Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Economist, Associate Professor, Ph.D., the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, editor and journalist, interested in comparative economic systems, cultural economics, geopolitics and geo-economy

The Fourth Estate. And So Forth

The press today makes it easier to formally prove one’s credentials as a journalist as opposed to one’s calling for the profession or even vocation, through personal probity and other underlying yet necessary qualities. You may say that this utterance is an opinion, a matter of taste or a value judgement. You may even call it confirmation bias. There is nothing wrong with such thoughts, but we say about journalism that, before values enter into the equation, it must concern itself with verifiable facts and objectivity. More

The War of the Worlds: Macro-societies in Battle Against Micro-organisms

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Alexandru Georgescu

As the lockdown has been relaxed (in Romania, the homeland of TMFI), yet social distancing is still a sacrosanct recommendation, we release the second episode from our collection of editorial products, this time from our in-house harvest. We hope that the variety and the quality of these “corona-readings” to function as a cure equally for unjustified anxieties and for mind hibernation. More

Brâncuși’s Endlessness and the Scarcity of Some Means

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The public subscription for Brâncuși’s “The Wisdom of the Earth”, to get it from private hands “back” to the Romanian state, failed not so long ago. In markets, big money is paid for his works, more than “all” Romanians managed to gather. The moral? Art may be a public good, but it is, above all, and shall stay so, a private thrill as beauty is also in the eye of the legit beholder. More

The Market for Ideas: Supplying and Demanding Thoughtfulness

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Alexandru Georgescu

It has been three years since our project – The Market for Ideas – took shape. We have tried to present our readers with interesting ideas from a wide variety of fields and penned by a wide variety of others. To the best of our abilities, we have tried not to turn this journal into a publication by Romanians for Romanians, only in English, which would be snobbery, but a shared space in which Romanian issues could be presented alongside more general considerations for the edification of a diverse and educated, but non-expert audience. The figures back us up, both on Facebook and on the website, where Romanians are still a plurality, but no longer the majority of our readers. Hopefully, we have not driven any of them away; instead, we rather managed to interest some people in our corner of the Internet, which is a difficult thing to do in a world given to shallow and homogenizing diversity. Facts and figures: TMFI is being read in 188 jurisdictions all over the world and its writers come from more than 50 countries. More

MIND(s that filled) THE GAP(s)

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The Market for Ideas initiated an editorial project in which “international business and economics” students, besides being consumers of quality information, become (co)producers of this “good”. The concept aims for a quadruple gap-filler, with young people, from all over the world, story-telling, in a non-“homework”, but “freestyle” manner, on the value and values of entrepreneurship. More

Cyber-Cerberus and Hackers’ Hades

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Dumitru Miron

The creation of cyberspace may be perceived either as a benign addendum to the biblical Book of Genesis or as man’s fatal conceit making a virtual world mimicking the inherited one. Is it a smarter cover for the physical world – with its old-days and more predictable social life, economic cooperation, and power politics – or a digital hallucination – leaving us disturbed? The godfather of cyberspace is considered William Gibson. He invented the word, using it in his SciFi Burning Chrome story and Neuromancer novel. You do not have to be full-time scientific-fantasist to get the side effects of an avatar-world. An avatar-world will accordingly develop goods and bads that will transcend it and trespass it. Its goods will enhance the source realms, its bads will strike back in it, as happened in the world of www, Facebook, Wikileaks and US presidential campaign interfered by maleficent descendants of the “dark-side” soviets. More

PrestiDigital GeoPolitics

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

We, humans, live and act in the old physical space, though spatiality will never be the same after digits became the atoms of some “virtual matter”, in which our bodies and souls e-immersed. Cyberspace, equated reasonably with the Internet, allows for larger and better markets and fortunes, as well as more and fierce dangers to our security and liberty, to our homes and homelands. More

For a Privatization of Environmental Public Policies

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Climate change and sustainable development are, somehow, like “love and marriage”, and they go together like “a horse and carriage”; and if you ask “the local [as well as global] gentry”, they will say that this is “elementary”. But despite a basic consensus, that something is happening to our earthly environment and something must rapidly be done, the problem is much more delicate scientifically and politically. More

Romanian Capitalist Economic Thought (I)

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The process of institutional transformation from the socialist, command economy to the capitalist, market economy can be understood theoretically and historically, as a priority, like a process of intellectual transformation. Romania in the 1990s, perhaps to a greater extent than any other country in the ex-communist bloc, was the theatre of a transition at the level of politico-economic institutions which was little-announced and stated by a convergent, consensual idealistic transition. More

Romanian Capitalist Economic Thought (II)

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

“The disappearance of Communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 reflected the collapse of the existing belief system and accordingly the weakening of its support organizations” (North 1997, 18). Such a verdict catches the image of a bivalent process of deconstruction and institutional reconstruction: from former imposition of material and moral servitudes to economic and political liberalization. But that new order – of the market and of the multiparty system – could have been accomplished, ultimately and inevitably, with the same people who inhabited the old institutional and organizational architectures, both at the top and at the base of society. The intellectual scaffolding of transformation became a critical resource, and its training and performance were, among others, functions of epistemic tradition and transfer. More

Amfiteatru Economic, the Measure of Lastingness

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

I started writing about economics and economy in the “big press”, both academic and mass-media, around the same time, somewhere in 2002. This, after having explored journalism during the university studies. I had understood the difference in the literary species between an article dedicated to the mass-media field and one published in academic journals, long before the biblio- and sciento-metric tsunami reached Romania, with its (inter)national indexations and citations of the scientific publications. More

Long Live Europe!

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Dumitru Miron

European Union remains one profoundly unaccomplished political project for too many reasons. Despite a continuous external growth, since the inception, and internal maturation, it was not able to fill entirely the “real estate” of the cultural habitat which – by both stretches of the mind and grace of geography – was and is considered to represent the whole (and holy) Europe: the Norwegians and the Swiss were not seduced by the “tender offer” Brussels displayed towards them, though they are solid parts of the continent’s historical trunk either in its “heroic” (the Viking expeditions by sea) or in its “settled” (Europe’s inland highly celebrated democracy) epochs. Also, EU struggles to digest and metabolise some of the Central and Eastern European new-comers, while the Western Balkans, with the residual nation-states of the ex-Yugoslavian failed multinational union, seem, with the notable exception of Croatia, so “estranged” from Europe. More