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)

CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 4): The Smithsonian Republic of Knowledge

Patronage is living proof that exceptional public goods can be produced, at least in part, privately. And this goes against the emphatical treatises on economics that theorize and preach the contrary. And when the theory seems far too dry for a journalistic incursion, history comes with (un)sweet(ened) evidence. In the summer of 1829, a certain James Smithson had bitten the dust in Italy, the one from whose glorious gens, that of ancient Rome, Gaius Maecenas descended, diplomat and advisor to the emperor Octavian Augustus and documented as, indeed, the first “patron of the arts”. Smithson, a respected British chemist and mineralogist (after whom zinc carbonate was dubbed Smithsonite), an early member of the Royal Society of London (only a year after graduating from college), had left behind him a will with a strange stipulation: should his only grandson die without issue, his fortune would go the way of the United States of America “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an Establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge”. Okay, but what’s the catch? Smithson had never set foot in America! More

CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 3): The Price of Pricing the Priceless

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The intensifying dialogue among social sciences is one of the most insightful contemporary academic advancements. Promising gains stem from interdisciplinarity, by connecting themes and concepts from a variety of fields, engaging them as parts of a Wertfrei system (of scientific nature), as well as a Weltanschauung (of cultural nature), rather than stockpiling merely discrete ingredients. For instance, the bonds between cultural studies and economic sciences – perennial, as they exist “materially” married, yet peripheral, as they seem “spiritually” divorced – may be revisited and reviewed against the intertwined backgrounds of: ideological mindset (e.g., liberalism, statism), technological mastership (e.g., industry “4.0”) and ecological momentum (e.g., climate, recycling). It is in the midst of the cogitations on the future of “humanity” (both the species and its spirit) – given chronic/acute ideological clashes, given technological shifts in leisure habits and in labor markets, also recasting micro-/meso-/macro-/mondo- business structures/relations, and given ecological encumbrances, under- or over-valued – that I’m roaming some of the finest American museums and libraries. More

Super Bowl and a Soup Bowl

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Football is a community distilled product (“You’ll never walk alone” goes the Liverpool F.C. anthem, adopted, against all odds - in the Beatles city, from a Pink Floyd show tune). Football unevenly blends feelings brewed by a collective order civilization which yet reeks of a wriggling culture of conflict. Association football is, among the rest of the team sports, the paragon that can most successfully neutralize societal disaggregation. Unlike theatrical performance (with which it imparts the technical and tactical demands of the plot, the actors getting into a play of mutual relations in which the spectator is merely a “spy”), the soccer performers are participants in a web of mutually shared strategy game rules where the spectator solely intrudes as a spy. The football show will also stand apart from the gigs, say, a pop-rock concert (akin in that they both trigger deep visceral sensations, still distinct where the former lacks the gut feeling usually associated with inward mystery myths, while the latter is a product explicitly delivered to its fans). This game will always generate peculiar reactions. It re-unites there where entropic drives are marked: the football supporters will allow themselves to be drugged with the cause and the strategy of the game, only when they experience this excitement with the punter on the left, right, in front and behind. The football fan will thrive feeding not only on the peers sitting close in the stand but also on the combined energies of the crowd, shouting against opponents, yet strangely aggregated by the empathy for the other team supporters. Go! Go! Go! Boo! More

CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 2): “Enlightenment” and “Environment”

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The Smithsonian Museums in Washington, D.C. are, par excellence, propitious places for memory. Universal, and also personal. Walking through the National Museum of American History, I made the acquaintance, in sculptural form, of a certain Mr. Thomas Alva Edison, and was reminded of what I had written about him a decade ago, when the EU was starting up its eco-crusade against its beloved baby, the incandescent lightbulb. I said back then: “Mr. Edison, a lightbulb went on in our good European heads and made us turn off your bloody wasteful invention, once and forever!” Mr. Edison is a grown-up, no doubt, and he knows how to cash in this historical punch. In his time, the brilliant guy is said to have “first” invented the lightbulb only after other gentlemen did the same before, but none had flashed the exquisite ideas to “fill in” a brighter-burning filament, to immerse it in a “more void” vacuum, while having a “more enduring” electrical resistance. Having gorged himself on patents and being the 4th most well-protected “luminary” in the history of technology, he became known for eagle-eyeing others’ ideas, while draping his own in government paperwork, for none could be allowed to think up similar ideas to him and independently of him. He then played God, despite being a free-thinking atheist, and libeled the alternative current of rival George Westinghouse by cunningly associating it with the electric chair, in whose creation Edison had had a hand in. More

CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 1): Industrial Revolutions

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

CAPITOL LETTERS (Ep. 0): New World Orders

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

The Earthly Algorithms of the Heavenly Affairs

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Faux Treaty on Witch-Hunting

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

“Russia has invaded Ukraine! Russia must be punished!” Thus goes the most commonly expressed sentiment these days, postulating an imperative that seems, however, by far easier said than done. “Economically, politically”, the speech then emphatically continues, “...and militarily” in a rather light whisper. Yet, even if we were to content ourselves with “verba” without moving further to “facta”, a heady operational riddle is evident to those who pay close attention to the words being used (said usage being, in itself, a factum as much as an intended expression of facts). Which Russia are we referring to? All of Russia? Should V.V. Putin, the “ringleader” who originated this crisis, be condemned before anything and anyone else? Should we also not punish the (active and passive) accomplices of the now infamous head of state: the apparatchiks (who fill the ranks of the country’s political leadership); the oligarchs (from the pseudo-private business); the state-serving intelligentsia (with both its academic and artistic branches)? Maybe sanction the Russian nation itself, for surely it has democratically legitimized the tyrant, either involuntarily (through ignorance) or voluntarily (through deluded conviction)? Why not the Russian culture altogether, with its departed and unborn, since the racketeers have the same unhealthy origins as the Karamazov brothers and poor Karenina? 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

The War Economy: Of Bits and Bobs

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

There are some key assertions which are axiomatic for the pureblood moralists and demonstrable for utilitarians, such as – “war means defeat even for the victors”, “war is the health of the state”, “peace between nations is inconceivable without limiting the power of states over their own nations”, “a durable order cannot be maintained by the sword”, “in a world of free trade and democracy, there are fewer temptations for war and conquest”. These do not exclude the need for an answer to the following question: “if we are to inevitably have war, how can it be waged rationally from an economic standpoint?”. War is the supreme immorality, - indisputable when it is a war of aggression, but also when it constitutes a hasty rejoinder -, but isn’t it also an immorality, of a lower degree, when it is waged with means that delay or hinder winning it in the most efficient/efficacious way for society? More

The Road to Sibiu, the Road to Wisdom

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

2018 found Romania celebrating a century of nation-state unity. 2019 finds Romania as the home of the European unity. A freely and firmly committed community of nations is one of the most delicate enterprises of mankind, one that up to now no empire has succeeded in preserving. The nation seemed the ultimate aggregate. But ration is the ultimate aggregator. More

Obelix Runs Away from Fiscalix

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Mihaela Iacob

The “fear” of taxation dies hard. In 2013, Gerard Depardieu became a French “tax refugee” in the Russian Federation. Half a decade since then, he became a Russian tax debtor in the Russian Federation. In 2018, he was listed in Russia’s Federal Court Marshals Service database as owing taxes in Saransk (the capital of Mordovia, somewhere in “Yevropeyskaya Rossiya”), where he was registered. More