AFP/Madrid
Spanish economist and author Jose Luis Sampedro, one of the ideologues behind Spain’s “indignant” protest movement against economic inequality and corruption, has died, his family said yesterday.
Sampedro, who advocated a more humane economics based on ideas of solidarity, passed away overnight on Sunday and his remains were cremated yesterday morning, his widow Olga Lucas said.
“He had asked that his death be treated without a fuss. I would like him to be remembered for his vitality, his dignity and his fighting spirit,” she told news radio Cadena Ser.
Born in Barcelona in 1917, Sampedro lived in Tangiers in northern Morocco with his family when he was a child.
He taught economics at Madrid’s Complutense University as well as at universities in Britain and the United States.
“There are two types of economists: those that work so that the rich become richer and those like me, who work so that the poor become less poor,” Sampedro once said.
His works include The Etruscan Smile (1985), The Economic Forces of Our Time (1967), Economic Structure (1969), and Humanist Economics, Beyond Numbers (2009).
When the grass-roots “indignant” movement emerged in Spain in 2011, with activists occupying squares across the country against the government’s handling of the economy, Sampedro emerged as its standard bearer and took part in several rallies despite his advanced age.
“To consider money as a supreme good will lead us to catastrophe,” he said in an interview published in left-leaning daily newspaper El Pais in June 2011.