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)

“Liberation Day”, the Nightmare to Stay?!

No. 52, Mar.-Apr. 2025 It is said, for example, that America has not even responded with tariffs commensurate with the mockery it has been subjected to by friends and enemies alike; that nations that sell it more goods or services than they buy from it are, in fact, raping it with a sick lust; that the country will fare better by repatriating the industries exiled abroad by the ignorance of previous administrations. Except that America is not populated only by “xenophobic economic agents,” but also by consumer-citizens hurt by suddenly inflated prices by thickly penned signatures, as well as by producer-citizens hit by shrapnel from supply chains blown up by tzealous “equalizer” – the US/world’s economies/societies are far more diverse and complex than that… More

Flat Earth and Rare Earths

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

No. 52, Mar.-Apr. 2025 The rules-based international order, through which global organizations were conceived for collective problem-solving, for reducing protectionist impulses and for stabilizing the postwar global economy, is a feeble exception to the world’s true “state of nature”: the anarchy of the balance of power. Fetishized by the idealists who naively believe in the vigor of its architecture, this “order” makes, by comparison, the flatness of the Earth seem like a reasonable hypothesis. More

Technological and Institutional (Co)Evolutions, Revisited by (Political) Economists

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

No. 51, Jan.-Feb. 2025 Industrial Revolutions (IR) are more than just marches of technological and scientific advancement; they are strides of profound societal transformation that defy and reshape the very structures of political, economic, and social life. The forces of technological progress, economic development, and political maturation have historically collided, for instance, with those of tradition, heritage and conservation, placing the accommodating institutional settings under significant strain. In times of transformation, societies undergo veritable “stress tests” that demand realignments, rebounds and resilience. As technological innovation pushes the boundaries of possibility, social/political/economic institutions are forced to respond, either by embracing change or opposing it, resulting a dynamic interplay between progress and stability. These periods of transformation are not just of interest to historians or theorists in economics and other social sciences; they are crucial for everyone’s understanding of the future existential trajectories – micro, meso, macro, mondo. The study of Industrial Revolutions can be set as a needed inquiry into the future of humanity itself. The current episode, Industrial Revolution 4.0 – driven by artificial intelligence (AI) as its flagship –, has already raised common sense questions regarding what systems of production and governance, of social security and civic engagement will become commonplace. Notably, the relationship between Industrial Revolutions and socio-political-economic institutions is one of co-evolution. Technological breakthroughs often drive the restructuring of social, political, and economic systems (with their norms and habits), while these systems, in turn, influence how technology is adopted, regulated, and integrated into society. The interaction between institutions (immanently, stabilizing forces) and technologies (congenitally, disruptive) is simply… complex. More

The Most Serene DOGE

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

No. 51, Jan.-Feb. 2025 The President-Elect of the United States, Donald J. Trump, has begotten an inquisitorially-minded anti-waste institution dubbed the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The bicephalous institution (an initial red flag when it comes to institutions everywhere) is jointly run by noted tech giant Elon Musk (worth 330 billion dollars or thereabouts) and the pharma entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy (a mere 330 times “poorer”). The department will not be an actual government body, which presumably would require Congressional complicity in downsizing the leviathan it helped create. DOGE will be a sort of outside consultant specializing in “dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures and restructure federal agencies” (Trump dixit). Presented as a veritable “Manhattan project for our times”, the nascent body is born under a feeble star sign (since the President relies on bipartisan support from Congress, not just a pen, no matter what Obama claimed back in the day), while also being coupled with unrealistic and exaggerated claims of two trillion dollars in yearly savings, which is a third of all federal expenditures outside those of interest on debt. 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

“To Know” – That’s the Essence of Journalism!

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The daily journalist is the professional who doctors us against informational nightmares – the wordplay I prefer to use in order to summarise this vocation (which is vocal in both a literal and a figurative sense). And I use that metaphor because, paradoxically, it is “in broad daylight” when “the night of the mind” acts with a most uncommon ferocity. This saying applies with particular accuracy to the so-called science journalism. This specialised form of journalism only managed to become its own thing starting in the second half of the twentieth century, occupying today a significant portion of the written, audio-visual and online press. Science journalism must be produced and consumed as something more than a mere form of entertainment. Sure, it diversifies our field of understanding of the world and of life, but its purpose is not to delight – even though it has curiosity (and curiosities) at its core –, nor is it to distract – though it successfully deviates from the trivialisation of reality and, equally so, from its vulgarisation. One of the harsher “stress tests” it was confronted with was the Covid-19 pandemic, which consisted of a mix of fake news and pseudoscience that oscillated between (or was even maintained by) “occult conspiracies” and “official statements”. More

“Twin transitions” and (the Transformation of) Art

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The future of what is currently happening in the European Union (although the process we are discussing is ultimately and inevitably global) constitutes the beginning of the “twin transitions” that may find us, decades from now, in the following scenario: we will start our day in a smart and clean house (energetically and aseptically), looking out the VR window that shows us the weather status up to the air quality level and indicates the optimal time to spend outside from a health care index perspective; we will have breakfast after seeing the sustainability score of the menu’s food, with delicacies, by the way, coming from high-tech farmers who take care of their crops by buttoning in the cloud, connected to Big Data, open source weather platforms, fine sensors, and autonomous tractors; we use the washing machine when the dynamic electricity tariff is in our favour, for we are brave prosumers and suppliers in the grid, thanks to strategically mounted solar panels on the roof; we go to work, not yet counting among the lucky digital nomads with flexible telework regime, 4/24, 4/7, waiting for some well-deserved e-leisure hours reserved, for example, for culture; we have the choice between immersing ourselves, through the AR headset, in the captivating Metaverse for a play (where, no, we will not be spectators, but we will play Horatio, in Hamlet, replying to the immortal Laurence Olivier’s avatar) or we can order a Cézanne exhibition at home, as in the old days, at the Tate Museum (projected 16K on the white and versatile walls of the 3D printed and luxuriously finished house by Obi-One, the painter robot of the 100th Romanian unicorn); nostalgic, tired of e-books, we take a book from the vintage memories shelf and sit under the retro-futuristic lamp, in which an old LED bulb from Electromagnetica stubbornly functional has fused with the glass recovered from our great-great-great-grandfather’s oil lamp, a hero at Mărășești WWI clash. Always and everywhere, the cultural-artistic experience integrates us (as well as distinguishes us) in/from the environment, together with our exosomatic extensions (of instrumental, technological nature). More

Where We Head to When There’s Nowhere to Run

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The phrase “life is a struggle” aptly describes the experience of writing about anything other than the ongoing war a year after Russia’s attack on Ukraine, but so much has already been written on the topic (and so much will yet be written – in vain, though) that a distraction would be welcome for the sake of mental sanity. Thus, we “struggle” with the temptation to join the “library” division of the corps of strategists operating deep behind the front lines, specifically the “armchair reasoning” battalion of the “ex cathedra” regiment. Nevertheless, it is impossible to keep at it indefinitely, for the boomerang of wandering thoughts will follow its own course, no matter how much one may try to shift one’s mind away from the unceasing horrors. In Sci-Fi literature and cinema, the desolation of Mother Earth following a (nuclear, technological, environmental etc.) cataclysm is usually coupled with the remaining population fleeing to the unknown worlds of outer space and/or retreating to the catacombs of what’s left of the planet, partially sedated through immersion in surrogate cyber-realities. In other words, it is an outward and/or inward escape. More

Memories from the Future of the European Union

Octavian-Dragomir Jora

The “science of future” (future studies, futurology) represents, at least, a paradoxical expression. Before anything else, the future’s flaw is not the fact that it is a too complex web of events, but that it… has yet to happen; we can see it/dream about it, but we cannot “know it” because it neither disseminates “news”, nor emanates “science”. Afterwards, the future is (will be) just one, although there are a lot of probable and plausible futures in the minds of the professional visionaries; and, ironically, absolutely all of them are cursed to never match the real future. More