Life is full of sabotages. Some are sabotages knowingly committed by certain people or groups over others in order to make a profit while other kinds are sabotages we thoughtlessly wage against ourselves. Rational and critical thinking, data, conversation with others and a wide range of perspectives are powerful weapons we can use to counterattack both types of sabotages.

Zaragoza
Spain

Avri Levitan

Avri Levitan is one of the leading violists in the world and a regular of the best international concert halls. He has recently founded Musethica,with the aim of bringing the music of extraordinary young performers to all kinds of social settings such as hospitals or prisons.

Miguel Yasuyuki

Japanese by birth, Miguel lives in Valencia, Spain now. He is a researcher and an enthusiastic promoter of community or complementary currencies and in this line, also founder of the OLCCJP, the Online Laboratory on Complementary Currencies. He is convinced that the current global economic system is doomed to collapse any day soon.

Jorge Bielsa

Born in 1965 in Saravillo, located in the valley of Chistau of the Aragonese Pyrenees. Son of ranchers and twelfth generation descending from Bernat de Mur who established here in 1572. Swimming against the current all the time, thanks to the intervention and personal effort, he got his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Zaragoza.He worked for three years as a statistician for the Health Institute after joining the faculty body of the University of Zaragoza. He currently teaches Macroeconomics and his research field is Environmental Economics, with a focus on water and energy. He lately seeks (as the circumstances require) to expand those fields to global economics and finance, with a particular interest into the causes and consequences of income distribution. Besides occasional immersions in the land of politics, in an amateur and quick-paced/ time-bound fashion , he presently is yet another citizen astonished and incensed with those who run our society.

Nick Powdthavee

Professor Nattavudh (Nick) Powdthavee works at both the University of Melbourne and the London School of Economics where he conducts innovative research about the surprising relations among economics, psychology, behaviour and happiness. His research findings have been regularly featured in the media, including the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of the book, “The Happiness Equation: The Surprising Economics of Our Most Valuable Asset”, Icon Books.

Carro de combate

Carro de Combate is a journalism project on the origin of products and working conditions in which they are manufactured to inform on slave labor and other negative consequences in their different phases of production. The project is led by Nazareth Castro and Laura Villadiego who have just published their first book “Bitter Sweetness” where they analyze the sugar-cane production chain.

José Antonio Pérez

Jose A. Pérez (born in Bilbao, 1979) is a columnist, a scriptwriter and a television director. He is the creator and the director of Ciudad K (K City), a surreal TV series filled with cultural humor aired by Spanish public television and Sceptics, a scientific news popularization program on Basque public televisión. He has written the script of several television hits such as El Club de la Comedia (The Comedy Club), El Hormiguero (The Anthill), Homozapping and the TV series Pelotas (Balls). As a columnist, he worked for The Public, The Post, Rolling Stone, Radio Euskadi, JotDown and Orsai.

Observatorio crítico de la energía

El Observatorio Crítico de la Energía (OCE) (The Energy Critical Observatory) was founded in early 2007 by a group of young engineers and scientists who, united around a common analysis of the problems of society, decided to start a public activity aimed at the transformation and regeneration of the democratic system. The principles on which this activity is organized are rooted in a critique of ecological and economic unsustainability of our society and the degradation of our democratic culture. Conceived as a progressive and essentially critical organization, the OCE is a forum for discussion and analysis. It tries to generate a rigorous and informed discourse to address these issues from a position that combines the solvency of the scientific method with the political and social awareness.

Miguel Conde Lobato

Miguel Conde Lobato (born in Caracas, 1963) is Chairman and Chief Creative Officer for BAP&Conde, one of the top 25 Spanish agencies in terms of turnover (according to INFOADEX), with offices in Madrid and A Coruña, and one of the top five agencies consisting of 100% Spanish capital. He is also Chairman of several companies specialized in the field of communication and marketing such as the MCL group (A Thousand One Hundred Fifty Companies) including the Dignity Brands Company (Strategic Consultancy), Congo Productions (Production Company), FBI (Fábrica de Buenas Ideas or The Good Ideas Factory), social media marketing and IMAM (running market, behaviour and motivational research). Miguel Conde has been a tutor for different projects in postgraduate education and a lecturer in many business schools. He has received numerous awards and national and international recognition for his work in advertising. Besides “Knowcosters” (from 2012), Miguel Conde is the author of “Target, User’s Guide” (2007) and is currently immersed in the publication of two new works on different subjects.

José María Larrañaga

He started working at age 14 combining it with his studies at the Politeknika Vocational School of Mondragon. With a little over 20 years old, he became a Copreci cooperative member and since then his work activity has always been linked to the cooperative movement and specifically to MCC (Mondragon Cooperative Corporation). He has been involved in the foundation of the Ikastola Jose Arana of Escoriaza and the Escoriaza Teacher Training School and currently works as teaching staff at various Universities and companies. His life has always been linked to Escoriaza (Guipuzcoa) where he served as Municipal Councillor for four terms.

Carlos Berzosa

Carlos Berzosa was born in Madrid on November 20th, 1945. He is a Professor of Applied Economics at the Complutense University. He has served both as Dean for 14 years (from 1984 to 1998) and Rector (from 2003 to 2011) of the Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences. He considers José Luis Sampedro his mentor and has worked to update two of his books “Conciencia del subdesarrollo” and “La inflación (al alcance de los ministros)”. He has also written the Prologue and a selection of articles for one of his book: “Humanist Economics”. This positions him within the heterodox economics and at odds with the neoliberal development model or the dominant economic theory. He is the author of several books and articles where his swimming against the tide position can be fully appreciated. Lately, he declared his outrage at the economists incompetence in their decision-making capacity and their suggested ways for solving the current economic crisis. He feels indignant at all the social costs that are being generated by the actions of some economists who are accomplices of certain power structures where elites can evade taxation and hide in tax havens.

Aitor García Rey

Aitor is founder of Linking Paths, a web company obsessed with creating simple and useful web services, and Pro Bono Publico, the main non-profit advocate of Open Data in Spain. Adding to his 15 years experience as developer (including award winning mobile apps), he is now a CIID Summer School alumnus. He lives in Reykjavík, where he is actually marvelling at how software predates every human experience, how the digital/physical boundary collapses and how awesome his wife is. He telegraphs 140 chars messages too often and maintains a digital commonplace book.

Álvaro Aznar

Alvaro Aznar, with a Degree in Law from the University of Zaragoza and a civil servant in the Public Administration, is convinced of the necessity of a strong public sector to guarantee the citizens rights. Despite his youth, he has held various positions in the local government, and is currently Head of Human Resources in the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment. A strong advocate of the role of civil society, he has worked for years as a volunteer for Intermón Oxfam, Entreculturas Peace Research Seminar Foundation, etc. He teaches Public Administration at the University Complutense of Madrid.