It’s Our Fault

This book begins from an uncomfortable premise: our institutions fail not only because of politicians, elites, or laws, but because they reflect our own preferences—often poorly informed, contradictory, and incoherent.

It’s Our Fault does not seek easy culprits or indulge in moral outrage, but rather understanding. With rigor and clarity, it shows how our collective decisions—as voters, citizens, and consumers—feed the very system we later criticize.

In a style that is incisive yet calm, Benito Arruñada examines the mechanisms behind Spain’s stagnation: from education and housing to territorial organization and political culture. Instead of the comfort of blaming others, he proposes a demanding but realistic alternative: a citizenry that is better informed, more responsible, and less gullible in the face of magical promises. These pages are not an invitation to resignation, but to adulthood and initiative—because if the fault is ours, so too is the solution.

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“The ancients said that when the gods favored us, they ignored our wishes, and when they wished to punish us, they granted them. Likewise, Spaniards express preferences that politicians strive to satisfy—with disappointing results. This perceptive and meticulous book analyzes why we demand from the state precisely what frustrates us, and then blame it for giving it to us.” — Fernando Savater

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CONTENTS

Arruñada, Benito (2025), La culpa es nuestra: Cómo las preferencias ciudadanas frenan las reformas en España, La Esfera de los Libros, https://shorturl.at/9qlVL.

Introduction – Who Is to Blame for Our Troubles? An examination of Spain’s instinct to shift responsibility and the collective illusions that block reform.

Part One – A Country Shaped by Its Citizens

1. The Elite Fails – but So Do the Citizens Why political and economic elites operate within limits imposed by voters’ own contradictions.
2. Citizens’ Preferences and Public Affairs How incoherent preferences in taxation, welfare and public services lead to poor outcomes.
3. Citizens’ Preferences and Private Affairs The private behaviours and expectations that reinforce structural problems.

Part Two – Major Problems: Largely of Our Own Making

4. Scarce and Expensive Housing: A Choice We Make How planning, regulation and local incentives restrict supply and push up prices.
5. Education Turned into a Consumer Good Why the system rewards credentials over learning, and how this undermines skills and mobility.
6. Regional Autonomy as a Source of Rent-Seeking How fiscal and regulatory fragmentation encourages duplication and capture.
7. Catalonia: Spain’s Uncomfortable Mirror The Catalan crisis as an extreme case of the same incentives and illusions found elsewhere in Spain.

Part Three – How to Change Course

8. How to Rethink Our Problems Why Spain needs institutional changes that shape preferences, not only transmit them.
9. The Deceptive Promise of “Good Governance” The limits of imported institutional fixes when underlying preferences remain unchanged.
10. Towards a More Conscious Citizenry Proposals to make costs visible, improve civic information and align emotions with consequences.

Bibliography

Index of Names and Subjects