Rubrics » Bridging News
The Place of Football in the Political Culture of the Twentieth-Century British Working Class
Today, football is one of the world’s most popular cultural phenomena. But in order to understand how this ball game has managed to transcend virtually all physical and cultural boundaries, we must take a quick look at its origins – namely, the emergence of a recognised national sport of British workingmen, reflecting their aspirations for social inclusion, political empowerment, and fairness. More
Pleas for Trade Remain Trendy in the Midst of Globalization
As an economist, I share the belief that, when it comes to realistic alternative systems of social organization, we always choose between the state and the market, between coercion and private property, bureaucratism and entrepreneurship. Thus, depending on the criterion of property rights – the most important, after all –, economic systems can only be either the free market (or the system of private ownership of the means of production), or socialism (or the system of public, state, “non-private” ownership of the means of production), or interventionism (the system in which certain sectors – or certain options for the use/allocation of scarce resources – are managed in the private sector, while others in the public one)[1] More
The Great Reset: Rethinking the Future of Work
In retrospect, the year 2020 will certainly be seen as the Great Reset. This theme is one that have been echoed repeatedly from different quarters. It is almost certain that post-Covid, the world of work will no longer be geographically bound. More
Transatlantic Exchange: Introducing Francis Lieber
It is remarkable how quickly America was transformed from an isolated agrarian republic in 1800 into a hegemonic industrial power by 1900. Intellectual and cultural changes that began taking root in the early half of the century yielded a cornucopia of new fruits in the latter half, including tax-supported public libraries, the rise of the scientific professions, and German-style graduate education. The impact of democracy, nationalism, industrialization, the reform crusades, sectionalism, urbanization, commerce, and immigration together gave new urgency to Crevecoeur’s old question: “What is this new man, the American?” More
Tackling Climate Change and the COVID-19 Pandemic Crisis
The issue of climate change has been a global concern in recent years. Based on the theory that global warming is caused by human activity, in the context of industrialization in the last century, governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations, international actors, have actively engaged in an unprecedented effort to mitigate the negative effects of greenhouse gases and to reduce emissions. More
How Spare Time Legislation Impacts the Workforce in the West
With today’s modern world being as complex and susceptible to constant change as it is, it is safe to assume that few people, if any, would be able to envision a lifestyle without some basic form of balance. Said balance is sure to include a set of principles, values and rules within which our existence is not only shaped, but also sustained and enabled, while maintaining predictability, order and continuity in our social and economic lives. More
Piketty-Saez v. Lakner-Milanovic: Visions on Income Inequality
The issue of labor in contemporary Economics and society is a very interesting one. First of all, the rapid changes such as the accelerated evolution of technology and the emergence of new economic paradigms have radically influenced the vision on labor. Secondly, with all of these changes, some positive, labor still faces many issues, some of which are very old, such as forced labor or even slavery – even now, with its contemporary forms – and some which are a direct result of modernization, such as low job matching efficiency or welfare systems. These are related to another set of problems, which go hand in hand with those of labor, namely inequality issues, especially those of an economic nature. More
Five “Good” Reasons to Hate Economics
We live in a world where hating something is trendy. Some hate Hawaiian Pizza, some others hate the rich, some hate immigrants, some people hate rap music, etc. Some people hate economics. What is economics about? I would refer to it as a social science that studies the economy from a well-defined perspective – that resources are scarce, that choices must be made in using them, that most of the time people use some thinking in making these choices, and that the market mechanism helps carry out this resource allocation. Thus, economics is first and foremost about the functioning of the market economy, and about the role of prices in allocating resources. If one wants to get an idea on what economists do study, he/she might look to the table of contents top-5 journals of the field, including the American Economic Review and Econometrica; the collection of Schools Brief in the Economist is also representative of the “hot topics” in today economics. One might be surprised by the methodological homogeneity of the field. Econ-haters will probably disagree with my definition, since when you really hate something, you sometimes end up by denying its existence. I agree, this can raise some logical problem (should I hate something that does not exist?), yet hate is about emotions, not about logical thinking. More
Deciphering Timelessness through Ephemeral Numbers
I first made the acquaintance of Professor Cezar Mereuță in the most natural way a young novice economist can meet a master of the profession: as a name on a textbook. In the Professor’s case, his exposure to “the market for ideas” has always been deliberately bimodal: both in the realm of academia and in economic mass-media. I, too, have chosen to heed this tenet of dualism, for although scientific truth is sublime, its social value is only apparent once it is communicated: the “economy” of (the economic) science is inevitably a “mixed” one, its nature being both “public” (in the sense of its popularisation, not politicisation) and “private” (in the sense of being responsible for the appropriateness of one’s terminology and the adequacy of one’s methodology). Among economists, discussions can veer into opaqueness, yet it is clear that disseminating the fruits of economic research via mass-media has always been a goal of Professor Mereuță, for the sake of civility and the civil population at large. I worked alongside him for roughly twelve years, first as a reader, then as editor, foreword author and, lastly, co-author. More
IP, Fire, and Other Dangerous Things
Why is there more money being invested in the development of (video) games than in research of new drugs and medicine? Well, the claim underlying the question may be overblown. But there is evidence for the gaming industry being larger than the movie or sports entertainment sectors.[1] There is also evidence suggesting a surge of innovation in gaming and a simultaneous decline of innovation in the pharma sector.[2] This begs the question: What does all this have to do with intellectual property or IP? More
Romania’s Loss of Competitiveness Compared to Hungary and Poland
Romania has improved its competitiveness compared to the Czech Republic and Bulgaria at the regional level in recent years but lost ground compared to Croatia, Poland and Hungary, according to data released by Eurostat. With an index calculated at 96.77 (2010 = 100), we were slightly better than our neighbor from the South of the Danube (97.32), with the note that a lower value shows an improvement in competitiveness. More
The Advantages of an Adequate Minimum Wage
We find today, in the specialty literature, analyses and studies that focus on the quality of life, and these frame the concept of wellbeing as concerning the individual and referring to a state. In these works, the semantic features of the concept of wellbeing are formulated as follows: wellbeing refers to the person (the individual) – it considers the individual himself, not a certain social-historical individual; wellbeing refers to a state (static profile) – it is a “photograph” of the components of a state vector considered appropriate, representative, relevant and practicable for researching such a concept; wellbeing refers to a moment – the establishment of empirical values of the state vector that refers to the individual, at a certain moment. This is observed, from a theoretical and philosophical point of view, both at the level of the individual, as individual wellbeing with a strong idiosyncratic accent, and at the level of society as social welfare with an objective character. The concept of wellbeing remains in our attention also in this period when we attach great importance to individual safety issues, and I am referring here to health issues. More
