Dumitru Miron

Economist, Professor, Ph.D., the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, President of the Romanian-American Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, Secretary General a.i. of the National Association of Romanian Exporters and Importers

Cyber-Cerberus and Hackers’ Hades

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Dumitru Miron

The creation of cyberspace may be perceived either as a benign addendum to the biblical Book of Genesis or as man’s fatal conceit making a virtual world mimicking the inherited one. Is it a smarter cover for the physical world – with its old-days and more predictable social life, economic cooperation, and power politics – or a digital hallucination – leaving us disturbed? The godfather of cyberspace is considered William Gibson. He invented the word, using it in his SciFi Burning Chrome story and Neuromancer novel. You do not have to be full-time scientific-fantasist to get the side effects of an avatar-world. An avatar-world will accordingly develop goods and bads that will transcend it and trespass it. Its goods will enhance the source realms, its bads will strike back in it, as happened in the world of www, Facebook, Wikileaks and US presidential campaign interfered by maleficent descendants of the “dark-side” soviets. More

Commercial Reflections for a Centennial Romania: Trading Abroad Adds to the Prosperity of a Nation, Albeit National Prosperity Shall Never Be Tradable

Dumitru Miron

In the history of a nation, its commercial relations with neighbouring countries or with those over the seas matter a great deal. Someone once said that, across centuries, the most common ways of interrelating between people were war and trade. Both activities have many advantages but also significant costs. History has shown that in the case of trade, the balance is tilted towards its benefits. Although they also participated in armed conflicts, most often against their will, the Romanians contributed to the history of Europe and the world especially by participating in cross-border trade. Who were their ancestors and what did they do? Who are their contemporaries, and most importantly what must they do? The answers to these questions rest on today’s youth, who are obliged to flesh them out and to better understand their past in order to become the main actors to bring about a positive change in the Romanian society. It is the authors’ hope that the work presented in article is going to contribute to the process of dealing with the various facets of the historical development of this nation, which has done well in the past and should take great pride in itself. More

Long Live Europe!

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Dumitru Miron

European Union remains one profoundly unaccomplished political project for too many reasons. Despite a continuous external growth, since the inception, and internal maturation, it was not able to fill entirely the “real estate” of the cultural habitat which – by both stretches of the mind and grace of geography – was and is considered to represent the whole (and holy) Europe: the Norwegians and the Swiss were not seduced by the “tender offer” Brussels displayed towards them, though they are solid parts of the continent’s historical trunk either in its “heroic” (the Viking expeditions by sea) or in its “settled” (Europe’s inland highly celebrated democracy) epochs. Also, EU struggles to digest and metabolise some of the Central and Eastern European new-comers, while the Western Balkans, with the residual nation-states of the ex-Yugoslavian failed multinational union, seem, with the notable exception of Croatia, so “estranged” from Europe. More

People’s Republic of Competitive Cooperation
Present China’s Silky Ties

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Dumitru Miron

China has a special geometry and geography of time, and whenever you touch its lands and breathe its epochs, you understand that the sizes and units of measure are different. When travelling to China, a foreigner cannot ignore the time-space continuum in which reigns the cosmopolitan-and-comradely cohabitation of apartment skyscrapers, sometime taller than their corporate cousins, pictures of hard-core communist planner Mao featuring on banknotes circulating in a market economy, workers and peasants equipped with much more than blunt sickles and hammers, apparatchiks and free spirits, mundane youngsters and flying shaolin monks. “To understand China’s last hundred years, see Shanghai. To understand China’s last thousand years, see Beijing. And to understand China’s last three thousand years, see Henan Province”, here is a good piece of advice for those who want to take the perfect tour of China. More

Romania’s Neighbourhoods:
An Exercise of Critical Thinking

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Dumitru Miron

At the township level, the “community spirit” is a function of knowledge, and proper action, about / towards people – as persons – and their places – or properties, either private or public. A community is defined equally by bonds and bounds, wisely informed and duly enforced, so that a neighbourly peace, not necessarily a heavenly harmony, will emerge and endure. In Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” there is a famous line – “Good fences make good neighbours” – suggesting the common sense truth that order among humans requires, much sooner than empathy or sympathy, an order “in rem”, with respect to their belongings, which are part and parcel of their personal universes – teleological prolongations of their beings. “The Bible tells us to love our neighbours and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people”, said once G.K. Chesterton. This might be the most pessimistic view of a neighbourhood, which we are advised to treat with utmost kindness. If love is too much to ask, then the next line of defence is to understand, not understate, things. More

AD 2017 is Anno Donald 1

Dumitru Miron, Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The advent of Donald J. Trump hardly resembles the prologue to some great national redemption, for it is not clear what kind of greatness he has in mind for his beloved America. As for the international landscape, his “twilightenment” reigns supreme, for it is not clear who are the (real) alien friends and foes of the “archetypal”/“average” (yet so imaginary) US citizen. Trump’s moral code is literally undecipherable, his logic is humoral, his values are untraceable, while his value is a secret formula of his capitalist net worth and democratic trustworthiness. What is common to any of Trump’s portraits is his basic uncommonness: he serves a Union whose domestic polarization he embodies, while his foreign policy seems foreign to any present day routine. But if we want to capture the essence of his discourse (or at least of the perceptions of others regarding it), there are two basic concepts that in no case should be ignored: anti-political correctness and populism. More

Growth-at-All-Costs vs. Democracy – What Kind of Globalization?

Dumitru Miron

A few centuries ago, Teilhard de Chardin had spoken about the two sides of all matter: a “within” and a “without”. It has been proven many times that it is vital for the outer world and the inner world to move together at the highest level of harmony in order to achieve balance. One can say that a globalized society reaches to an overdeveloped “without” but, unfortunately, to an underdeveloped “within”. For others who speak about the crisis of meaning, it has become necessary to take into consideration that the world of matter, materiality, science, and technology, even though all of them are good in themselves, do not possess meaning in and of themselves, or none that can satisfy “man’s search for meaning”. They are tools, not ends in themselves. The year 2017 is one in which both scientists and decision makers must understand the difference between challenges and opportunities and to find optimal solutions to the first and the best use of the latter. As was proved during the debates in the framework of the World Economic Forum, the key words for every debate in the landscape of ideas and the actions are: uncertainty, opportunity, resilience, prosperity, democracy, populism. More

Journal of Reasonable Arguments

Dumitru Miron, Octavian-Dragomir Jora

“A «market for ideas», is that what we’ve been missing now, in times of severe and tangible hardships?!” Such a reaction is a performative contradiction, since this invective expresses, in itself, an idea, even before the emitter tries, by shouting, to rob himself and us of the value of a train of thought through his “heckler’s veto”. More

New Business Models

Dumitru Miron

The most turbulent international business environment in decades, the globalization process and the major transformations in the social and environmental conditions pressure us into finding new ways to adapt to these rapid shifts. The most important factors that contribute to the development of new business models are the increased role of governments, the greater awareness of companies towards multidimensional risks inherent in change, the need for more efficient scientific solutions for sustainable development and also the emerging power of social media. More

FIRST EDITION