Citizens and... Others!
"A city's infrastructure is not a technical problem. It is a statement of intent towards its citizens." — Street observation, Botoșani, 2026
Citizens and... Others! Yesterday, the mayor of Botoșani municipality, whilst unveiling the new electric buses
on which the dear citizens of Botoșani will henceforth be able to travel — on routes 101 and 102 only — announced that development is continuing! Routes 101 and 102 were perfectly adequate before, between ourselves! I spent the whole night on tenterhooks [translator's note: the Romanian idiom is "ca pe ace" — literally "as if on needles," equivalent to "on tenterhooks" or "on pins and needles"], kept awake by the World Cup matches, thinking about the journey I would make the following morning. Half past seven. The stop at "La Cornișa" ["The Cornice" — a local landmark name attached to a Chinese goods shop, itself a small marker of post-communist provincial commerce]. A green bus was just pulling away. Smart. New! I decided to take the Number 3 instead. Red. Dusty. It draws up. I climb aboard: the door tied shut with a piece of string, inside — an oven! The ticket: four lei [approximately 80 pence or one US dollar at current exchange rates]. — "Could you put the air conditioning on?" I venture. The driver presses something. The window on the right goes down a little. Inside... a picture of misery! I alight at the "End of Line 1" stop — a thoroughly modern stop, as can be seen from the photograph. A few steps further along, another stop, equally "modernised." "We continue... the non-installation!" That is what the campaign ought to be called. Ahh, if only they'd had a majority on the Local Council [translator's note: the "Consiliul Local" is the municipal deliberative body, directly elected, with authority over service contracts and public expenditure] — what oversight they would have exercised, what penalties they would have written into the service contract, which runs until 2028, what... anything! Forgive me! They do have the majority on the Local Council! Well, they won't be invited to the businessmen's galas! Citizens? Some are pleased (on routes 101 and 102), others...! We continue the non-installation! — Cristian Stăncescu
A translator's note after the source text. What follows is my rendering of a short piece of Romanian literaryjournalism by Cristian Stăncescu, a local commentator writing from Botoșani — a city of roughly 100,000 people in north-eastern Romania, in the historical region of Moldova (not to be confused with the neighbouring Republic of Moldova). Stăncescu writes in a compressed, ironic register that draws on a long tradition of Romanian satirical observation stretching back to Ion Luca Caragiale (1852–1912), whose comedies and sketches of provincial political life remain, one hundred and thirty years later, the sharpest lens available for Romanian civic reality. The original Romanian title, Cetățeni și... alții!, turns on an untranslatable social distinction: cetățeni means citizens in the full, rights-bearing sense; alții — "others" — implies those for whom the system does not, in practice, function. The ellipsis and exclamation mark are structural: Stăncescu does not explain. He suspends. The reader completes the sentence from experience.
The concrete scene: the green bus and the piece of string. Reading Cristian Stăncescu's text, I felt something precise and recognisable. Not anger — anger would have implied surprise. It was recognition: that specific sensation of watching a familiar mechanism operating exactly as one knew it would, confirmed by a witness who observes it with the same warm, hopeless exactness.
Citizens and... Others! has a richer narrative structure than it appears at first reading. There is a specific morning: half past seven, the stop at La Cornișa, a green bus already pulling away. There is a small, revealing choice: the narrator decides to take the Number 3. Red. Dusty. And then the text becomes a catalogue: the door tied with string, the heat inside, the four-lei ticket, the modest request for air conditioning, the window going down slightly in its place. Stăncescu exaggerates nothing. That is precisely why it devastates.
The sentence that stopped me was not the one about the door with the string. It was this one: "If only they'd had a majority on the Local Council — what oversight they would have exercised, what penalties they would have written into the service contract [...] what... anything! Forgive me! They do have the majority on the Local Council!" It is a construction that is almost musical in its rhetorical movement — the unreal conditional followed by the pause that collapses back into itself — and it contains an entire theory of local power. Stăncescu knows that we know. He does not explain. He leaves the sentence to fold back upon itself, like a door on a rusted hinge.
Last summer, somewhere between an unfinished pavement renovation and a press release about successfully absorbed European funds, I took a bus on a peripheral route in Botoșani. The stop was a concrete slab with no shelter. An elderly man with a plastic shopping bag waited in the sun. I thought: this place has a service contract with a provider. The Local Council has a majority. And the old man was not on route 101 or 102.
This is the story of a principle, not of people. A principle that operates with a precision no external audit has managed to disturb: selective modernisation as an instrument of political communication. What is visible gets renovated. What does not bring visible votes remains uninstalled.
The Central Argument: Modernisation as Spectacle, Not Service
When we discuss local public administration in Romania, there is a temptation to treat every new project as progress. Electric buses — progress. Renovated shelters — progress. A press release announcing that "development is continuing" — a sign that something is moving.
This reading is comfortable, because it leaves open the possibility of optimism: if electric buses are purchased today, perhaps the shelters will be installed tomorrow. If routes 101 and 102 exist, perhaps route 3 will come next.
But what if selective modernisation is not a step in a process, but the destination of the process? What if the electric buses on routes 101 and 102 are not the beginning of a modernisation programme but the finished product of a communications spectacle?
Charlie Munger — one of the most lucid observers of institutional behaviour of the past century — formulated a simple law: "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." It is not an aphorism. It is a method. Show me what the system rewards, and I will tell you what it will produce, regardless of the declared intentions of its actors.
What does the Romanian local electoral system reward? Visibility, not functionality. The green, new electric bus, photographed at the inauguration ceremony, distributed in official press releases, is visible. The uninstalled shelter at the end of the line, frequented by pensioners and workers who do not follow the local authority's social media accounts, is invisible. Munger would have predicted the scene Stăncescu describes without knowing Botoșani: a system that rewards inaugurations and does not penalise uninstalled shelters will systematically produce inaugurations and uninstalled shelters.
Yanis Varoufakis names the broader structure technofeudalism: a system in which those who control infrastructure — institutional, digital, urban — extract legitimacy and rent without producing the promised value, precisely as the medieval feudal lord extracted from the labour of serfs without contributing to production. The urban analogy is exact: the local authority controls the transport infrastructure. The citizen pays taxes for it. The service contract with the provider runs until 2028. The shelters remain uninstalled. The electric buses appear on routes 101 and 102. The mayor announces that "development is continuing." The system functions — not despite this behaviour, but through it.
The firm that wins the contract is the rent. The electric buses on the selected routes are the visible dividend. The uninstalled shelters are the cost externalised onto the citizen-spectator. We continue the non-installation.
Local Context: Botoșani as a Laboratory of Deeper Romania
[For international readers: a brief geographic and historical note.]
Botoșani is a county capital in north-eastern Romania, in the historical region of Moldavia — not to be confused with the neighbouring Republic of Moldova. With a population of roughly 100,000, it belongs to a category of Romanian cities that are large enough to attract European Union structural funds and to have an elected mayor with genuine administrative powers, yet small enough for the effects of those funds — and of their absence — to be visible to any attentive walker in an afternoon.
Romania joined the EU in 2007. In the years since, European cohesion funds have financed infrastructure projects across the country, including in cities like Botoșani. The record of absorption has been uneven: headline projects — historic centres, main road surfaces, public building façades — have tended to receive investment; peripheral infrastructure, service contracts, and routine maintenance have tended not to. The gap is not accidental. It follows the logic Munger described: what is rewarded gets done.
Stăncescu does not describe an exception. He describes a type. The type of the provincial town with a renovatable centre — possibly with EU funds, possibly with commemorative plaques marking successful absorption — and with a periphery suspended in an endless transition that has been called "in the process of modernisation" for thirty years.
Three moments, not as nostalgic inventory but as markers of the same recurring logic.
The 1990s: Privatisation Without Infrastructure. After 1989 and the collapse of communism, the communist-era buses passed into private concession or underfunded municipal administration. The network survived through inertia, not investment. The stops continued to exist because they already existed — there was no need to build them. The first layer of ageing infrastructure was installed, and accepted as normality.
The 2000s–2010s: European Funds and the Selectivity of Absorption. EU money arrived. Historic centres were renovated, some main thoroughfares received new tarmac, certain public buildings acquired modern façades. The periphery waited. Service contracts began to include clauses and deadlines. Not all deadlines were met — but no effective penalty mechanism existed. The habit was established: the contract exists on paper; delivery exists in part.
2020 to the Present: The Age of Visual Electrification. Electric buses are the most accessible visual argument for a mayor's modernity. They are green, silent, photogenic, European. Their cost is partly absorbed from public or European funds. The routes on which they operate are those with greater passenger flow and, therefore, with greater electoral visibility. Whether shelters on those routes are renovated matters less. Shelters on peripheral routes do not enter the calculation. The contract with the provider runs until 2028. The council majority exists. Nobody penalises anything. "We continue the non-installation."
There is a perfect continuity in this logic that cannot be understood as failure if one views it from the perspective of those who obtain what they are seeking. Stăncescu sees exactly this: "If only they'd had a majority on the Local Council..." — followed by the self-ironising, resigned silence of someone who knows the answer before forming the question.
Psychology and Sociology: Why It Works
Stăncescu does not ask why citizens accept it. That does not mean the question does not exist. It is in the substrate, beneath every line of his text.
Cognitive psychology offers a first answer: people accept situations that have been normalised gradually far more readily than they would accept the same situation introduced abruptly. A shelter that has had no roof for fifteen years is no longer perceived as absurd — it is perceived as normal. Normal is not contested, not because people are passive by nature, but because contesting the normal requires cognitive and social energy that daily life does not distribute free of charge.
Munger goes deeper. He describes the Social Proof Tendency — the inclination to calibrate one's own behaviour against the behaviour of those around one: if nobody nearby is complaining about the uninstalled shelter, complaining makes you the exception — not the official who has not done his job. Being the exception costs something. Conformism is free. And the shelter remains uninstalled not from a collective decision to tolerate it, but from a sum of individual decisions not to be the first to complain.
Bourdieu would call this habitus: the ensemble of internalised dispositions that cause a social field to reproduce itself without explicit conspiracy. Nobody decided that the stops in Botoșani must remain uninstalled. No such decision is needed. The field operates through its implicit rules: the provider knows it will not be penalised; the local authority knows it will not lose its majority because of bus shelters; the citizen knows that a complaint will produce no change; everyone knows that everyone knows — and the shelter remains uninstalled as a result of this distributed knowledge.
Stăncescu captures the habitus in his final phrase: "We continue the non-installation!" It is not anger. It is observation. The observation of someone who has internalised the rule and names it, with that irony which is, at bottom, the only form of resistance available to the person who controls neither the contract, nor the majority, nor the bus on which he goes to work.
The Caragialean Typologies: Where We Recognise Them Today
[For international readers: Ion Luca Caragiale (1852–1912) is Romania's foremost playwright and short-story writer. His comedies — particularly "A Lost Letter" (1884) — and his sketches of provincial political life are the foundational texts of Romanian satirical literature. His characters have long since become common nouns in Romanian public discourse: a "Trahanache" denotes a pompous, decorative authority figure; a "Cațavencu" is an unscrupulous opportunist who changes political allegiance without changing direction; a "Pristanda" is the perfected loyal subordinate who executes orders without moral reflection; a "Farfuridi" is the demagogue who mistakes the production of speech for the production of meaning. These are not merely literary references — they function in Romanian as the way that "Pecksniff" or "Gradgrind" function in English: cultural shorthand for recognisable social types. But, crucially, in Romania they are shorthand for types that are still encountered daily, rather than types safely historicised into the Victorian past.]
Caragiale never wrote about buses. He wrote about the mechanism by which public offices are captured, maintained, and exploited by actors who know that the watching public has no effective instruments of intervention. The mechanism is identical.
The Mayor-as-Trahanache is not necessarily malicious. He does what the system rewards him to do: inaugurates, communicates, poses beside the green electric bus. It was not he who decided that the shelters would not be installed — he decided that the electric buses would be purchased. These are not the same thing. Trahanache never decided what was important — he validated what the structure around him had already established as important.
The Official-as-Pristanda of the service contract: he penalises nothing, not because he does not know he should, but because penalising would disturb a network of relationships on which his professional survival depends. Munger would understand him immediately: an organism that has calibrated its behaviour perfectly against the structure of available rewards. Pristanda does not withhold the penalty from laziness — he withholds it from local rationality. The system does not reward penalisation. It rewards its avoidance.
The Citizen-as-Cetățescu of Stăncescu's text — that is to say, the man who boards the dusty red bus, requests air conditioning, receives a slightly lowered window, and alights at the uninstalled shelter — is perhaps the most complex Caragialean figure of the scene. He participates. He pays the four-lei ticket. He ventures a modest request. He accepts the modest response. He leaves. Not from stupidity — from pragmatic calculation: the cost of contesting is greater than the cost of accepting, because by accepting, you get home. By contesting, you gain nothing guaranteed and miss the bus.
Caragiale saw that equation. He saw that the citizen is not guilty of the system — he is caught in it. And he understood that compassion for the citizen is more complicated than contempt for the mayor, because the citizen is us.
Literature as an Instrument of Urban Diagnosis
There is something specific in the way Stăncescu writes about Botoșani. He does not describe it from a distance — he lives it. Half past seven. The stop by the Chinese goods shop. The Number 3. The window on the right. There is a precise, verifiable itinerary, with locations and times. This is not investigative reporting — it is testimony. And testimony has a force that analysis does not: it anchors the abstract in the concrete, the mechanism in bodies and heat and string.
Urban literature in the broadest sense — literary journalism, the observation essay, the street chronicle — has a function that neither public audit nor investigative journalism can entirely replace: it produces the bodily memory of a place. Not statistics about transport infrastructure, but the sensation of the dusty red bus in July. Not reports about unexecuted contracts, but the image of the "modernised" shelter that does not exist.
Generations of Botoșani residents know what an uninstalled shelter looks like. Few have written it down. Stăncescu writes it — and by writing it, makes it refusable. Not immediately. Not through any direct petition-and-response mechanism. But through a slower and deeper process: creating a formulation that circulates, that is recognised, that makes it impossible to deny in public what everyone already knew in private.
"We continue the non-installation!" is already a formulation. It has the rhythm and irony of an inverted campaign slogan. If it circulates widely enough, it will become a reference — and references change, slowly, what can be said in public without embarrassment.
Satire does not install shelters. But it can make the claim that shelters are being installed impossible to bear.
Interdisciplinary Connections: Economics, Psychology, Urban Philosophy
George Akerlof, in his analysis of markets with asymmetric information, demonstrated that when a buyer cannot verify product quality before purchase, the seller has no incentive to offer real quality — undetectable quality is unrewarded. The mechanism functions identically in local public contracts.
The citizen-taxpayer cannot verify whether the transport service contract has been executed in accordance with its technical specifications. She has no easy access to the acceptance documents, the monitoring reports, the minutes of the council meetings in which non-fulfilment was discussed. She sees the uninstalled shelter — but the uninstalled shelter does not appear in any of the provider's performance indicators, because the performance indicators were not defined with sufficient precision, or are not monitored with consistency. The Akerlof result: the service provider who delivers partially survives contractually, because information asymmetry shields non-delivery from consequences.
Stăncescu captures this in his parenthetical about the majority: "what oversight they would have exercised, what penalties they would have written into the service contract, which runs until 2028, what... anything!" — followed by the observation that the very majority that could have exercised oversight is the one that does not. This is not a contradiction. It is the Lollapalooza Effect that Munger described: information asymmetry (Akerlof) + absence of incentives for oversight (Munger) + the relational habitus that penalises conflict with the provider (Bourdieu) + the legitimacy conferred by the majority (the feudal structure — Varoufakis) = a system with a stability that no individual complaint can perturb on its own.
Varoufakis adds the final layer: whoever controls infrastructure need not deliver it fully in order to extract rent from it. Rent is not conditional on delivery — it is conditional on monopoly. The provider has a contract. The contract is valid until 2028. There is no transport alternative. The uninstalled shelter costs the provider nothing — the cost is externalised onto the citizen who stands in rain or sun waiting for the bus. This is the feudal structure in its clearest form: rent without accountability, extracted from those who have no alternative.
Tocqueville would have observed that local democracy functions properly only when the citizen has real — not merely formal — instruments for holding the elected to account. The formal instrument exists: the Local Council, the public sessions, the right to petition. The effective instrument is absent: the mechanism for penalising non-execution of contracts, genuine document transparency, electoral pressure calculated not on inaugurations but on ongoing functionality.
Counterarguments and Limits: What This Essay Does Not Say
Any analysis that starts from a local urban chronicle faces a problem of representativeness: a dusty bus and two uninstalled shelters are not a statistic. They may be a bad day. They may be exceptions within a system that, on average, functions better than Stăncescu describes.
Other data exist. Botoșani has absorbed European funds. Projects have been completed. There are transport routes that function, shelters that exist, buses whose doors are not tied with string. The full picture is more nuanced than the chronicle of a single journey.
The second counterargument: the electric buses on routes 101 and 102 are, in themselves, a good thing. Even if strategically distributed, even if they do not cover all routes, even if their inauguration has an evident communications component — they exist, they operate, they reduce pollution on those routes. Partial modernisation is better than no modernisation at all.
Stăncescu does not contest this — he observes the selection. And in the selection lies the mechanism. Not that electric buses are not good. But that good things are distributed according to a logic that is not the logic of need, but the logic of visibility.
The third counterargument concerns the comparability of contexts. To compare the Botoșani of Caragiale's era with the Botoșani of 2025 means comparing systems with fundamentally different institutional structures, different levels of education, different geopolitical contexts. Romania today is an EU member state with partially independent judicial institutions and a functioning civil society. The distance from 1889 to the present is real. It is also not as large as we would prefer to believe.
The limits of this essay are also the limits of analogy as a method: the structure resembles; the contexts differ. Not all local authorities function identically; not all providers deliver equally partially; not all citizens accept equally quietly.
Personal Reflection
I am sitting in Botoșani, reading Stăncescu's text on the same street served by route 3. The bus passes. It is red. I have developed the habit — I calculate whether it is worth going to the stop or whether it is simpler to walk. The stop is about a hundred metres away. It has no roof. In summer it is too hot. In winter it is too cold. It is easier to walk.
I think of my father, who was a mechanic. He knew that a car with its door tied shut with string has a different kind of problem from a mechanical fault: it has a problem of intention. Whoever ties the door with string and puts the car into service has decided that string is sufficient. He did not forget to repair it — he decided it was not worth repairing. My father used to say: "Watch how someone looks after his tools and I will tell you what he thinks of his work." He applied this to everything, including local government, with a technical scepticism that was not cynicism — it was a professional standard transferred to a new domain.
My son has ridden on public buses in Botoșani often enough. He knows how they work. I did not tell him it should be otherwise — that seemed a gratuitous cruelty. I told him, once, that the difference between a bus with a door tied with string and one without is a decision made by people. That those people have contracts. That contracts are penalised or not penalised depending on whether someone has the interest and the courage. That interest and courage are distributed unequally.
He looked at me the way adolescents look at an adult explaining something they already know from experience. He probably knew better than I did.
What concerns me more than the uninstalled shelters is a single thing: that at some point, uninstalled shelters will become air. That we will no longer see them precisely because they are everywhere. That "We continue the non-installation!" will remain an amusing formula, without remaining an accusation.
An Open Conclusion
Stăncescu wrote about twenty lines. He described a bus, a shelter, a modest request for air conditioning, and a window lowered in its place. He mentioned a council majority and a contract running until 2028. And he ended with a formulation that works as an inverted campaign slogan: "We continue the non-installation!"
Twenty lines containing an entire theory of local administration held captive by its own wrong incentives. Munger would have recognised the structure. Varoufakis would have named it. Akerlof would have formalised it. Bourdieu would have described the habitus that reproduces it. Caragiale would have dramatised it with characters who make it more painful by being sympathetic.
But no theoretical framework can replace the sensation in Stăncescu's text: half past seven, the red bus, string on the door, the heat inside, the right-hand window going down a little.
What is saddest is not that the shelters are not installed. What is saddest is that we know why. And knowing why, we also know that they will remain uninstalled — until the incentives change, which is to say not soon. The people who control the contract do not stand at those stops. They travel on routes 101 and 102.
Some are pleased. Others... continue to wait, without a roof, in sun or rain, for the bus that is coming.
Ten Questions About Stăncescu's Text and Its Mechanisms
1. What does the detail of "the door tied with string" demonstrate? It demonstrates that the condition of the bus is not an accidental fault but an accepted standard. A door repaired with string means that the person responsible saw the problem and decided string was sufficient. This is not a lack of resources — it is a lack of minimum obligatory standard applied with consistency.
2. Why did the electric buses appear on routes 101 and 102 rather than on other routes? Because routes 101 and 102 have greater visibility — heavier passenger flow, more users with smartphones and social media accounts, greater potential for photography and communication. The logic is not transport need; it is the logic of the profitable inauguration.
3. What does "the contract until 2028" mean in context? It means the service provider has contractual security regardless of performance, at least until that date. Without an effectively applied penalty mechanism, the contract is a guaranteed rent, not a performance-conditional commitment.
4. Why does the Local Council majority not penalise the contract? Because the structure of local political relationships makes penalisation costly: it disturbs networks of relationships, creates uncomfortable precedents, generates conflict with actors who may become allies or adversaries at future elections. Conformism is free; conflict costs.
5. Is Stăncescu correct that "routes 101 and 102 were perfectly adequate before"? Probably yes. This is precisely what makes the choice of those routes for the electric buses less an act of infrastructure and more an act of communication: investment goes where things already work, in order to be able to communicate visible improvement.
6. What would change the situation? An effective mechanism for penalising providers for non-execution of contracts, monitored independently of the political majority. That is: a local audit institution with real powers and without subordination to those it audits. This does not currently exist in the required form.
7. Is Botoșani a special case or a typical one? Typical. The mechanisms Stăncescu describes are national, not local. Unpenalised service contracts, majorities that do not oversee their own contracts, selective modernisation on visible routes — these are found in the majority of medium-sized Romanian towns.
8. What role does the citizen play in reproducing this system? An active one, even if unconscious. Through the normalised acceptance of existing conditions, through the failure to complain systematically, through voting on the basis of visible inaugurations rather than functional performance — the citizen contributes to the system's reproduction. Not from fault, but from the logic of daily survival.
9. Is Stăncescu's irony effective or merely emotional release? Both, with the qualification that effectiveness and emotional release are not mutually exclusive. The irony is effective insofar as it creates a formulation that circulates — "We continue the non-installation!" has the potential to become a local cultural reference. The emotional release is real and justified. The problem is that irony, even effective irony, does not replace institutional pressure.
10. Why does Stăncescu write about this, and not somebody else? Because local observation with narrative precision requires physical presence, patience, and the willingness to appear banal. Stăncescu leaves at half past seven, takes the Number 3, asks for air conditioning, and alights at the uninstalled shelter. These are not glamorous actions. They produce a text that does not look like investigative journalism and is more accurate than many investigations.
On the Șopârle in the Text
[For international readers: the Romanian literary-rhetorical concept of "șopârle" (literally "lizards") refers to arguments or accusations embedded within apparently innocent or peripheral remarks — Aesopic reasoning, the art of saying the dangerous thing by appearing to say something else entirely. The tradition has deep roots in Romanian literary culture, particularly in Caragiale, and continues in contemporary satirical writing. A "șopârlă" is recognisable to the initiated reader and deniable to the hostile censor. In Stăncescu's text, three stand out.]
"We continue the non-installation!" — stated as a parodic campaign title. In fact, a compressed argument: if an administration with an absolute majority and an active contract does not install shelters, the problem is not capacity but will. And will follows incentives, not declarations.
"Could you put the air conditioning on?" I venture. — the key word is venture [Romanian: îndrăznesc — literally "I dare"]. Stăncescu does not ask — he dares to ask. Daring implies a perceived risk. What is the risk of asking for air conditioning on a public bus? No formal risk. The real risk is that of someone requesting something they are not entitled to in the system's own logic: the passenger is a traffic unit, not a rights-bearing customer. This minor act of daring describes the entire relationship between citizen and public service.
"Well, they won't be invited to the businessmen's galas!" — stated as irony about the consequences of penalising providers. In fact, a radiograph of the local reciprocity network: the local authority, the service provider, and local business figures form an ecosystem of informal exchanges that makes formal conflict impossible. To penalise the provider means to exit the network. Nobody penalises.
"Some are pleased (on routes 101 and 102), others...!" — the ellipsis is a rhetorical argument. Stăncescu does not finish the sentence — he leaves it suspended, to be completed by the reader who knows what follows others. The technique is Caragiale's: what is not said is more charged than what is. The suspension implies that the situation of the others is so evident that verbalising it would be redundant — and that shared evidence is itself an argument about the normalisation of the unacceptable.
A Note on Translation Method
Translating Stăncescu into British English presents challenges that are worth making explicit, since the choices made in a translation are themselves a form of argument about the original.
Register. The Romanian original operates in what might be called the register of the knowing provincial — a voice that is ironic but never arch, warm but never sentimental, locally anchored but analytically precise. The nearest British English equivalent is perhaps the tradition of the literary sketch: Hazlitt's essays, some of Orwell's journalism, the kind of piece the London Review of Books would describe as "a letter from the provinces." The translation attempts to hold that register throughout.
Proper nouns and local references. I have retained the original Romanian place names (La Cornișa, Capăt la 1) and route numbers (101, 102, the Number 3), providing brief contextual glosses in square brackets on first appearance. These are kept short: the foreignness of the names is part of the meaning. Botoșani should feel like Botoșani, not like a stand-in for any provincial European city.
Institutional terms.Consiliul Local (Local Council) is translated as such throughout, with a brief explanatory note on first appearance. The Romanian administrative vocabulary — primar (mayor), prestator de servicii (service provider), contract de servicii (service contract) — maps reasonably well onto British equivalents without distortion.
The untranslatable. The Romanian title, Cetățeni și... alții!, resists exact translation. Cetățeni implies the full legal and civic weight of citizenship — rights, obligations, standing. Alții — "others" — implies those who are formally citizens but functionally outside the system's concern. The English "Citizens and... Others!" preserves the structure, including the crucial ellipsis and exclamation mark, but loses the specific Romanian legal resonance of cetățean. This is noted in the translator's preamble above.
The irony problem. Romanian satirical irony, in the Caragiale tradition, tends to be warmer and more resigned than British irony, which is more likely to be dry and adversarial. The translation attempts to preserve Stăncescu's resigned warmth rather than sharpening it into British dryness. Where this balance tilts one way or the other, the Romanian original is the authority.
Translator's Note on Contextual Scope
This essay draws on a source text that is local in the fullest sense: a specific bus, a specific morning, a specific town. For readers outside Romania, two things are worth holding simultaneously.
First: the mechanisms this essay describes — selective modernisation as communications strategy, service contracts as guaranteed rent, the habitus that makes non-penalisation the path of least resistance — are not uniquely Romanian. They are recognisable in varying degrees in any democracy where local electoral pressure is primarily exerted through visibility rather than through functional accountability. Readers from British cities will recognise aspects of the story. So will readers from Italian small towns, Spanish provincial capitals, or Polish secondary cities. The Romanian inflection is specific; the structure is not.
Second: the Romanian inflection is specific, and it matters. The presence of Caragiale as a living cultural reference — not a historical curiosity but an active diagnostic tool — gives Romanian civic irony a particular quality: it is simultaneously more resigned (because the tradition of recognising the mechanism is so long) and more precise (because the vocabulary for it is so well developed). Stăncescu is not reinventing a wheel. He is adding a spoke to one that has been turning since 1884. This longevity is not a comfort. It is part of the diagnosis.
Methodological Note
This essay uses Cristian Stăncescu's text, Citizens and... Others!, as an observational anchor point, not as a source of statistical data. It is treated as a cultural document of local urban experience — with evocative and diagnostic value, not demonstrative value.
The theoretical frameworks employed — Munger for the psychology of incentives, Varoufakis for structures of extraction, Akerlof for information asymmetry, Bourdieu for the reproduction of the social field, Tocqueville for the conditions of effective local democracy — are integrated semantically, not decoratively. Each appears at the point in the text where it adds a dimension absent from the frameworks already present.
The personal reflection on the mechanic father is not rhetorical ornament. It performs a methodological function: the experiential anchoring of an abstract mechanism in lived and transmitted knowledge. The mechanic's technical scepticism about promises without diagnosis is an epistemology, not a sentimental biography.
The comparisons with Caragiale are structural analogies, not historical identity. Romania today is different from the Romania of 1889 — richer, better educated, more integrated into European institutions, with partially independent judicial bodies and a functioning civil society. These differences are real. The behavioural structures described by Caragiale and by Stăncescu present similarities significant enough to be analysed in parallel — not because nothing has changed, but because certain mechanisms persist in adapted forms.
The essay was originally drafted in Romanian and follows the DOOM (Dicționarul Ortografic, Ortoepic și Morfologic — the normative Romanian dictionary) in that version. The present English version follows the conventions of British English literary journalism.
Bibliography
Akerlof, George A. The Market for "Lemons": Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1970.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice [Le sens pratique, 1980]. Translated by Richard Nice. Polity Press, 1990.
Caragiale, Ion Luca. The Lost Letter and Other Plays. Translated by Frida Knight. Lawrence & Wishart, 1956. [For international readers seeking the primary works in English translation.]
Caragiale, Ion Luca. Opere complete. Fundația pentru Literatură și Artă, București, 1938. [Romanian primary source.]
Munger, Charlie T. Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. The Donning Company Publishers, 2005.
Stăncescu, Cristian. Cetățeni și... alții! [Citizens and... Others!] Local chronicle, Botoșani, 2025.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America [De la démocratie en Amérique, 1835–1840]. Translated by Henry Reeve, revised by Francis Bowen, further revised by Phillips Bradley. Vintage Books, 1990.
Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. The Bodley Head, 2023.
What You Might Do Tomorrow
Five concrete suggestions, for readers anywhere.
Photograph and document. A photograph with the date and location of an uninstalled shelter or a defective bus, posted publicly with the local authority tagged, produces more pressure than a written complaint lost in an archive. The photograph bypasses information asymmetry: it makes the non-delivery visible to those who were designed not to see it.
Read the public contract. Service contracts with municipal providers are public documents in Romania — and in most EU member states. Find them on the local authority's website or request them under the relevant freedom of information legislation. Check whether penalty clauses exist and whether there is evidence they have been applied. The gap between what the contract says and what the shelter looks like is the measure of accountability.
Attend a council meeting. Not necessarily to speak — to observe. The presence of citizens at council sessions modifies the behaviour of elected members, even marginally. Marginally, consistently, over time, becomes structurally.
Ask candidates the right question. At the next local elections, do not ask candidates what new projects they will undertake. Ask them how they will monitor existing contracts and what they will do when providers do not deliver. The question itself is a pressure.
Refuse the normal. When a bus door is tied with string, note the bus number and the time and file a complaint. Not because the complaint will be resolved immediately — but because accumulated complaints build a pressure that the singular complaint cannot create. The habitus of non-complaint reproduces the system. The habitus of complaint, if it reaches critical mass, can destabilise it.
What to avoid:
Do not generalise to paralysis. "They are all the same" is a conclusion that justifies non-engagement — and is also empirically false.
Do not confuse irony with action. Stăncescu's text is excellent. Sharing it on social media without any further action is pleasant and insufficient.
Do not neglect the local level in favour of the national. The transport service contract is signed by the local authority, monitored by the council, paid from the local budget. This is the scale at which civic engagement has the greatest effect per unit of effort invested.
Do not abandon institutions because they are imperfect. Imperfect institutions are the only ones available. Abandoning them in favour of informal alternatives or total cynicism does not produce better institutions — it produces the vacuum occupied by precisely those against whom you are indignant.
Petru Cojocaru is the founder of Absolut Web Expert SRL, a web agency based in Botoșani, Romania, and the author of the editorial network petrucojocaru.ro, servicii-web-alex.com, absolutweb.ro, and cojocarupetru.info. He writes essays at the intersection of technology, culture, and political philosophy.
This essay was originally composed in Romanian and has been translated and expanded by the author for an international readership. The Romanian-language version is available at petrucojocaru.ro.