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)

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

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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”

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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!

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

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

Sustainability, Cause It’s Better than All Else

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The Brundtland report – Our Common Future (1987) – represents the catechism of durable/sustainable development, defined as that type of “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Sustainability puts two disciplines/social sciences to work, in a deliberate debauchery: economics (preoccupied with the efficient satisfaction of subjectively arranged individual needs, with the social stock of available scarce and, thus, precious resources) and ethics (preoccupied, amongst other things, with the moral validation of the exercise of violence/coercion, knowing that the scarcity of resources generates conflicts in a society). Therefore, economic sustainability is based on the ethical axiom according to which it is the responsibility of each and every generation to “preserve”/”conserve” an amount of “capital” goods deemed necessary in up-keeping a “level of income” sufficient enough for the future ones. More

Azimuth, Romania

Octavian-Dragomir Jora, Alexandru Georgescu

The political-economic phrase “regional cooperation mechanisms” is dry enough that it brings in tow a serene attitude, which neither Romania’s voluptuous imaginaries, nor its immanent vicinities seem to pan out. Central and Eastern Europe, extruding towards the South East – the softly symbolic geographical notion which includes Romania –, has always possessed a lively geopolitical tectonic, prone to extremely brutal outbursts and worldmaking shifts (i.e., featuring as some hotspot for the two world wars), and a latent geoeconomic magnetism too (i.e., due to its fine resource pools and in spite of its dire infrastructures). These traits have remained somehow unchanged for centuries, only to be recurrently re-evaluated. More

A Midsummer Night’s Chilling Dream

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

Climate changes and armed conflicts – as facets of, basically, the “non-human” physical nature and of the “dehumanised” human nature, respectively –, when fatally intertwined with each other, bring us closer to Apocalypse nightmares. The mental cohabitation between ecological anguishes and the anxieties of belligerence is the product of the Cold War era’s madness (as in MAD – mutual assured destruction). A doctrine of deterrence, MAD highlights the fact that every nuclear confrontation between superpowers can only end with the annihilation of both, regardless of who was at first on the offense and who was on the defence. Such an infamous possibility also had a climate-related dimension. Either the thermonuclear explosions will broil Earth’s fluids like a boiler (some sort of a “Heat Death”), or they would release a cloud of particles in the atmosphere, blocking the solar radiation (generating an “Ice Age”), the horrific result would be a residual human-inhabited area to oscillate agonizingly between scalding and drowning, between freezing and extreme hunger. Even though the industrial rivalry, including the peaceful kind, remains the main target of the accusations that it devours the environment and disrupts the climate, war, even the regular genre (though it has been recently becoming more and more hybrid in nature) imposes itself as a research subject in relation to climate risks. More