Yet while BNR governor Mugur Isarescu, who has been wondering where we are going and has no answer for it, as he himself admitted after having returned from the circles of power in which he moves, down there, “in the street” people invent new products and services that are changing our lives, generations that consume “life” in a different way are overtaking us. Dreams, expectations and their preschool kid vision are changing things and steering the world. Without realizing it.
When Bill Gates started Microsoft thirty years ago, his dream was to have a PC on every desk and every computer to run his software. Meanwhile, desktop PCs are in their final years and laptops are gaining ground. The cell phone became available in the nineties and it looked like a brick. Now you lose it in your pocket and you are afraid to touch it because it can do so many things that you are already lost to the new world.
Is it the end of capitalism because the social and retiree Europe, the unscrupulous America, the lazy Greece, the dolce far niente Italy, the afternoon nap Spain, the too young euro, the dollar without backing, the greedy banks, the free market that does not create equality but creates and makes extremes more visible, rich and poor, are going down?
It will be the end of capitalism if those who are running countries, companies, schools etc. today do not make sure that those who are born, live and breathe everything that is new will have jobs to match their hopes and expectations in a matter of years from now.
Technology isn’t everything, indeed, but it drives things forward. And dreams. That you can achieve something. Regardless of what that something is. From a cake that’s different to an entirely revolutionary product.
We will be living with news of the crisis for even more years to come. Crisis in our country first cut the upper extreme and then sent us to the other extreme and we hope that 2012 will bring some kind of balance from which the growth should start.
Romania does not have a disaster, neither political, nor economic on its hands. Yet we cannot be Germany, either. It is not in our DNA. The Germans will not pay EUR1 million to a witch because they cannot afford it. In our case, money came out of thin air for a certain class and they could afford to pay “to have all their enemies die and to be successful in that business”. This is our daily life.
One day we have lots of problems, worries, loans and debts, the next day we squander money on cars, houses, Valentino and Gucci – they did not open those stores for nothing, did they? We expect the change of the society, of the economy to come from the political class, from somewhere up there, but it will never come peacefully from that place.
We throw insults at Basescu, but do not find Ponta and Antonescu trustworthy, so that we expect a new leader to come up from somewhere. And there are no new ones because they do not want the job. The business class comments in a muted voice on the sidelines but will not step up into the arena and fight those in power. Therefore, how should things change, who should the people vote for? And the society is held captive by both politicians and businesspeople. And by us after all. That is the Romania of 2011.
Yet some time this fall in Timisoara, in a business incubator, on a floor of a building, I heard a group of programmers, i.e. those guys whose job and how they do it you cannot understand, talk. “My name is Bogdan (I think that was his name), I am still in high school and I want to do a game/program that would bring people together outside not in front of the computer.”
“I want to do” that is the phrase that carries him forward. And everybody in that incubator wanted to do something and was really doing it. Nobody knew whether they were going to be successful but the fear of failure and of unknown surely did not exist for them. And their boss, the boss of the business incubator that is, said that he was currently going to high schools to recruit future entrepreneurs because those in college were already recruited by multinationals.
Meanwhile, Boc and the government need to approve the budgets and the losses of the state-owned companies. There is no room for business incubators on the daily agenda. And this is how we wasted yet another year with the reform of the state and contemplating what is going on abroad.
We will overcome the crisis when we want to escape from it and the end the captivity we defend.
May you have happy holidays and a good new year!