--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 028
+title: Building business, or why (some) Gypsies are smarter than (most) Romanians
+excerpt: A case study on self-regulating systems.
+date: August 16, 2014
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: asphalt
+---
+
+I feel compelled to step into this essay by means of a short digression: I
+can't help but notice how many inhabitants of the Internet seek to make a
+living off sensationalistic titles such as "How to $X$ your $Y$ business using,
+or from, or by $Z$"; because nothing sells better than "The Best Business
+ever", like there aren't a zillion definitions for "Best" and like "Building
+Business" is a piece of cake. Which, of course, it most definitely is not.
+
+Fortunately this is nothing of the sort. But I feel once again compelled to
+digress, discussing my own background into the matter: I have nil knowledge on
+the matter of building a business. Which is why the reader, as a young or old,
+or experienced or, on the contrary, inexperienced entrepreneur, might wonder
+what lessons have I to teach them. Well, maybe I have none, but then again...
+
+I have been fortunate enough to study a tiny bit of game theory for my computer
+scientifical diploma thesis. Thus I know that the "Best" business isn't the one
+that maximizes profit and/or income, or social utility or whatnot. In my
+opinion, the best business[^1] is the one from which all or most of the agents
+can benefit, i.e. extract the most utility, in an otherwise perfectly hostile
+environment such as product, labor, financial markets, and so on and so forth.
+It is what physicists would call a closed system, or what biologists would call
+an ecosystem, or what game theorists would call a nash equilibrium, possibly
+one attained using mixed strategies.
+
+Facebook, for example, has proven itself to not be an ecosystem upon which
+entrepreneurs could build their businesses. Sure, it worked for a while for
+more or less dubious companies[^2], but in the long term, the whole "reach",
+"engagement", "click-through" etc. marketingspeak has been nothing but harmful
+to both companies and clients. This, I theorize, happens because Facebook has
+in this game a stake which is in direct conflict with either the users' or the
+companies' utility (or maybe both), which in a zero-sum game does not
+necessarily lead to what we would call an equilibrium. But as previously
+stated, I have no background in economy nor finance[^3], so my theories should
+at least be taken with a pinch of salt.
+
+I shall, instead of theorizing, share a case study which, I assure you, is
+perfectly real and has left me thinking for a bit, even though the story might
+on a first glance seem trivial and uninteresting, but which, I once again
+assure you, is anything but that.
+
+You see, the capital of Romania[^4] is split up into six Districts
+("Sectoare"). Arguably the least developed of them is the fifth District
+("Sectorul 5"), locally governed by a Gypsy mayor, a fact strongly correlated
+with and also caused by the great number of Rroma people in District 5. If
+you're not Romanian, or European for that matter, you might be blissfully
+unaware of the fact that Gypsies are of a way of being that is shockingly
+different from that of the Romanian ethnics: being held slaves for hundreds of
+years and freed from slavery at the half of the 19th century, they remain a
+resilient social group, in that they aren't interested in any way in
+"integrating" with the other Romanians, either because they're dumb or because
+they in fact have some kind of culture worth defending; hard to say.
+
+By "shockingly different", I mean that their way of being is what some would
+call "barbaric": they live in tents, don't in general have a taste for hygiene
+and their morals are rather harsh. What's more disagreeable in this (sub)urban
+Bucharestian context is that, save for a few, they are poor and poorly
+educated, do drugs and are very prone to crime, especially small theft. This is
+quite unfortunate among others for the Romanian locals, not too wealthy
+themselves, thus not too fond of having a relationship of any kind with their
+Gypsy neighbours[^5].
+
+Until one or two years ago, this social problem also led to others, such as
+ecological ones. You see, no one likes to live in a neighbourhood that smells
+like shit, yet sanitation services were for a large period of time, as many
+other public services, available only on paper, not also in practice. The
+situation gets more complex, but the general idea is that the streets of
+Rahova, Ferentari and other neighbourhoods in District 5 were, with few
+exceptions, not quite devoid of garbage. And while in Berlin this would be the
+cause of outrage, in Romania no one bothers to cry in public about it, because
+that's what fifty years of communism has done to people[^6]. And to think about
+it, the authorities even placed public ecological bins for the locals, only the
+locals, Gypsies and Romanians alike, have little respect for the establishment,
+so they misused those however they could.
+
+Now, as all self-regulating systems go, it seems like there was (and is) a way
+to profit from this otherwise bleak situation. First, a few wealthier Gypsies
+from the Gypsy mayor's circle of business partners bought some barren, or maybe
+toxic pieces of land. Then they opened what one would call "ecological trash
+dumps" for any and every type of bottles, including but not limited to the
+biodegradable ones.
+
+The first step was, of course, to pay the aforementioned sanitation services a
+little extra for garbage sorting. I have no idea if this is really profitable,
+but I wouldn't be surprised if it was, since this most probably uses funds
+coming from the European Union, District 5 or no District 5. The best part of
+it, however, is that, with this crisis and all, people with no jobs started
+gathering bottles off the streets themselves and bringing them to these dumps.
+So you see, if you walk through Rahova in a summer evening, you'll see a guy
+off the streets who's gathering cans of beer left behind by some other
+drunkard, "for free", since he's not really doing it on taxpayers' money. He
+might not be making much money, but he's learned that something is more than
+zero and working your ass off beats sitting your ass off at any time in human
+history.
+
+And this is how, dear reader, we arrive at the whole crux of the story.
+Building the "Best" business doesn't require "genius", "talent", "innovation"
+or other such empty words. Building business, not one, not many, but business
+as a general thing, requires looking around you and solving that problem to
+help your selfish needs, and only incidentally those of your peers. This
+matters, while the government not giving senior folk bigger pensions or
+Facebook not working does not.
+
+That is all.
+
+[^1]: And you might have remarked that it is my opinion, which is why I'm
+talking about the best, and not the "Best".
+
+[^2]: Zynga.
+
+[^3]: Basically I have no idea what I'm talking about. Or have I?
+
+[^4]: Bucharest.
+
+[^5]: And this is what leads to social tensions, but this is a story for
+another time, maybe.
+
+[^6]: Also read [The mechanics of socialism][1].
+
+[1]: /posts/y00/017-the-mechanics-of-socialism.html
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