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“Sense and Sensibility”: Forward-Looking Back
No. 57, Jan.-Feb. 2026 The year 2025 can be understood economically not only through its conjunctural indicators, but also through the fertile tension between “sense” and “sensibility”, remarkable, in their distilled, essentialized embodiments, as science and art. By the way, we just celebrated a quarter of a millennium since the birth of Jane Austen, the author-global-phenomenon, who treated and titled, in her debut novel (Sense and Sensibility), the intellect-affection duality, active in each of us and in all our societies. Beyond routine-becoming boom-bust cycles, there is an “exceptional economy”, in which value is not generated linearly, but through ruptures at the level of clichés and taboos. The process is not always happy – the “brain” conceives evil, and the “heart” does not thwart rage. However, science/Truth and art/Beauty – with a quasi-quantum shrewdness – converge in the compass of the Good. More
Colonies and Freedom: Why Some Flourish and Others Fail
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 A brief scrutiny into the living conditions of former colonial nations reveals a perplexing motif: today, nations that abound in resources prized in the past lag behind initially agrarian countries that showed little promise. Economists Kenneth Sokoloff and Stanley Engerman find such contrasts between British offshoots like Jamaica and the United States and French settlements like Canada and Haiti. Even Argentina, whose name captures the original belief that it was lush with silver, was relatively barren compared to its Spanish neighbours, which are presently less developed. The two economists surmount this paradox by observing that regions with a high and immediate productive potential – where, for example, coffee and sugar cane plantations were instituted – are also the places where the highest inequality installed. A thin elite, formed predominantly of settlers, that was solely interested in exporting the harvested commodities back home, concentrated almost the entirety of wealth, with little distribution to lower echelons. This class perpetuated its privileges by shaping institutional arrangements to its advantage, holding to the reins of power and prohibiting cultivators from owning property or selling produce, without conceding any rights. While regimes periodically changed, and elites were replaced, the practices of predecessors continued as new rulers faced little pressure to conduct reforms, leading to inequality that remained puzzlingly persistent up to recent times. More
Bucharest-Ilfov Region, European Leader in Work Intensity but Encircled by Poverty
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 The capital region of Romania is the European leader in work intensity, according to data presented by Eurostat for 2024. While 7.9% of people in the EU lived in a household with very low work intensity, the lowest shares among EU regions were in the capital regions of Bucharest-Ilfov in Romania (0.6%), Bratislavský kraj in Slovakia (0.8%) and Warszawski stołeczny in Poland (1.1%). More
The Evolution of Money and Payment Systems
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 In the modern era, money and payment systems have been characterized by the use of official currency (banknotes and coins, cash), issued by the central bank, as well as private currency (scriptures, account money), created by commercial banks by establishing demand deposits and issuing credit cards and other financial instruments. Payment systems that have emerged recently – such as, for example, Alipay, WeChat, Venmo or PayPal – are based on a new financial technology (fintech), but are still linked to bank deposits and credit cards. As a result, these new systems constitute an evolution, not a revolution, as bitcoin supporters claim. More
Turning from 3 to 4 Seas – Greece’s Gamble on 3SI
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 3SI’s transformation from a CEE cooperation framework into a broader regional platform reached a pivotal moment with Greece’s accession as its 13th member during the 2023 Bucharest Summit. This expansion, which literally added a fourth sea to the initiative’s geographic scope, represents more than symbolic growth, it signals a strategic recalibration that has proven mutually beneficial for both Athens and the evolving regional architecture. More
Unfinished Poems and Eternal Myths: Hungary ‘54 and Holland ‘74
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 I have not lived through Hungary 1954 or Holland 1974, yet I feel them more deeply—perhaps more vividly—than anything I’ve personally witnessed or endured in my decades as a football fan (which started with USA ‘94 and England ‘96). Football thrives on myths. Immortal stories, some achingly painful, like those two etched in the sport’s soul. Both defied nature, logic, the very order of things. More
The Cost of Corruption
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 The “National Defence Strategy for the Country for the Period 2025-2030”, recently adopted by Parliament, considers that a major vulnerability for Romania’s national security is corruption. It constitutes a serious risk for national security, as it weakens state institutions, affects the economy and erodes citizens’ trust in each other and in the democratic political system. More
The Lighthouse Effect – How Romania Can Beam Energy Across Europe
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 For centuries, the Black Sea has been a vital crossroads between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Today, renewed geopolitical turbulence and the discovery of vast energy resources are turning the region into a sea of opportunity, especially for Romania. More
The Amfiteatru Economic Journal and the Collective Dimension of Intellectual Friendship
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 Since September 1999, when, emerging from a circle of intellectuals from Buzău (academics, journalists, and economists), and at the initiative of Professor Sandu Costache and Professor Vasile Dinu, the Amfiteatru Economic journal was founded within the University College of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies in Buzău, until October 2025, nearly 26 years have passed. Let us call them “the first 26”. More
Pluralism or Prestige? Why Economics Still Needs the Courage to Talk to Itself
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 Academic disciplines, like nations, cultivate myths about their origins. Economics especially. Some say it was born from rational choice. Others swear by spontaneous order. Some invoke institutions, others values. Each camp writes its own genealogy; each believes the plot finds its resolution in itself. Yet if there is one lesson that social sciences should have learned by now, it is this: intellectual monocultures are lethal. A discipline does not collapse because it disagrees – it collapses because it stops disagreeing. More
![Responses to Science and the Industrial Order, 1914-1950 [Part II]](http://www.themarketforideas.com:443/img/w-315/h-0/images/articles/2099/01/Current Issue/responses-to-science-and-the-industrial-order-1914-1950-part-ii-a1065.jpg)
Responses to Science and the Industrial Order, 1914-1950 [Part II]
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 Modern technology invests political and other organizations with the means to increasingly organize all variables which impinge upon their operation. The need to economize an organization’s activities, due to a condition of insufficient means and material, motivates an effort to secure greater control over those variables on behalf of the organization’s presumed interests. This article – the second of two parts – is drawn from the second part of a paper written in 1971, which was used as the second chapter of my 1974 M.A. thesis, The Methodical Conquest: Perceptions of the Impact of Modern Technology on Society. It focuses on ideas put forward by writers from 1910-1950. More
The Prospects of the GCC-EU Bilateral Partnership
No. 56, Nov.-Dec. 2025 In 2021, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) format celebrated forty years after the rulers of the six Gulf Arab states (Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia) met on May 25, 1981, at the InterContinental Abu Dhabi to attend the first GCC summit. More
