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From the Queen to the Tsar: on Trump’s Travels to Europe
An eventful week passed from July 12 to 17 as US President Donald Trump made two high-profile visits to Europe: one to the United Kingdom where he met with the British monarchy and government officials, and one to Helsinki where he met with Russian President, Vladimir Putin. These events occurred in a complicated geopolitical context: on the one hand, it appears we are witnessing a paradigm shift in US-EU relations, with increasingly divergent viewpoints on a number of key issues, most notably security in Europe’s Eastern flank and the Middle East; on the other hand, the suspicions of Russian involvement in the US elections in order to skew the votes in Trump’s favour are still alive in the eyes of certain US officials and part of the American electorate. More
Wisdom and Perseverance
These days mark the National Day celebrations as my country, the United Arab Emirates, strides forward with wisdom and perseverance, following in the footsteps of its founding father, the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, under the leadership of the President, HH Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan and his brothers their Highnesses the members of the Federal Supreme Council, Rulers of all the emirates, and through the hands of its loyal daughters and sons, pillars of the country’s growth and development, attaining developmental, cultural, economic, political and social achievements. More
The Market for Ideas: Supplying and Demanding Thoughtfulness
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
Pandemic: Of Words, Beasts, and the Gates of Peace
The world is facing a pandemic. People are looking for ways in which to minimize its effects and defeat the virus. Some are taking all the necessary precautions. Some are treating the situation lightly. Some are panicking. And some… are spreading false information and fueling animosity.Of fear and consequencesOne of the most dangerous issues during this time of crisis is misleading information. It changes people’s behavior, and people’s behavior is the only way in which the spread of this virus can be halted, and, vitally, the way in which society’s future after this pandemic can be guided, for better or worse. More
Charter Cities: Vernian Fantasy or Human Reality?
In 1895, the French novelist Jules Verne launched one of his many visionary ideas that either became reality or something future next generations are expected to achieve. Propeller Island follows the story of four musicians whose services are demanded on Standard Island, a floating fabricated island which is the home of Milliard City, the capital city inhabited only by remarkable and eccentric American millionaires and wealthy and adventurous Yankees who gathered into what can be considered a self-governing city-state. Notwithstanding the particular adventures of the quartet, the requirement of being a millionaire and certain technologies which facilitate life in the fictional Milliard City, the idea of an independent city, built from the ground up in this way, with its own jurisdiction and socio-economic system, may not be so ahead of our times. History is littered with city-states and there are some still existing today, but since all land outside of Antarctica is claimed by sovereign entities, it seems impossible to create such a city by design. Standard Island is still unrealizable for us and, while we applaud Verne’s imagination, we should turn to the closest form of organization that could resemble this island – that of the charter city. If fully realized, the masterminds behind this audacious project can end up with their own novel and with the satisfaction of having advanced the good of humanity, as the objective of charter cities is declared to be. More
“Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree”… I Forgot My History
It is strange for any of us who live in relatively free societies to picture oppression. It is probably why most of us have an insatiable desire for dystopian television productions. The hair raising, mind and heart stimulating stories take us to a place with which we are not familiar, a place which makes us wonder “what would I do in this situation?”. Many of us are quick to point out that we would always do the right thing. But, just as one can watch surfing on TV, believe it to be fun, and then hate its difficulty when they try it out themselves, TV productions, or even books, do not really test our stamina and mettle. Spectatorship is a sport filled with experts and critics, after all. More
Toward Understanding the Balkan Economic Thought (II)
The notes that follow are a preliminary summary of our observations and studies in the field of Balkan economies and economic thinking as well as of scholars engaged in the subject of economic traditions in the Balkan region. The main characteristics of economic thinking in the Balkans set forth below must not be regarded as established definitively but rather as the first approximation towards the elucidation of the Balkan type of economic thought (BET). More
Freedom Under Assail
For millennia, papers and books have been written about the essence and significance of human freedom. In these contributions, competing conceptions of freedom aimed to define the contest between liberty and power. Philosophers Plato and Hobbes, for example, thought that extensive or absolutist rule over society was compatible with their definition of freedom because, in their view, it would prevent society from plunging into violence or even chaos, which they perceived as more detrimental to freedom than a powerful state. Others, such as the 6th-century BCE Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu and the 16th-century Spanish scholastics, expressed and developed ideas consistent with the view of the father of modern political philosophy, John Locke, that freedom implies that an individual not “be subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his own” More
The NEET Tag and Intergenerational Existence on Labour Market
The challenge today is to analyse unemployment among young people from different generations in terms of understanding their values and attitudes, as well as their influence on the labour market.The labour force is an important factor of production, but we cannot say about work itself that it is a commodity like everything else, because it involves a man with a whole system of values and expectations that influence his individual decisions. More
Crossroad Years
Human beings are obsessed with identifying trends and motifs in the passage of historical ages and to personalize, even deify, their geographical cradles. From the very sages of cultures and civilization(s) to the common folk, it seems that every turn and twist of time might have a logic of its own, as every chunk of space is teeming with life in its particular rhythms. This craze prevails. It is “sustainable”. More
Will the Coronavirus Amplify the Role of the Government in the Economy?
A defining phenomenon for virtually the last hundred years is the expansion of state influence in all areas. The extreme was reached in the communist and fascist countries, where, under dictatorship, all freedoms were altered. In Western democracies, freedoms made progress, but the struggle between governments and markets to play the central role in managing the economy has sometimes resulted in serious disruptions of market freedom. The alteration occurred due to serious economic difficulties. The drastic limitation of the freedom of financial markets after the crisis of 1929-1933 is known. More recently, the economic and social difficulties that emerged after 2008 have been used by governments to limit the freedom of financial markets and to increase the state’s role in managing the economy. Will a severe recession caused by the coronavirus be an opportunity for a renewed strengthening of this trend? The concern for the principle of market freedom contained in this question could be seen as injudicious, as the functioning of the society seems to be dictated by the rapid resolution of various situations that appear to us as urgent. However, neglecting the principles in decision-making could be a way that may go unnoticed of moving to a type of society that we do not want. More
The Inconsistency of Biological Analogies in Economics
I often tend to use biological analogies either as a simple heuristic or an explanatory model in an analysis, or as a purely illustrative model in support of certain ideas by constructing argumentative structures. For instance, in an attempt to understand how the mechanism of import-export operations at the level of an economy works, I have associated this bidirectional mechanism with the sodium-potassium pump found in the plasma membrane of almost every human cell. But can such analogies actually be used in economics? Can we deal with complex phenomena in economics through such a reductionist approach as biological analogies or, conversely, biological metaphors are a consequence of the complementarity between economics and biology, designed to give rise to a new more complex field, such as evolutionary economics? Nevertheless, one thing is certain: there are reasons for the scepticism towards biological analogies, and the heuristic value of evolutionary biology for economics is still a matter for debate. More
