I’ve just finished reading the book “Espanya, Capital París” authored by Germà Bel and soon available in english, published by Sussex Academic Press (by now, only in its original, spanish, and the in language of the author, catalan).

A few points touched me particularly and this is what I’d like to share with the blog readers. I’ll raise some issues that refer to the content of the book, but not giving the answers as they are within the book, what is gonna be unpolited until it is published in english. Sorry for that, but this post is just about my personal view.

This is not a letter from a catalan persuading spaniards for a larger self-government in Catalonia. It is a work made in spanish for spaniards (as it looks to me) to show them off another Spain should be possible. It is a book written by an economist with a wide historical view. An advantage reflected in the structure of the book, that made it easy to understand for non economists.

After reading it, I have a more practical, less romantical view of what a nation-state is, with a failure-story that might be ported to other spanish stories.

Productivity

What is a nation-state? It is a tool built by humans, in order to become more productive

Now I can better understand and explain why a tailor from Seville will always be less productive than a less skilfull one from Hamburg.

Solidarity

So many politiciens have shut themselves down before this issue, in Madrid, it becomes good to understand what a fallacy it is and how pathetically they all have knelt before the bureaucratic project of a centralist conception of the building of the spanish nation.

Mistakes fixing

Century after century same mistake has been observed and deepened into it. Even when someone or all the bureaucrats have decided to fix it, they have deepened, even more, in the mistake. Spanish bureaucrats have their role and they will never give it over.

IT infrastructures

After reading a book about the spanish failure in transports, as a computer engineer, I’d like to read its analogy about IT infrastructures and I’d join a crowd funding pursuing this target.