Rubrics » Bridging News
Trump’s Infrastructure Blues
There is a phenomenon jokingly associated with Steve Jobs, called a “reality distortion field”, whereby he did not just happen to be right very often with regards to his products, but the Universe itself conspired to make him right, regardless of what he said when it comes to what the consumers want or need. A similar phenomenon has been observed with Donald Trump, ever since he announced his candidacy for the US Presidency. Some pundits have taken to calling it “Trump’s luck” and, were there any possible means for him to do so, the coincidences have been so “fortuitous” that one expects him to have arranged them himself. His announcement speech spoke about illegal immigrant criminals and was widely derided by the media for not bearing any relation to their preferred reality. More
The Belt and Road Initiative
Amid an accelerated economic growth, China has become one of the most important players on the global scene in the 21st century and a central element of the regional and world economy. China has experienced a rapid economic development, which has propelled it among the strongest economies in the world, and this trend was due to both economic reforms implemented since the 1980s and a change of perspective in its relations with other states. More
Starved of Elites
The staffing of the Trump Administration will always be its Achilles’ heel, from the lowest echelons of its 4,000 positions to be filled to the Cabinet level of the mandarins who decide many of the US Executive branch’s policies and their details. Regardless of the factual and moral truth in the matter of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn’s discussions with the Russian Ambassador and his report on the content of the discussion to his superiors, the political truth made his position untenable even for Trump at his most defiant. While public contention has reached new heights with the Trump Presidency, every new Administration has had its staff criticized, scrutinized, derided, lambasted or slandered until a stable and workable political formula could be found. More
The Initiative for Competitiveness proudly presents a look into the future high tech economy
The 1st of March is the first day of spring and is marked by numerous traditions. Please accept as our gift an invitation to a special event organized by INACO – “Inițiativa pentru Competitivitate” (The Initiative for Competitiveness) in collaboration with the International Business and Economics Faculty of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies and covered for a worldwide audience by The Market for Ideas magazine. It will take place on the 1st of March at 4:30 P.M. in the Robert Schuman Hall of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies. The topic of the conference is represented by the new facets of business and the economy under the rushing tide of technological development. More
The Future Is Already Here. It’s Just Not Evenly Distributed
Science fiction author William Gibson coined the phrase in the title of this article in an interview with The Economist over a decade ago and his observation still stands. Automation and its physical sub-domain, robotization, are taking the world by storm. Automation stands for the reduction of human input in any process, though we will be referring mostly to economic processes. Labor saving devices and processes have been a mainstay of Western economic development since the Industrial Revolution, with their share of detractors, but labor elimination devices are increasingly more capable and more affordable, even for areas previously thought immune to automation. More
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
The World after Brexit and Trump
Come to Free Market Road Show 2017! The event is organized by Austrian Economics Center - Austria (AEC) and will host interventions from renowned libertarians thinkers and speakers like Andreq Bernstein and Barbara Kolm. Individual liberty is the undying dream of western civilization. State tyranny is the enemy of democracy. More
Aristotle and the Benefits of Moderation
Many times, when moving from the descriptive of “what is” to the prescriptive of “what ought to be”, it is necessary to appeal to a shared knowledge of a moral framework that imbues the ideas presented with values, concepts and interpretations that are scarcely universal, but rather grounded in one specific civilization and possibly one specific tradition. In his article in The Market for Ideas No. 2, “Blurred lines: Good vs. Good. Evil vs. Evil.”, Dragoș Tîrnăveanu crowned his analysis with a twist on the ancient Manichean (dualist) vision of a conflict of opposites – light versus dark, good versus evil. He analyzed the uncertainty of our modern age, in which an asymmetry of information and of values gives rise to morally ambiguous situations, which he termed as “Good vs. Good” and “Evil vs. Evil”. More
Football and Invisible Hands
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
Trump and the Israel Gambit
There have been many attempts to label Donald Trump as an anti-Semite by his Democratic opponents, who feel themselves entitled to sling the accusation around implicitly because of Jewish voting patterns that heavily favor them. This is the sort of “scarlet letter” that instantly destroys careers, campaigns and social standing without a presumption of innocence or due process. More
The Leader of the Free World
The Arab Spring began as a spark in Tunisia and extended to the entire MENA region, causing major disorder and a political meltdown of authoritarian regimes from Libya and Egypt, but a firm stand began in Syria by the beleaguered regime, where a social uprising has been transformed into a bloody civil war. By far, the ongoing conflict in Syria is the most brutal because a “civil war” has been replaced by an international war, due to the fact that every party involved is getting outside support: More
Trump’s Budget Battles Are Just Beginning
Maybe it is the effect of being immersed in the now and only being aware of the rough summary of history, but I am not alone in getting the feeling that the political polarization in the Western world has reached such a fever pitch that political coups that took place once in a generation are now occurring with greater frequency. Whether it is the unbalancing of the political establishment or the overt transgression of formal or informal political norms, one gets the feeling that politics has become unhinged. More
