Octavian-Dragomir Jora
Octavian-Dragomir Jora
Professor, Ph.D., Habil., at the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, where he has cultivated and developed interests in comparative economic systems, critical/creative thinking, and geo-politics/geo-economics of cultures and civilisations. Dr. Jora is involved in epistemic communities – i.e., board member of the Romanian Economic Society, the Research Center in International Business and Economics, etc. Recently, he received the Woodrow Wilson Scholarship from the Romanian Cultural Institute for research conducted in Washington, D.C., United States of America. He is (co-)author of numerous scientific works (100+ titles), as well as of journalistic op-eds, essays, pamphlets (1000+ titles), his works being distinguished over time with plentiful and prestigious scholarly and mass-media awards. Also, dr. Jora is editor-in-chief of the Œconomica journal and founder editor of The Market for Ideas pop-science magazine (Curriculum Vitae)
Technological and Institutional (Co)Evolutions, Revisited by (Political) Economists

Technological and Institutional (Co)Evolutions, Revisited by (Political) Economists

No. 51, Jan.-Feb. 2025 Industrial Revolutions (IR) are more than just marches of technological and scientific advancement; they are strides of profound societal transformation that defy and reshape the very structures of political, economic, and social life. The forces of technological progress, economic development, and political maturation have historically collided, for instance, with those of tradition, heritage and conservation, placing the accommodating institutional settings under significant strain. In times of transformation, societies undergo veritable “stress tests” that demand realignments, rebounds and resilience. As technological innovation pushes the boundaries of possibility, social/political/economic institutions are forced to respond, either by embracing change or opposing it, resulting a dynamic interplay between progress and stability. These periods of transformation are not just of interest to historians or theorists in economics and other social sciences; they are crucial for everyone’s understanding of the future existential trajectories – micro, meso, macro, mondo. The study of Industrial Revolutions can be set as a needed inquiry into the future of humanity itself. The current episode, Industrial Revolution 4.0 – driven by artificial intelligence (AI) as its flagship –, has already raised common sense questions regarding what systems of production and governance, of social security and civic engagement will become commonplace. Notably, the relationship between Industrial Revolutions and socio-political-economic institutions is one of co-evolution. Technological breakthroughs often drive the restructuring of social, political, and economic systems (with their norms and habits), while these systems, in turn, influence how technology is adopted, regulated, and integrated into society. The interaction between institutions (immanently, stabilizing forces) and technologies (congenitally, disruptive) is simply… complex. More


The Most Serene DOGE

The Most Serene DOGE

No. 51, Jan.-Feb. 2025 The President-Elect of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has begotten an inquisitorially-minded anti-waste institution dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The bicephalous institution (an initial red flag when it comes to institutions everywhere) is jointly run by noted tech giant Elon Musk (worth 330 billion dollars or thereabouts) and the pharma entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (a mere 330 times “poorer”). The department will not be an actual government body, which presumably would require Congressional complicity in downsizing the leviathan it helped create. DOGE will be a sort of outside consultant specializing in “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies” (Trump dixit). Presented as a veritable “Manhattan project for our times”, the nascent body is born under a feeble star sign (since the President relies on bipartisan support from Congress, not just a pen, no matter what Obama claimed back in the day), while also being coupled with unrealistic and exaggerated claims of two trillion dollars in yearly savings, which is a third of all federal expenditures outside those of interest on debt. More


AI on Rye, Hold the Mayo!

AI on Rye, Hold the Mayo!

No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 The tech evangelists would have us believe that AI will be part of „our daily bread” (in biblical and practical terms) in the Industry 4.0 era. Some will put anything on their sandwich and are quick to try out new technologies and mainstream them if they bring in the profits; others are shaking and shivering simply hearing about it. The providence and peril of new technologies, among which AI is the “queen”, are, how else, unequally distributed. The fatcats and the working stiff, to turn to class depictions, are not equally represented in the spoils of AI. Between organizations and businesses, the ones with visionary and versatile leaders in terms of incorporating AI in production processes will win out against those who are more reticent or rigid. Within the organizations and businesses, AI helps less qualified or productive workers make up some of the gap in productivity compared to the high performers. Until we get to the point where AI will replace either the former (“the useless class”, apud Yuval Noah Harari), or the latter (the underappreciated in “Gresham’s Law”), who knows where we are going?! The researchers are working day and night on the predictions and the explanations. More


Liber Amicorum in Praise of Amfiteatru Economic

Liber Amicorum in Praise of Amfiteatru Economic

No. 50, Nov.-Dec. 2024 I shared the following thoughts before and they have already been printed in the pages of the book that tells the story of the most appreciated Romanian magazine of economic science. I also recommend the other testimonies collected between the covers of the volume edited by Professors Vasile Dinu and Laurențiu Tăchiciu, Amfiteatru Economic și dimensiunea colectivă a prieteniei intelectuale [Economic Amphitheater and the collective dimension of intellectual friendship]. Because, yes, beyond any metric, writing-for-communication endures only when it becomes writing-for-communion. More


The Industrial Revolutions of Art

The Industrial Revolutions of Art

No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 The bonds between cultural studies and economic science – timeless, as they endure “materially” married, yet peripheral, as they seem “spiritually” divorced – need to be revisited and reviewed with the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (IR 4.0). It is in the midst of the debates on the future of “humanity” (understood as species and spirit) – given the new technologies that affect and alter micro-/meso-/macro-/mondo- business organizations, production processes, consumption habits – that this research endeavour unfolds. Both cultural facts and economic tools are subject to an intricate intellectual “stress test”, therefore scrutinizing the “4.0” cultural concepts/definitions and attitudes/behaviours, observable in markets’ as well as in policies’ deliverables will help us to fairly (fore)see what we might risk losing or stand to win, culturally, as communities, nations, human kind.Industrial Revolutions (IR) remain at the crossroads of several binomials: intellectual design and spontaneous emergence, institutions and technology, necessity and fortuity, and so forth. The shifts from mechanised production (IR 1.0) to mass production (IR 2.0) then to automated production (IR 3.0) and to the ascending scale/scope of digital transformation (IR 4.0) – with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as flagship technology – triggered mode(l)s of development, devised profound societal upheavals and fuelled worries about freedom and fairness. Culture(s) too host(s) such civilizational twists and turns – as spots of reflection on social disruptions, as sites of refuge from own uprooting, as spaces of sharable hidden energies – and IR 4.0 excites and upsets them via novel ideological biases, vanguard niche markets, public versus private spaces trade-offs, or geo-cultural/-political/-economic resets. More


A Journey Through Another Dismal Science

A Journey Through Another Dismal Science

No. 49, Sep.-Oct. 2024 I first met Professor Silviu Neguţ as a name on a book cover, probably the noblest of encounters between a (timeless) master and a (future) disciple. In my wayward youth, I was enamoured of everything that resembled geography, a passion second only to football. I have matured since then into the fullness of my wisdom and subtlety of pursuits ;-), therefore I can no longer claim a passion for geography. I just… love it. (As for football, the passion remains, defying maturity, wisdom and subtlety :-D). More


SWIFT

SWIFT

No. 48, Jul.-Aug. 2024 Twenty-five years ago, during World Economic History class in university, our professor decided to “indulge in a bit of showing off” (this was long before the Romanian expression translated as “making an arrogance” [a face o aroganță – sic!] became an iconic idiom thanks to the local shepherd + real estate + football magnate Gigi Becali). My professor’s very first words during the very first class were Azúcar Moreno. It was the name of an acclaimed Spanish musical duo consisting of sisters Antonia and Encarnacion Salazar who topped the charts back in the day and had just finished a well-received concert in Romania. The name of the band itself meant “brown sugar”, a self-referential nod to the sisters’ Romani origins. During that semester, the professor took us through various historical eras peppered with hints and references to these two words, discussing at length about routes and resources, relations and regimes, all connected by the “red thread” of the savour of the goods (or the scent of money) and of the colour or the skin (along with the sound of suffering). He did not abandon his eccentricity even during the exam. Sensing a sports-related metaphor in my answer to a standard exam question, he issued me a challenge, again, long before it became a common practice on social media. To earn the highest mark, I had to not only enumerate ten sports teams from the US regardless of the sport or league, but to do it in the (chrono)logical order in which the terms associated with them entered the American vernacular. I walked away from that exam with an “A” (10) and the revelation that skilful wordplays could add value to scientific knowledge. More


“The American Claimants”

“The American Claimants”

No. 48, Jul.-Aug. 2024 We know, the US is short for the USA, in turn an acronym for the United States of America, which could very well stand for The-Somehow-Still-United-Despite-Constant-Divisions-and-Bickering-States-of-America. Race and class, gender and religion, all craftily packed in (debilitating) ideologies, are some of the cruxes for (or rather, causes of) the many fault lines that stubbornly drive wedges within the highly regarded and widely praised “land of the free, home of the brave”. These boundaries date back to the time of pilgrims and pioneers and will endure in an idiosyncratic form of patriotism, just like their political coalescence has become, paradoxically enough, the driver of American society and statehood. The polarity between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, aka “the left” versus “the right”, aka “liberals” versus “conservatives”, keeps America in motion, even if the image of the debate (debacle?) Biden-Trump on the evening/morning of June 28/29, was one of an American political class that “went to pot” than of candidates “running for POTUS” (President of the United States). More


Extractive Behaviours in Datacracy 4.0

Extractive Behaviours in Datacracy 4.0

No. 47, May-Jun. 2024 Planet Earth is both an immense habitat – our cradle – and a gravitational vehicle – with circumsolar motion. With its array of natural (im)balances, the Earth is a venerable 4.54 billion years old; the (industrial) imprint left by the human species on it, deemed not negligible, barely exceeds two centuries; and our digital/IT&C/virtual existence, in what we call cyberspace, makes us feel still too young. This quite new frontier to be conquered is competing with the expansive cosmic imagination (Universe), but inverted into a quantum-ritual dreamscape (Metaverse), somehow simplistically assimilated with the internet. Yet, cyberspace is more than the sum, it is the synergy of computers (and all assimilable devices), servers, routers, and other globally connective digital infrastructures (hardware), “animated” by software, including here the omni-technology of our utopias/dystopias, Artificial Intelligence. In our quest for space and sense we do struggle to understand whether AI is a friend or a foe. More


Independence through Interdependencies

Independence through Interdependencies

No. 46, Mar.-Apr. 2024 The study titled The role of regional cooperation mechanisms in the current geopolitical context – opportunities and challenges for Romania, authors: Octavian-Dragomir Jora (coord.), Marius-Cristian Neacșu and Cezar Teclean, under the auspices of the European Institute of Romania, attempts to offer a lecture entry-point – one of the many potential ones – regarding Romania’s regional cooperation mechanisms, useful not only to the purveyors of external policies, but to all those who internalize its shortcomings. This approach attempts to make itself useful by signalling the multitude of interpretations of the international reality, which goes from the level of the common citizen all the way to chancelleries and which demands a smart reconciliation and a sage reconnecting at maybe the hardest calculable parameter when it comes to the very existence and functioning of a state: the national interest.The formulated conclusions – out of which a brief excerpt is republished below – emphasise, rather than exhaust, the wide range of possibilities of regional cooperation, in a heterogeneous/eclectic set of catalogued formats/mechanisms, which must be detached, before anything else, from the realm of monotony and rigidity. We are talking about promising, uncharted fields, but also about upsetting redundancies; about lucrative components, but also about bureaucratic laziness; about room for national initiative, but also about convenient conformity. These aspects are further complicated by the upsurge of the contestation of the international rule-based order. Here is a concise inventory of some generic ideas – concentrated in 10 points – which emerged from the research process, while a bit more extensive summary, preceding the study in full (in Romanian) is to be retrieved here. More


Enlightened Minds’ Derby: Oxford vs. Cambridge

Enlightened Minds’ Derby: Oxford vs. Cambridge

No. 45, Jan.-Feb. 2024 In the beginning, there was the… bludgeon – in an episode of the “town vs. gown” saga. The first faction – that of the trueborn townsfolk; the second one – of the academics – alien and politically privileged as opposed to the locals. In 1209, following a harsh clash between the two Oxford factions – NB: a town with academic activity dating as far back as 1096 –, several studious individuals fled to Cambridge and laid the foundation of the university with the same name, yet bringing with them the same social tension. Nicknamed “Oxbridge”, given their common historical and institutional features, the two venerable English universities have developed a mutual condescension over time. Though aristocratic and non-aggressive, it was seemingly even more defiant in its staunch refusal to “name the other”: i.e., to those in Cambridge, Oxford remains, bluntly, “the other place”. Centuries of “grey-matter” warfare, following the original battle of fists, led to these two universities accumulating both intellectual/human and financial capital. Their combined wealth: £21bn! More


Let’s Not Let the Politicians Play Bits and Bytes!

Let’s Not Let the Politicians Play Bits and Bytes!

Before the political elections (about a year or so before), on the day of the vote and a little while after, the citizens remember the values of the Polis: the social contract (a subtle notion), democracy (more declaimed than digested), the rule of law (or the primacy of laws, which become frail when legality does not rhyme with justice). In the rest of the time between electoral cycles, we find ourselves, usually, in the posture of citizens nursing a profound displeasure towards the elected, who either forgo the promises for which we voted, or they deliver precisely the promises we did not vote for. Somehow, in between elections, power becomes something wielded by a few of “us”, as is the case on election day, when a majority of a narrow minority wins the day and decides the collective future. It leads to many people being in hock to the opposition, which is waiting for another turn of the wheel in their favour. This is the curse of the “social contract”, the high priests of the status quo assure us a bit cynically! More


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