissez-faire and the invisible hand but the real movers and shakers have always been more pragmatic than dogmatic.    

  The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming David Wallace-Wells If the world's most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the EU average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent. We won't get there through the dietary choices of individuals, but through policy changes.  

  The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions Jason Hickel Economists often speculate that the Global South failed to develop because of a lack of capital. But there was no such lack. The wealth that might have provided the capital for development -precious metals in Latin America and surplus labor in Africa- was effectively stolen by Europe and harnessed to the service of Europe's own development. The Global South could theoretically have developed as Europe did were it not for the plunder of its resources and labor and were it not for the fact that it was forced by Europe to supply raw materials while importing manufactured goods. Whether or not they would or should have done so is another matter of course. After all, much of European-style development required violence towards other lands and other peoples, but the point remains. It is impossible to examine the economic growth of the West without looking at the base on which it drew.  

  The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens Gabriel Zucman In the end, the taxes that are evaded have to be compensated for by higher taxes on the law-abiding, often middle class households, in the United States, Europe and developing countries. Nothing in the logic of free exchange justifies this theft.  

  The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution Richard Dawkins Right up to the middle of the twentieth century, life was thought to be qualitatively beyond physics and chemistry. No longer. The difference between life and non-life is a matter not of substance but of information. Living things contain prodigious quantities of information.  

  23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism Ha-Joon Chang Once you know that there is really no such thing as a 'free market', you won't be deceived by people who denounce a regulation on the grounds that it makes the market unfree. When you learn that large and active governments can promote rather than dampen economic dynamism, you will see that the widespread distrust of government is unwarranted. Knowing that we do not live in a post-industrial knowledge economy will make you question the wisdom of neglecting, or even implicitly welcoming, industrial decline of a country, as some governments have done. Once you realize that trickle-down economics does not work, you will see the excessive tax cuts for the rich for what they are: a simple upward redistribution of income, rather than a way to make all of us richer, as we were told.  

  Because We Say So Noam Chomsky In the future, historians, if there are any, will look back on this curious spectacle taking shape in the early 21st century. For the first time in human history, humans are facing the significant prospect of severe calamity as a result of their actions, actions that are battering our prospects of decent survival.