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The Impact of Russia’s Strategic Interest in the Black Sea Region on the Imbalance of the Russian Economy
March 6th, 2009, Geneva. In an attempt to boost the diplomacy between the two nations, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russian Minister Sergei Lavrov with a red button with the English word “reset” mis-translated into a Russian word meaning “overload”. The wrong translation proved to be a prediction for US – Russia relations for the years that followed. More
CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 1): Industrial Revolutions
Industrial Revolutions (IR) are manifestations of the delightful concept of “creative destruction” (J. Schumpeter). This means destroying the useless as a force of creation for the useful, not vice versa, that is being creative in destroying. Destruction qua creation is about capitalising and making the most of resources, whereas creativity in destruction sooner resembles blunt vandalism (war, for instance, is creative in its nihilistic annihilation). Apparently, an IR is like TV: it isn’t necessary to understand how it works, what matters is to have the remote at the ready. However, some economists and historians continue to fiddle with the explanatory and predictive mechanism of a phenomenon that has already reached its fourth generation. Thus, for IR 1.0 (manufactured by the British), the main contributing factors identified were cheap energy and somewhat improved wages, coupled with metropolitan freedoms and the extortion of colonies, or perhaps the establishment of a general climate of “bourgeois equality” (D. McCloskey), where the ideas of common people could be expressed and experimented with free from the tyranny of statutes. Debates remain vivid here. More
Should the State Adjust the Market? The Case of ROBOR
The duel between state and market is an old story in the debates regarding the best way to run society. Of course, there are both extremists and moderates in this debate. I am not interested in covering the large array of opinions, but in exploring the essence of the issue. More precisely, I am interested in whether the state has a legitimate role in adjusting the macroeconomic variables generated by the free market and, to a finer degree, to see if we have thresholds or intensities or other contingencies in accepting or requesting the state's intervention in the market (viewed as a free market). More
The Economic Consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian War
The Russian invasion in Ukraine marked a new war in Europe, which started four months ago and whose end is not yet in sight. The longer the conflict lasts, the larger the threats to world peace will become. The Western world’s reaction was to apply severe economic sanctions, to impose penalties, mainly as deterrence. Even though it is too early to see the end of this war, some economic consequences are already visible.When Ukraine was invaded by the Russian army, the world’s economy was already in a huge stagflation, not comparable to the one from 1973-1974. This economic shock was strong enough to impact the demand in different sectors: fossil energy (oil, gas and coal), food (corn), chemical fertilizers (based on potassium and nitrogen) and industrial raw materials (nickel, titanium). Those goods accounted for a good percentage of the exports of Russia and Ukraine, and the war led to an increase in the world prices for those goods. More
Universal Basic Income – A Challenge for Social and Economic Policies
The purpose of this article is to draw the reader's attention, perhaps even initiate a debate on the Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a policy instrument for economic and social policies. It is not a comprehensive scientific study of all current problems, rather an introduction to research into a possible revolutionary social change, correlated with the fourth industrial revolution. In terms of economic growth, income inequality and the possible effects on the labour market, two important issues need to be taken into account. UBI establishes a direct causal relationship with human life. The revolutionary aspect comes from eliminating economic and legal causation between income and labour. Its global implementation or a differentiated implementation at the level of all states would require new ways of individual thinking, new systems of economic and social thinking, new institutions or even states. So far, some approaches to the concept are known, especially in the form of social experiments, different in size and coverage, that have attracted the attention of researchers and theorists, as well as of political decision makers. More
CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 0): New World Orders
When we speak of “order” where the international system is concerned (international relations, to be precise), the discussion gives the impression of value-neutrality, in the same vein as the scientific approach to a problem. However, the minute we enclose this word in the syntagma “new world order”, there is a distinct feeling of veering into vain gossip and idle chatter. Thus, there are conspiracies, occult and confined to tenebrous spaces, away from common decency, standing opposite the rigorous, refined academic thinking that inhabits the halls of universities. Such rhetorical pedantry cannot, however, rule out the raw fact that human society, beyond the intensiveness and extensiveness of the (hierarchical and/or anarchical) relations between humans, seeks order (including “novel” and “worldly” ones), and not just any kind of order, but that order in which we are creative, proactive architects instead of passive artefacts. To this end, we employ tangible or symbolic means, be they transparent or opaque, genuine or deceitful. And politicians, who enact this (dis)order as per their (ir)responsibility, are far from being accused of a lack of ambidexterity (as they are naturally born “on the one hand… and on the other hand…” cynical calculators). More
Simion Mehedinti and the Romanian Geopolitics
We have the privilege and pleasure of inviting the Romanian readers of The Market for Ideas, Saturday, February 23, 2019, 13:30, at Romexpo, Pavilion B2, Stand 261, to a brief meeting with the name of the visionary geographer and geo-political scientist Simion Mehedinţi, the one who:• wrote about the “United States of Europe” as early as 1909, using systematically this syntagm in several studies and conferences, four decades before the European Coal and Steel Community, the future European Union, was born;• wrote about the “corporate state” as early as 1920, long before the phenomenon of globalization penetrated the Romanian space;• wrote about the “international aviation for world peacekeeping” as early as 1927 (in the famous work “Le pays et le peuple roumain”), anticipating NATO, which will be born two decades later. More
The Future of the Cultural Economy: Ideological Assumptions, Technological Breakthroughs and Ecological Constraints
The “economic” and “cultural” traits of human existence are brought together by the objective fact of subjective values (that incite our sought ends) and valuations (that inform our chosen means). While “cultural economy” is that interplay of activities related to producing/distributing/consuming spiritualized materiality, “cultural economics” allows us to view/review/preview all of the above. Blamed for obsessively “pricing the priceless” and for stuffing artistry into “production functions”, cultural economics still has many paths open for scrutiny, yet with epistemic prudence and prowess. More
Fostering Recovery through Metaverse Business Modelling
The past years’ uncertainties and pressures resulted from the pandemic, alongside new developments in social technology, 5G, cloud computing, augmented and virtual reality, generated the perfect setting for the Metaverse to gain traction. Several companies found there’s a critical need to redefine the work environment and started exploring the Metaverse concept beyond the entertainment sector. Thus, new tools for collaboration and data visualization within a digital shared space are being created, aiming for a fully immersive interaction between the virtual and the physical worlds within the next few years. While still in its early developments, the Metaverse can be seen as an extension of the social media platforms, and an opportunity to leverage remote work even further. More
Ersatz Liberals (Part I)
(Too) many of today’s politicians in Romania claim an intellectual and/or moral affiliation to different political ideologies or schools. Ignoring the fact that such a claim resonates with the voters if and only if the population reaches an average level of political sophistication (or even general culture) at the minimum level required for such complex issues, the problem is whether those claims are justified, i.e., morally legitimate. Of course, we have here two ‘sources’ of information in solving the question: a) the politicians’ declarations; b) the facts, that is, the political decisions and actions (either as acts or abstentions) of the politicians in question. More
The Earthly Algorithms of the Heavenly Affairs
The papal institution opens up the road to redemption for more than 1.200 million Roman-Catholics – that is for the so-called “Western Christianity” –, according to Vatican statistics. Through its doctrine of closeness to God, far and away from any canonical schisms, the Holy See inspires all Christianity, pervasively radiating to all hemispheres, over other distinct cults as well. The fact is that to be able to order the immanent chaos while indulging your mind to wander with the transcendent is a tough penance. Even if you have adhered to your faith wholeheartedly, the spiritual stakes were and are under assail by the modern-version-of-Canaan capitalist hedonism (now called insatiable consumerism), by the anti-social socialism (now dead, but still not buried), and by “welfare-warfare” statism (now, as ever, trying to divide and conquer, and command and control). The aforesaid progenitors of the human “fallen existence” have declared foreclosure on the most valuable assets of the life we lead, all except for the “perceivable physical” biases. The pitfalls looming ahead of all our mundane trespasses, entailed by the very nature of the interaction with our own kind, tarnished as that may be, are lurking as far as the eye can see, even what we now call in vernacular the supreme “consultancy” and “governance”: namely, the one covering the “salvation of our souls”. All human beings, with all their burning passions, are, since the beginning of times, fumbling in the dark to find their way to reach Him. And the mission is not easier even for His most faithful servants. As the supreme pontiffs, the Bishops of Rome, are (supposed to be). More
Inflation: Old Wine in New Bottles
Inflation is rapidly rising at present across most of the world. This happens in the aftermath of a first pandemic year during in which the fears of deflation that have characterised the decade following the 2008 financial crisis resurfaced in earnest. The new inflation wave is commonly blamed on the pandemic supply shock to global supply chains, as well as on the negative effect of Russia’s war in Ukraine, particularly with regard to grain prices. These aggregate supply rationales are real and correct as far as they go, but insufficient to explain the phenomenon. The pandemic affected both supply and demand, whence sustained efforts in large consumer-driven economies such as the United States to preserve the latter. Less financially constrained consumers accumulated large cash balances at the height of the pandemic which have been reinjected into the economy since the most draconian restrictions have been gradually lifted. And excessively cautious monetary policies, oriented towards recovering lost growth from years past, have reinforced the inflationary effect of post-pandemic spending. More
