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)

Marx & Spencer

The wordplay in the title blissfully suggests that mirth is a legitimate reaction to the connotations of a mundanely “hallowed” name. Phonetically, it insinuates an English apparel retailer, much appreciated by the in-crowd. Visually, there seems to be a “spelling” mistake. Obviously, it is just a caprice, of the same character as the caprices history slams in our faces; these caprices are (also) known as coincidences. They make up the tools based on which some individuals torment themselves to transform the historical fact into invariant lessons. Those individuals may be labelled “hasty” historians. And the most “arrogant” of them postulate with no remorse universal laws from past uniqueness. More

Football and Invisible Hands

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The British Isles have shared with our world, among others, two paradigms of sociality: the classic economic liberalism and the modern game of football. Contrasting the proverbial avarice, Scotland has handed us two apostles of the… “invisible hand”, that witty formula touching both the social matter-of-course and the footballer’s fetish: Adam Smith and Sir Alex Ferguson. Professor of logic and moral philosophy, searching for a unified theory of society and bringing together ideas of theology, ethics, politics and law, Adam Smith came to write the first systematic treatise on political economy in history. Smith’s thesis contrasts its logical simplicity with the complicated sophistry employed by those who ignore it: if individuals were free to pursue their own interests, doing it through entrepreneurship and commerce, with respect for the freedom of the others, the society as a whole will improve its condition, coordinating itself via the market. And opposed to the invisible hand is the statists’ “hand play”. 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

Economic Goods and Political Gods: On Civilization’s Cultural Tectonics

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

In the hot peace after the “cold war”, a plethora of memories start haunting the minds of peoples awakened from blurry “isms” to old identities. Crosses, crescents, stars, tunes, tales, and togs, anything that can be symbol of the cultural self, start filling the new societal vacuum with the deep creed that nothing could be a better bond than the blood you are born with, flowing through your veins, and nothing could be a more poisoned tie than all the cunning ideologies, which are frivolous summer romances inclined to violent divorces. More

Europe United: A Goal Makes It, an Offside Brexit

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Mankind invented games when it figured out that its life and world can be miniaturized, simplified and represented in metaphors. A game can compress physical and metaphysical (social, political, economic) space to about the size of a rectangle in the grass or a wooden board and, for the sake of education or entertainment, (re)produces a societal figment in which human relations appear to detach themselves from the mundane, though not from its laws. More