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Technocracy and Millenarism: (Bad) Ideas Never Die
As the U. S. President John F. Kennedy once stated, “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. Ideas have endurance without death.” Maybe paradoxically, this is especially the case of bad ideas. The fact that some honest social scientists live with the impression that they succeed in evaporating a bad idea or argument usually ends with the condensation of such an idea into another form or recipe. More
Innovation’s Feet of Clay
Constant technological improvement is the fixed idea of the modern world, spoken of as a self-evident truth or an axiom in what has become the closest thing to religious revelation that many people get to experience. Not only is technology improving but, in many ways, it is also accelerating, leading to concepts such as Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity “within our lifetimes”, when computers become smarter than people and technological development becomes unmoored from human inspiration or effort. This might be the case and, in truth, ideas to the contrary have been proven wrong ever since the apocryphal episode of the Commissioner of the US Patent Office, Charles Duell, suggesting its closure on account of everything having already been invented by 1899. However, evidence is mounting that the rate of true scientific and technological advancement has only been maintained through the allocation of greater and greater resources, both financial and human. More
Trump’s Transatlantic Impaired Partnership
The two shores, and lands, of the North Atlantic – the Eastern and the Western ones – are subject to a movement where, metaphorically speaking, the economy tries to beat the geography, while politics seem to team up either with the first one or with the second. The name of the game is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP –, the famously hard-to-get deal between the US and EU, whose first official round of talks began in 2013, with the intention to bring about lower trade tariffs and to reduce regulatory barriers that make exchanges between the US and the EU more costly than they should. Geophysics literally distances America from Europe, the orogenesis of the Mid-Atlantic ridge pushing aside the tectonic plates where “the new world” and “the old continent” sit. More
Failed Acts of Speech, a Challenge for Democracy
“Each electoral cycle is a new opportunity to identify failed acts of speech, both inter- and intra-generational, and communication can have deep connotations”, believe a number of Romanian academics, journalists and experts from various NGOs and think-tanks, gathered recently at the Dignitas Foundation in Bucharest to analyse the latest global and local events. Juxtapositions are always made in the Romanian public space, which is very well informed and connected to the West, through the extensive international cooperation in both public and private sectors, and through the Romanians studying in Western Universities, who then return with a more critical eye on society. More
Trump’s Infrastructure Blues
There is a phenomenon jokingly associated with Steve Jobs, called a “reality distortion field”, whereby he did not just happen to be right very often with regards to his products, but the Universe itself conspired to make him right, regardless of what he said when it comes to what the consumers want or need. A similar phenomenon has been observed with Donald Trump, ever since he announced his candidacy for the US Presidency. Some pundits have taken to calling it “Trump’s luck” and, were there any possible means for him to do so, the coincidences have been so “fortuitous” that one expects him to have arranged them himself. His announcement speech spoke about illegal immigrant criminals and was widely derided by the media for not bearing any relation to their preferred reality. More
The Belt and Road Initiative
Amid an accelerated economic growth, China has become one of the most important players on the global scene in the 21st century and a central element of the regional and world economy. China has experienced a rapid economic development, which has propelled it among the strongest economies in the world, and this trend was due to both economic reforms implemented since the 1980s and a change of perspective in its relations with other states. More
Starved of Elites
The staffing of the Trump Administration will always be its Achilles’ heel, from the lowest echelons of its 4,000 positions to be filled to the Cabinet level of the mandarins who decide many of the US Executive branch’s policies and their details. Regardless of the factual and moral truth in the matter of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s discussions with the Russian Ambassador and his report on the content of the discussion to his superiors, the political truth made his position untenable even for Trump at his most defiant. While public contention has reached new heights with the Trump Presidency, every new Administration has had its staff criticized, scrutinized, derided, lambasted or slandered until a stable and workable political formula could be found. More
The Initiative for Competitiveness proudly presents a look into the future high tech economy
The 1st of March is the first day of spring and is marked by numerous traditions. Please accept as our gift an invitation to a special event organized by INACO – “Inițiativa pentru Competitivitate” (The Initiative for Competitiveness) in collaboration with the International Business and Economics Faculty of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies and covered for a worldwide audience by The Market for Ideas magazine. It will take place on the 1st of March at 4:30 P.M. in the Robert Schuman Hall of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The topic of the conference is represented by the new facets of business and the economy under the rushing tide of technological development. More
The Future Is Already Here. It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
Science fiction author William Gibson coined the phrase in the title of this article in an interview with The Economist over a decade ago and his observation still stands. Automation and its physical sub-domain, robotization, are taking the world by storm. Automation stands for the reduction of human input in any process, though we will be referring mostly to economic processes. Labor saving devices and processes have been a mainstay of Western economic development since the Industrial Revolution, with their share of detractors, but labor elimination devices are increasingly more capable and more affordable, even for areas previously thought immune to automation. More
Marx & Spencer
The wordplay in the title blissfully suggests that mirth is a legitimate reaction to the connotations of a mundanely “hallowed” name. Phonetically, it insinuates an English apparel retailer, much appreciated by the in-crowd. Visually, there seems to be a “spelling” mistake. Obviously, it is just a caprice, of the same character as the caprices history slams in our faces; these caprices are (also) known as coincidences. They make up the tools based on which some individuals torment themselves to transform the historical fact into invariant lessons. Those individuals may be labelled “hasty” historians. And the most “arrogant” of them postulate with no remorse universal laws from past uniqueness. More
The World after Brexit and Trump
Come to Free Market Road Show 2017! The event is organized by Austrian Economics Center - Austria (AEC) and will host interventions from renowned libertarians thinkers and speakers like Andreq Bernstein and Barbara Kolm. Individual liberty is the undying dream of western civilization. State tyranny is the enemy of democracy. More
Aristotle and the Benefits of Moderation
Many times, when moving from the descriptive of “what is” to the prescriptive of “what ought to be”, it is necessary to appeal to a shared knowledge of a moral framework that imbues the ideas presented with values, concepts and interpretations that are scarcely universal, but rather grounded in one specific civilization and possibly one specific tradition. In his article in The Market for Ideas No. 2, “Blurred lines: Good vs. Good. Evil vs. Evil.”, Dragoș Tîrnăveanu crowned his analysis with a twist on the ancient Manichean (dualist) vision of a conflict of opposites – light versus dark, good versus evil. He analyzed the uncertainty of our modern age, in which an asymmetry of information and of values gives rise to morally ambiguous situations, which he termed as “Good vs. Good” and “Evil vs. Evil”. More
