TheMarketForIdeas

Not Too Young to Run

Emmanuel Olusegun Stober

Leadership is influence, while influence is quality and substance. Looking at the age reduction bill, and how that will reshape Nigeria’s political space, Nigerians would need to ask themselves, is the plan to kick out the old people because they are outdated, and replace them with the young ones because they are perceived to have the capacity to do better?  More

The Market Economy – Between Self-Testability and State Intervention

Emil Dinga

In principle, a market economy is understood as that institutional structure of a society which allows the self-regulation of the economic system. It should be noted that the freedom of the market is not sufficient to either ensure or guarantee such a self-regulation. Despite the fundamentalism of the libertarians, there are many cases (not accidentally, but necessarily) when the free market fails to self-regulate. I want to insist on the idea that such a structural incapacity should not be interpreted from a moral point of view, but objectively (in such a perspective, the so-called market failures are well known). I do not discuss here the issue of the free market failures, but a larger issue: could we really speak about an area of social (or economic) activity where the state is “allowed” to normatively intervene and, correlatively, about a “sacred” area of the social (or economic) activity where the state is “not allowed” to normatively intervene?  More

Drifting Away

Vlad I. Roșca

Summers in Germany are usually temperate. The humid winds from the West and from the North keep temperatures at a decent average, letting people enjoy sunny, but not torrid days, while also safeguarding some vital sales of the traditional beer. Away from the proverbial workaholism, Germans can also find their ways for letting off steam. Some of them do it in the ‘Biergartens’ of the ‘Vaterland’, while most of the others jump on the plane to Mallorca to work on a tan which is unavailable back home. “Little Germany”, as Mallorca has come to be known, offers cheese cubes, roast pork (to put it ‘simply’: “Schweinebraten”) or apple salads next to traditional paellas in what has become a ‘saxon-iberic’ mix meant at attracting tourists. More

Nudges – The Paradigm of the Oriented Free Choice

Gabriela-Mariana Ionescu

Referring to the extremes of economic behavior we can say that they are: a) the imperative norm and b) the absolute autonomy (we refer here to the individual freedom, which does not take into account the free choice of others). Focusing on the concept of freedom, it represents, according to Jonge (in his book “Rethinking Rational Choice Theory”), the autonomy of desires and not freedom of action. In Rawls’ opinion, freedom is first in the hierarchy of interests, higher interests becoming normative.  More

A Strategy of Subversion

Steven Alan Samson

Half a century ago the German sociologist Helmut Schelsky succinctly dissected the political strategy of left-wing radicals in West Germany and the West generally. His essay, “The New Strategy of Revolution,” remains one of the best summaries of an ongoing strategy of cultural subversion.Directed towards the “conquest of the system,” the revolutionary strategy depicted by Schelsky, which was inspired by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci and implemented by Rudi Dutschke, is premised on destroying the most significant features of political democracy. It bids to root out the fundamental political and social ideals and the corresponding patterns of life of the major groups within the system by discrediting the values, intellectual outlook, and institutional foundations of these groups, their ideals, and even the most ordinary interactions of their members. A useful comparison may be drawn with what Thomas Farr calls “China’s Second Cultural Revolution,” where Xi Jinping’s government controls the commanding heights and is endeavoring to introduce a utilitarian, soft-power “social credit” system to fine-tune its control. More

Making History While Snacking: Microwave Meets Marketplace

Bianca Petre, Alexandra Firescu

World War II, going on between 1939 and 1945, was one of the bloodiest confrontations in the world. It cannot be overstated how much this conflict changed the course of history, for better (if anything good can be related to wars) or worse. For instance, many of our modern inventions directly originate in the war period.  More

Democracy at Play – or at Risk – in America

Tanja Porčnik

In democratic societies, elections are determined by the vote of the people. The democratic process in the United States elected President Trump in 2016. Four years later, after all legal votes are counted and verified, the same process may require that he peacefully transfer that power to someone else. Clearly, from now until the inauguration on January 20, 2021 it will take many state election procedures and court battles in key battleground states to clear up all uncertainties about this election’s popular vote. The democratic process relies not only on the belief of the citizens in it, but also upon their patience with procedures that are comprehensive and time-consuming. Accordingly, President Trump might have jumped the gun when he claimed, “If you count the legal votes, I easily win”. More

Jeffrey D. Sachs, to Talk in Romania on Sustainable Development

The Bucharest University of Economic Studies welcomes distinguished and world-renowned economist Jeffrey D. Sachs for a talk on sustainable development on March 8, 2018. He has been invited by the Romanian Government and will be a keynote speaker at a conference on sustainable development organized by the Department for Sustainable Development. More

The Three Kinds of Money

Emil Dinga

Recent polemics linked to the fate of the so-called “2nd pension pillar” in Romania (the obligatory privately-run pension, as opposed to the optional private one) has brought to mind an older issue regarding the nature – public or private – of money. Since one of the questions raised by the mentioned discussion is just the nature of the money collected by the state and transferred automatically to the preferred obligatory private pension fund, I will underline some considerations in this article. More

Equality, Justice and Other Nonsense

Henrique Schneider

There are different conceptions of “equality”, and “justice”, but only some of these conceptions are commensurate with the institutions of individual liberty, private property, consensual contractualism and personal accountability. This essay argues that classical-liberal thinkers like Adam Smith and John Locke offered superior conceptions of equality and justice than much of the contemporary discourse does. This essay claims that the contemporary use of equality and justice is nonsensical; whereby nonsense is the absence of meaningful denotation and the intentional hiding of subjective normativity.  More

Rebuilding Economics: Propaedeutic Assertions

Emil Dinga

In the last decades, the economic discipline in its hypostasis of Economics (i.e. positive economic theory) was, and also currently is, subject to radical and massive criticism not only from the non-economists (including physicists!), but also from notorious economists, including Nobel Prize winners. The perspectives of such criticisms are very different, starting from the conceptual bases, focusing on the methodological framework, and ending with the predictive potential. Of course, although the initial criticisms were focused on the mechanical ways of economic thinking (by taking over the Newtonian paradigm in physics), other points came to the forefront in recent years: the required interdisciplinary character of Economics, the issue of truth in the economic field (in a wider sense: in the social field), the required evolutionary nature of Economics, because of the evolutionary nature of the society, and even the requirement of a new formalism in Economics based on something other than differential equations (which do not indicate the dynamics – i.e., the causality – in the economic process) and so on.  More