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)

Foot(Glo)ballisation by World Cup

If people were to tell their story to the inhabitants of other worlds in this universe, it would suffice to produce a chronicle of earthly discussions containing the keyword or hashtag #WorldCup. I believe we can safely leave out “football” from this label – the elliptical expression “World Cup” instantly directs our thoughts to the sport that will have grown into a religion defined by the “new testament” of Diego Maradona (1986) and his “second coming” in the form of Lionel Messi (2022). The secular religion of football is economic as well as political in nature; in other words, it is an instance of “scientifically” exploited “culture”. The Qatar edition is one of the clearest examples thus far of how the downright scientific marketing of a symbolic good (i.e., football) can contribute either insidiously or ostentatiously to the planetary management of cultural values (a potpourri of frigid conservatism and frivolous progressivism): a campaign worth some $300 billion meant to wash the image of some and the brains of others on the shores and hydrocarbon reserves of the Gulf. More

CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. ∞): The Industrial Revolutionizing of the Social Contract: 4.0 Generation Updates

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Mihaela Iacob

The “egg-and-chicken” problem when, for instance, reasoning on and ruminating about the history-long and worldwide plethora of technological shifts/rifts/drifts and social/political/economic realities is secondary to a principal obviousness: these two dimensions of the human(e) existence are involved in a co-evolutionary relationship, implying mutual and bi-directional causes and effects. Hence, defining (or decreeing) the “technological” as the independent variable and the “socio-” as the dependent one, or maybe vice versa, solely provides the scholar with insights onto limited segments from what it is, yet, a continuum; but, for the scientist, understanding each and every modest and simple link gets him/her closer to the underpinnings of the mega-complex chains of events. Studying Industrial Revolutions’ (IR) imprint on the functioning of polities is such a link, a compound of the chain of capturing the practical means which get us closer to our principled ends. 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

Cultural Goods and Cultural Welfare

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The core intellectual conundrum that fuels the present essay is the following: is culture a product made in “free markets” or a “public good” to be provided by the state – allegedly the only societal institution able to grant individuals the collective means for bundling cultural values, for breeding cultural capital, and for maintaining sustainable cultural behaviour? The answers diverge culturally: from laissez-faire French harmonists to Marxist or Maoist communists, from cosmopolitan libertarians to nationalist autarkists, from old-school conservatives to politically-correct progressives, from Maecenas-entrepreneurs to sacrosanct bureaucrats, from freelance, self-contained artists to publicly-subsidized, politically-connected spoiled artificers. More

The Anathema of Secession

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Talking about secession in the house of the modern state is, depending on the tastes and the actual situation of the speaker, either something absolutely hilarious (if not even dangerous), or something absolutely legitimate (if not even necessary). It is a historical fact that the current world, in its settlement as state-centred reality, of cohabiting territorial monopolies of legitimate use of force, was built on a foundation which, in the meantime, became a geopolitical quasi-taboo: the principle of self-determination. This self-determination, in its pure form, does not involve something that should mandatorily be seen as insidious, but a natural prolongation of human liberty and personal property – two civilizational benchmarks which, we must admit, are still treated as indigest on certain lands, in certain times. And if the state is portrayed and perceived as a social contract, then it can only be accepted as valid if closed between free men, within the limits of their legitimate patrimony, including their territorial possessions, under a strictly consented jurisdictional framework. (Or not quite so?) More

Three Unions in a (Life)Boat

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The unions of states, in their either federalist or inter-governmental setting, are portrayed in economics and political science literature, by certain scholars and pundits, as quasi-romance stories and, by others, as purely-cynical undertakings: they are, for the first, expressions of common destinies, while for the second, mere cartels of political exploitation. Though, beyond charitable or circumspect translation of state gatherings, the undeniable facts are that the state, as an organization of humans, has a maximizing logic and that this logic is exercised as the monopoly of (legitimate?) violence with the privilege of (unconsented?) expropriation, by taxation, regulation and inflationary redistribution of purchasing power. Maximization logic of the state (apparatus) – rightly de-homogenized from the rest of society – leads to a triple choice: to increase domestic exploitation, to expand abroad, or both. 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

Culture and Property Rights

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The International Book Fair Bookfest 2017 gave me the opportunity to exchange some thoughts, with quite exquisite and exigent readers, on my recent work – Spiritualitate, materialitate și proprietate. Cultura mea, cultura ta, cultura noastră, cultura lor (Editura ASE, 2016) [Spirituality, Materiality and Property. My Culture, Your Culture, Our Culture, Their Culture]. Addressed for now mainly to a Romanian readership (by its publication language) the book basically hosts a worldwide-relevant question, though not so frequently or explicitly asked (to say the least): “Is culture a public(ly enforceable) good or a private(ly producible) one?”. The question is being complicated by the fact that the culture deals with consensual, socializing, public values (we speak of preferences, traditions, beliefs, which, by definition, unite before they separate), as it is also true that the human person is the one who gives meaning to social aggregates (the methodological individualism, despite hasty amendments is crux in social sciences). Or speaking in “economics” (nota bene: the science of human action in a (praxeo)logical, commonsensical, un-sterilely-sophisticated expression): What makes a culture become a Culture? (Economic) freedom or (political) interventionism? More

Always Betting on God

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Forever interacting with a world where both he and the things around him are beyond his reach, man longs for infinity. Although his powers of action are limited by the constraints of time and space, man clings to his reason not only to order the reality of scarcity, but also to probe the mysteries of the beyond. He has only one life ahead to understand what awaits “beyond” and his only guilt is that of not being aware enough of the full importance of this “before”. We were endowed with reason from the very beginning and we use it to productively take part in the social metabolism, otherwise the animal instinct activated by implacable bio-physical-chemical laws would have sufficed. Reason is also the source for the understanding of the world as it is (to us) and of the world as it should be (to us). This assumption leads to the idea that reason is not only the best means to detect temptation but more often than not, the biggest temptation itself. 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

The Revolution from Within

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Revolutions are experiences of a purgatorial sort. They remake people’s lives and indeed rewrite not only their present and future but their past as well. The latter gets to be turned either into a memorial of avenged pain and suffering or into an archaeological site of bygone morality. And there, some find themselves scrapping feverishly through the debris for relics of a past “against the tide” righteousness, to be convertible into strategic assets in the “New Order” life. More

Trump’s Transatlantic Impaired Partnership

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The two shores, and lands, of the North Atlantic – the Eastern and the Western ones – are subject to a movement where, metaphorically speaking, the economy tries to beat the geography, while politics seem to team up either with the first one or with the second. The name of the game is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – TTIP –, the famously hard-to-get deal between the US and EU, whose first official round of talks began in 2013, with the intention to bring about lower trade tariffs and to reduce regulatory barriers that make exchanges between the US and the EU more costly than they should. Geophysics literally distances America from Europe, the orogenesis of the Mid-Atlantic ridge pushing aside the tectonic plates where “the new world” and “the old continent” sit. More