The following set of short pieces is an updatable selection, amid the myriad of collections that can be assembled, of “corona-readings” that, hopefully, have the property of keeping us sealed off from hasty worries and making reasonable arguments “viral”. More
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
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
The project: students become (co)producers of quality information. The concept aims for a quadruple gap-filler, with students, from all over the world, story-telling, in a non-“homework”, but “freestyle” way, on true entrepreneurship... More
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
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
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
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
“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
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
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
The unions of states, in their either federalist or inter-governmental setting, are portrayed in economics and political science literature, by certain scholars and pundits, as quasi-romantic stories and, by others, as purely-cynical undertakings: they are, for the first, expressions of common destinies, while for the second, mere cartels of political exploitation. Though, beyond charitable or circumspect translation of state gatherings, the undeniable facts are that the state, as an organization of humans, has a maximizing logic and that this logic is exercised as the monopoly of (legitimate?) violence with the privilege of (unconsented?) expropriation, by taxation, regulation and inflationary redistribution of purchasing power. The maximization logic of the state (apparatus) – rightly de-homogenized from the rest of society – leads to a triple choice: to increase domestic exploitation, to expand abroad, or both. More
