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Benoît Mandelbrot’s Asymmetry
No. 61, Sep.-Oct. 2026 Goethe arrives at the botanical garden in Palermo and reaches the conclusion that the answers are to be found in the world of plants. It is here that he conceives the idea of redefining the concept of metamorphosis: “It was revealed to me that in that organ of the plant which we ordinarily call the leaf lies the true Proteus, which can conceal itself and reveal itself in every possible form. Forwards and backwards, the plant is always nothing but leaf, so inseparably bound up with the future germ that we are not even permitted to think of them separately.” More
Romania, Lowest Public Expenditure on Education Among EU Member States
No. 61, Sep.-Oct. 2026 Romania stands out as having the lowest public expenditure on education among EU Member States, according to the latest annual survey published by Eurostat. In 2023 (the most recent year for which processed data are available), the highest level of public expenditure on education relative to gross domestic product (GDP) among EU countries was recorded in Sweden (6.8%), followed by Finland (6.3%), Belgium (6.2%) and Denmark (6.1%). Among the remaining EU countries, public expenditure on education relative to GDP generally ranged between 3.9% and 5.3%, with Romania (3.0%), Croatia (3.1%; 2022 data), Greece (3.3%), Malta (3.4%) and Hungary (3.6%) falling below this range. More
Atypical and Ambitious: The European Silicon Valley
No. 61, Sep.-Oct. 2026 The “Steinäcker” area, in the north of Heilbronn and south of the A6. To the west, on the other side of Grundäckerstrasse, is Fleischwaren Heilbronn, one of the largest meat processing plants for the Schwarz Group, owner of Kaufland and Lidl. To the east, the Neckar River and the city’s thermal power plant. From Grundäckerstrasse, tractors and seeders turn towards the nearby fields. The area was and still is predominantly used for agriculture, but now 23 hectares – the equivalent of about 42 football fields – have been cleared of vegetation to prepare the construction site. On a fence, the typical announcement: “This is where IPAI is built”. The sequel, perhaps, more atypical and as ambitious as possible: “The future Silicon Valley of Europe”. More
Ministries of Truth to Purge Marketplaces of Lies?!
No. 61, Sep.-Oct. 2026 Truth has always been treated either as a hypocritical or a hyperventilated “something”. Beginning with this inconvenient truth, teaming up with Ștefan-Dominic Georgescu, Georgiana Camelia Georgescu and Vlad I. Roșca, we explored precisely the dilemma stated from the title of this small by-product of a larger essay published in issue 73/2026 of the scientific journal Amfiteatru Economic: “The Enemy of My Enemy Is (Not) My Friend: A More-Than-Economic Inquiry into Fighting Private Fake News with Public Propaganda.” For who can dare the fact that everyone invokes the truth, yet fewer genuinely seek it, and fewer still are willing to bear all the consequences of finding it. Error, illusion, fraud, deception, manipulation and propaganda, by contrast, have long enjoyed a considerable competitive advantage: they are often cheaper, more appealing, more comforting and, at times, more profitable. More
Readiness in the Age of Permanent Compromise
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Living in a world of constant cyber threats has become such a routine condition of modern life that most of us have stopped asking what it actually demands of us. The phrase itself has calcified into a rhetorical tic, invoked in conference keynotes and ministerial statements alike, somewhere between a warning and a shrug. Everyone agrees the threat is constant. Far fewer agree on what a society, a company, or a government owes itself in response, beyond spending more on firewalls and hoping the next headline belongs to somebody else. More
Diplomacy in Orbit: The New Race for Space Resources and Sovereignty
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The 1967 Outer Space Treaty was written for a world in which no private company was a serious actor beyond the atmosphere. It says, in its second article, that outer space cannot be subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by use, or by occupation. Nearly sixty years later, that single sentence sits underneath a space economy the treaty’s drafters could not have imagined: one that the World Economic Forum and McKinsey expect to grow from $630 billion in 2023 to $1.8 trillion by 2035, expanding at roughly twice the pace of global GDP. Supply chains, food production, state-funded defence, retail, and digital communications are set to generate more than 60% of that growth. The treaty’s silence on who, if anyone, may own a mined asteroid or a bucket of lunar water has stopped being an academic curiosity and become the terrain on which the major space powers now compete. More
The End of Innocent Interdependence
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Perhaps one of the mistakes of the past few decades was not that we believed too much in globalization, but that we spent too much time looking at the glass as half full. And we had good reasons to do so. Trade created prosperity, investment crossed borders, and global production chains connected economies that once had little reason to depend on one another. We thus arrived at a seductive conclusion: the more we stood to gain together, the more we stood to lose apart. Interdependence was supposed to make rivalry too costly to remain rational. More
US Tariffs and the Strategic Responses of China, the EU, and Japan
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 International trade relations between the four biggest economic powers – the European Union, the United States, Japan, and China – have changed significantly in recent years, as an escalation of tariffs turned into trade war confrontations, particularly those initiated by the US. The EU, Japan, and China, three of the US’s major trading partners, all had to decide how to respond. China chose to retaliate against the US, the EU responded through calibrated countermeasures that matched the value of the US tariffs, and Japan relied on negotiation to reach an agreement with the US. Although the three economies faced the same external pressure, their responses differed according to their trade dependencies and strategic interests. More
The National Bank and Trust in the Leu
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Although the statement may sound abstract, money is the foundation of modern economic systems and an essential element in the decisions made by consumers, firms, and financial intermediaries. It is the means through which households and businesses earn income, purchase goods and services, save, invest, pay social security contributions and property and personal insurance premiums, extend and receive credit, while financial markets allocate capital to finance economic activity. More
Babson’s Early Warning: Reassessing a Neglected Voice in the History of Economic Thought
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 The Great Depression of the 1930s is often portrayed as an event that caught the economic and financial establishment entirely by surprise. Yet Roger Ward Babson – frequently described as a precursor to contemporary crisis forecasters such as Nouriel Roubini – issued a remarkably explicit warning on 5 September 1929, at the National Business Conference. He cautioned that a “crash” was imminent, pointing to factory closures, rising unemployment, and “a serious decline in business activity.” His intervention came at a moment when Irving Fisher, the distinguished Yale economist whose name is associated with the Fisher equation, the Fisher theorem, and the Fisher effect, continued to argue that although stock prices might undergo some downward adjustment, nothing “in the nature of a crash” was foreseeable. Even on 21 October 1929, just days before the dramatic collapse, Fisher referred merely to “a slight shake‑out in some of the more marginal circles of the stock market.” More
Romania, Shortest Working Life Among EU Member States
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 Romania has the shortest working life among EU Member States, according to data published by Eurostat for last year. With a value of 32.7 years, our country ranked last in this respect, after Italy (33.0 years) and Bulgaria (34.6 years). By contrast, in seven EU countries, the average expected duration of working life is 40 years or more: the Netherlands (44.0 years), Sweden (43.4), Denmark (42.6), Estonia (41.5), Ireland (40.7), Germany (40.2) and Finland (40.1). More
A Missing Violet Piece
No. 60, Jul.-Aug. 2026 We may well be approaching an important moment for Romanian football: the possible return of Politehnica Timișoara to the top flight. After years spent trudging through the mud of the lower leagues, the white-and-violets have risen from adversity with remarkable endurance. Backed with increasing determination by the Polytechnic University of Timișoara, the city’s flagship football institution has gradually reclaimed the values, identity, and spirit that have always made it worthy of the highest stage. More
