The Building Stirs. Management Sleeps.
"Men care less for what they hold in common with others than for their own concerns." — Aristotle, Politics, Book II
Yield. "This building isn't performing! We should sell it!" Wrong.
It is your management of this building — and of other buildings in the municipality and across the county — that is not performing. You and those you work with, your so-called "team", are either incompetent or acting in bad faith. The building stirs. It is waiting to be brought to life, to receive working people, to shelter them — warmth in winter, cool in summer, protection from wind and rain. What must decision-makers do? It is simple: think about every action concerning public assets and liabilities as though those assets belonged to you personally — cherish them, develop them. What stops them? Pride, self-interest, friendships and the party. No — not the party! The party never takes responsibility. — Cristian Stăncescu
[Translator's note — the source text]Cristian Stăncescu is a Romanian civil society commentator who publishes short, polemical observations on public administration, political culture and civic life — typically under 200 words, in the tradition of the Romanian journalistic "notă" (brief note). "Randament" — the Romanian word used as the title of the original piece — translates literally as "yield" or "return on investment", but carries a specific administrative register in Romanian: it is the language used by public managers when they declare assets unproductive and recommend disposal. Stăncescu turns the word back on the managers themselves.
The concrete scene: a building and an inverted diagnosis. Sometimes a short sentence cuts deeper than a hundred-page report. Stăncescu is not writing a case study. He is writing a correction — rapid, clear, almost violent in its precision. The first word of his response is decisive: Wrong. Not a qualification, not a polite amendment, but a complete reversal of the diagnosis. The problem is not the building. The problem is the person who framed the problem.
The text has the structure of a syllogism disguised as civic indignation. Major premise: management is not performing. Minor premise: the building stirs, has potential, is waiting. Conclusion: sale is a pseudo-solution that eliminates the symptom while leaving the disease intact. Sell the building without changing management, and the same management will administer the remaining assets just as poorly. Before long, it will reach the same conclusion: that those, too, are "not performing" and must be sold.
Reading this, I thought immediately of my father's workshop. He was a mechanic. In his workshop there was an unspoken rule, transmitted through behaviour rather than words: you do not sell a tool because you do not know how to use it. You learn. Or you acknowledge that you cannot use it and bring in someone who can. Sale is the last resort — not the first. The first step is a correct diagnosis.
Stăncescu makes the diagnosis that public administrations refuse to make: "you are either incompetent or acting in bad faith." A disjunction with no third option, no excuses, no mitigating context. Either you do not know, or you know and choose otherwise. In either case, the building is not to blame.
[Context note — Romanian administrative culture]In Romanian public administration, the phrase "nu dă randament" ("does not perform" or "does not yield") has become a formulaic justification for the disposal of public assets — buildings, land, equipment. The phrase typically appears in council deliberations and public procurement documents, often without evidence that the asset was adequately maintained, staffed, or resourced. Stăncescu's text is a direct intervention against this bureaucratic formula, insisting that the formula describes management failure rather than asset failure.
The central argument: the problem of incentives, not of ownership
There is an old debate in economic theory and political philosophy about the relative efficiency of public versus private ownership. Privatisation is frequently presented as a universal remedy: what belongs to the state is poorly administered because nobody truly cares for what is not their own. Transfer it to the private sector and the problem resolves itself through the mechanism of price and self-interest.
This argument has a genuine logic — and a genuine limit, which Stăncescu identifies without recourse to economic terminology. The problem is not ownership. The problem is the incentive structure of those who administer. If the administrator of a public asset has no incentive to develop it — if passivity or disposal is rewarded more generously than effective stewardship — then the asset will be poorly managed regardless of its legal status. And if a private asset is administered by a manager equally deprived of correct incentives, it will be equally inefficient.
Charlie Munger, perhaps the most lucid observer of human behaviour in the twentieth century, formulated the law underlying this logic: "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." Show me the reward structure of a system and I will predict the behaviour of its actors. This is not a motivational aphorism. It is a descriptive law with greater predictive power than any moral theory. It does not matter whether people are good or bad, intelligent or mediocre. What matters is what the system they operate within rewards.
Applied to the building in Stăncescu's text: the manager who proposes a sale is not necessarily corrupt or incompetent in any absolute sense. He may well be someone responding correctly to a wrong system. If the system rewards him more generously for the rapid disposal of a "problem" (selling the asset) than for the sustained effort of development, the manager will opt for rapid disposal. It is rational relative to his incentives. It is catastrophic relative to the public interest.
The building does not perform because management has no incentive to make it perform. That is the correct diagnosis. Stăncescu states it in plain language. Munger would have confirmed it with the equations of behavioural psychology.
Historical context: public ownership and the paradox of stewardship
Friedrich Hayek, in The Road to Serfdom and in his essays on prices and knowledge, articulated a fundamental observation: the knowledge required to administer any resource efficiently is distributed, local, and tacit — it cannot be centralised without enormous loss. A central bureaucrat does not possess what a local administrator knows about the building in front of him, about community needs, about maintenance costs, about potential uses. Centralising the decision invariably produces outcomes inferior to what local decision-making with local knowledge would produce.
But Hayek did not say that public ownership is inevitably a failure. He said it is inevitably suboptimal when administered without mechanisms to transmit and reward local knowledge. The distinction matters: manageable suboptimality is not the same as inevitable failure.
Stăncescu completes Hayek from the opposite direction: he is not speaking about an absence of local knowledge, but about an absence of will to apply it. "Simply think about every action concerning public assets as though those assets belonged to you." This is the remedy he proposes — not privatisation, not legislative reform, but a change of disposition: administer public goods as though they were your own.
Aristotle observed the same thing 2,400 years earlier: people attend to what is their own with a care they rarely extend to what belongs to others. Not from ill will — from the structure of motivation. True stewardship — the capacity to administer what belongs to others with the same attention one gives to one's own — is a rare virtue, not a default behaviour. It must be cultivated, incentivised, rewarded. And its absence must be sanctioned.
[Context note — Romanian administrative history]Romania's transition from a centrally planned economy after 1989 left an enormous portfolio of state-owned property — buildings, factories, land — in the hands of local and central government. The privatisation and disposal process of the 1990s and 2000s was widely characterised by undervaluation, connected transactions and political influence. Many assets were sold far below market value; others were transferred to party-affiliated networks through nominally transparent processes. The phrase "does not yield" entered administrative vocabulary during this period as a convenient justification for disposal that rarely required proof. Assets left in public hands have frequently been maintained inadequately, producing a self-fulfilling prophecy: neglect creates the appearance of worthlessness, which justifies further neglect or eventual sale. Stăncescu's text is written against this thirty-year pattern.
The problem of Romanian public administration is not that it holds too much property. It is that it has never built a system that makes genuine stewardship a rewarded norm and makes managerial negligence or incompetence a sanctioned one. Degraded buildings, undervalued sales and forgotten assets are not accidents — they are the predictable products of a system that does not punish poor administration and does not reward good administration.
Stăncescu sees this precisely. And he states it without euphemism: "incompetent or acting in bad faith." These two diagnoses contain everything necessary. Incompetence is a problem of capability — addressable through selection and training. Bad faith is a problem of incentives and ethics — addressable through sanctions and transparency. Both are solvable. Neither is solved by selling the building.
Psychology and sociology: why we do not care for what is not ours
Munger identifies, within his broader framework of the psychology of human error, a directly relevant mechanism: Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial — the tendency to avoid painful solutions by denying the real problem or substituting it with a more convenient pseudo-problem. The sale of an asset "that is not performing" is a classic form of active denial: instead of diagnosing and correcting management (painful — it involves conflict, accountability, personnel change), one declares the asset to be the problem and disposes of it. The problem is resolved on paper. The manager who produced the problem remains in post. He will produce the same problem elsewhere, with a different asset.
There is a second mechanism, which Munger calls Bias from Mere Association — the tendency to associate the qualities of something with the context in which it was encountered rather than with its intrinsic properties. A building that has stood neglected for years, with broken windows and a deteriorating roof, becomes in public and administrative perception "a problem building" — not a neglected building. The negative association has fixed itself to the object, not to the cause of degradation. Hence the perceived solution is eliminating the object rather than correcting the cause.
Bourdieu would add a further layer: the bureaucratic habitus — the ensemble of dispositions internalised within an administrative system — produces a type of official who has learnt that doing nothing is safer than doing something and making a mistake. In a system without rewards for initiative and with asymmetric sanctions (error is penalised, passivity is not), the rational response is to do nothing. Or to propose a sale — which appears to be action but is in fact disguised passivity: one has not administered the asset; one has removed the problem from one's own responsibility.
"The building stirs" — writes Stăncescu, and in this personification there is more than a figure of speech. It is an accusation directed at those who should hear the stirring and do not. Not because they are deaf. Because hearing would entail responsibility. And responsibility, in systems without correct incentives, is expensive.
Interdisciplinary connections: economics, political philosophy, public ethics
Elinor Ostrom, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2009, empirically demolished what was known as the Tragedy of the Commons — the idea that shared resources are inevitably destroyed through individual overexploitation. Ostrom demonstrated that communities have managed common-pool resources (pastures, forests, irrigation systems) with efficiency and durability over long periods — not through privatisation and not through bureaucratic centralisation, but through local systems of rules, mutual monitoring and graduated sanctions. The condition was not private ownership. It was a system of genuine accountability.
Applied to the public buildings in Stăncescu's text: the problem is not that they are publicly owned. It is that no Ostrom system exists for them — no clear rules of use and maintenance, no real monitoring of those who administer them, no sanctions applied when standards are not met. Without an Ostrom system, the tragedy of the commons is not a natural law — it is a consequence of the absence of accountability. It is avoidable.
Hayek adds the dimension of knowledge: to administer a local asset well, one needs local knowledge. Centralising the disposal decision at the level of a local or county council, without the involvement of those who have direct knowledge of the building and the community it serves, will inevitably produce suboptimal outcomes — premature sale, inadequate renovation, or abandonment dressed in good intentions.
Varoufakis, from a different angle, would describe the way public assets are treated as feudal rent extraction: whoever holds the position of decision extracts from the asset not value added through work and management, but rent through the mere fact of holding the position. In this logic, a sale may not be a managerial decision at all — it may be an act of accelerated extraction: rather than extracting rent over time, one extracts the capitalised value at once. The purchasing company, the political connections, the undervalued appraisals — all are instruments of the same feudal logic.
John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, proposes as a moral test the celebrated veil of ignorance: a decision is just if one would make it without knowing what position one will occupy in the system one is creating. Applied here: would anyone vote to sell the building if they did not know whether they would be the administrator or the citizen who might benefit from the services housed within it? The Rawlsian test is simple and revelatory. It shows that decisions to dispose of public assets are consistently made by those who will not bear the cost of losing them — and that this is precisely why they are made with such ease.
[Context note — EU regulatory framework]Romania, as an EU member state since 2007, is subject to European state aid rules and public procurement regulations that govern the disposal of state assets. These rules require open valuation, transparent tendering and demonstrable market-value pricing. In practice, compliance has been uneven. The European Commission has opened proceedings against Romania on multiple occasions concerning the undervaluation of state assets. The administrative pattern Stăncescu describes — disposal at below-market value through politically connected channels — has a formal legal framework that nominally prohibits it, and a practical reality that frequently circumvents it.
A typology of the custodian: who administers, and on what terms
Stăncescu implies a typology across a few lines. It is worth making explicit.
The liquidating manager is the one who sees in an asset a problem to be eliminated rather than a resource to be developed. He operates within the short horizon of a mandate: if the building produces no visible results during his tenure, the fastest solution is to remove it from the balance sheet. What happens afterwards is not his concern — he will no longer be there, or no longer be responsible. Munger would recognise the mechanism immediately: the time horizon of the reward determines the time horizon of the thinking.
The true custodian is the figure Stăncescu invokes prescriptively: the one who thinks about state assets as though they were his own. He does not appear often in Romanian public administration — not because competent and principled people do not exist, but because the system does not select for them preferentially and does not reward them differently from the other typologies.
The spectator manager is the third category, and the most common: the one who proposes neither sale nor development. He maintains the status quo, manages slow degradation, signs papers that carry no accountability, and waits for retirement or a change of mandate. He is invisible in statistics, inaudible in deliberations, and omnipresent in practice.
These are not character types — they are responses to incentive systems. The same person may be a true custodian in a system that rewards stewardship and a liquidator in a system that penalises it. This is Munger's lesson, and Stăncescu demonstrates it directly: "What stops them? Pride, self-interest, friendships and the party." Four obstacles — all psychological and relational, none structural in a technical sense. But all sustained by a system that produces no consequences for those who follow them.
[Context note — Romanian political party dynamics]The mention of "the party" in Stăncescu's text refers to a structural feature of Romanian political life: public administration posts at the municipal, county and national level are typically allocated through political patronage, with party affiliation determining appointments rather than demonstrated competence. This system — known informally as "împărțeala" (the carve-up) — means that managers of public assets owe their positions to party networks rather than to professional merit, and are primarily accountable to those networks rather than to the public. Stăncescu's final move — withdrawing the accusation from the party immediately after making it ("No — not the party! The party never takes responsibility") — is a formal accusation through ironic negation: the party cannot even be accused, because it refuses to assume responsibility for the behaviour of its own appointees.
Counterarguments and limits: what this essay does not say
There is a legitimate objection to Stăncescu's argument — and to its analytical extension here. Sometimes buildings genuinely do not perform in the strict accounting sense: maintenance costs exceed the value of services they can offer, rehabilitation is more expensive than new construction, location makes any viable use improbable. Not every degraded asset is a neglected asset with latent potential. Some are simply exhausted.
Stăncescu is not claiming that no public asset should ever be sold. He is claiming that the verdict "does not perform" is applied prematurely, and that those responsible for poor performance are not held to account before the asset is disposed of. This distinction matters: the problem is not sale in itself, but a wrong logical sequence — in which sale precedes diagnosis rather than following from it.
A second counterargument concerns the realistic capacity for reform. Even if the incentive system is wrong, changing it is extraordinarily difficult — it requires political will, coherent legislation, a different administrative culture, and time. The prescription to "think of assets as though they were your own" is prescriptively correct and empirically difficult to implement at scale. People do not alter their relationship to others' property through a moral appeal, however well-formulated.
The third counterargument is structural. Degraded public buildings are not solely a problem of management — they are also a problem of chronic underfunding, distorted budgetary priorities and a shortage of qualified staff in local administration. A manager with the best intentions but without resources cannot rehabilitate a building. Structural conditions matter, not only attitudes.
These limits do not invalidate Stăncescu's thesis — they contextualise it. The management problem is real and central. But it is embedded in a larger system that must be addressed simultaneously.
Personal reflection
I am from Botoșani.
[Context note — Botoșani]Botoșani is a county seat in north-eastern Romania, in the historical region of Moldova. With a population of approximately 100,000, it is one of the less economically developed urban centres in the country. Like many Romanian provincial cities, it contains a significant portfolio of degraded public buildings — former factories, cultural houses, administrative premises — left over from the communist period and the privatisation wave of the 1990s. The city is also the birthplace of Mihai Eminescu, Romania's national poet, and Grigore Ureche, a seventeenth-century chronicler. It sits in a landscape that Romanian writers have frequently described as peripheral in relation to the country's political and economic centres — which gives its local problems a particular sharpness: they are less visible, and therefore less likely to be addressed.
I know several buildings in the city that have stood empty for years — some for decades. I have watched them deteriorate slowly, year after year, as accumulated deposits of collective inattention. Some have been proposed for sale. Others are simply forgotten in the patrimony inventory of the municipality or county, like debts that nobody knows exactly to whom they are owed.
My father would have said that a car left in the yard without being used, without periodic checks, without oil changes and brake inspections, will rot. Not because it is a bad car. Because nobody attended to it. And that selling it in that state means selling your own negligence, not the car.
This is what public administration does when it sells buildings that "are not performing": it sells its own negligence. And rarely does anyone ask that question before the contract is signed.
My son will grow up in the same city. He will see, as I have, buildings standing empty or disappearing from the urban landscape, replaced by something else. I wonder whether he will ever know what they were, what they might have been, and who decided they could no longer be anything.
Open conclusion
Stăncescu writes briefly. One might be tempted to read his text as emotional discharge — as legitimate indignation, but without analytical substance. That would be a misreading.
Randament ("Yield") is a diagnosis in seven sentences. It identifies the problem (management, not the building), eliminates the pseudo-solution (sale), proposes the correct criterion (administer as though it were yours), identifies the obstacles (pride, self-interest, friendships, the party) and, in its final three lines, does something refined: it withdraws the accusation against the party the moment it is formulated. "No — not the party! The party never takes responsibility." This withdrawal is harsher than a direct accusation. The party is not even capable of assuming responsibility for its own people. There is a corruption more profound than self-interested corruption: the corruption that does not recognise itself.
The building stirs — writes Stăncescu. It is a metaphor that contains a hope. The asset is alive. It is not lost. It is waiting for a custodian who will hear it.
The custodian does not arrive through automatic privatisation or through declarations of good intent. He arrives through a system that makes the cost of negligence impossible to ignore and makes it impossible to confuse the responsible party with the object of their responsibility. Until then, buildings will continue to "not perform" — and will continue to be sold in place of those who failed to perform with them.
In theory, there is another way.
In practice, it is more complicated.
Bibliography
selective, with notes for further reading
Aristotle. Politics. Translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 1998. [Book II, the critique of common property from Plato's Republic; source of the epigraph.]
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Stanford University Press. [The concept of bureaucratic habitus and the reproduction of social fields.]
Hayek, F. A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. University of Chicago Press. [The argument for distributed knowledge and the limits of central planning.]
Hayek, F. A. (1945). "The Use of Knowledge in Society." The American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530. [The foundational essay on local knowledge and the price mechanism.]
Kaufman, P. D. (ed.) (2005/2023). Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. Stripe Press. [Primary source for Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency, Simple Pain-Avoiding Denial, Bias from Mere Association and the Lollapalooza Effect. The key text is Munger's 1995 Harvard Law School speech, "The Psychology of Human Misjudgement."]
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press. [Empirical demolition of the Tragedy of the Commons; the alternative model of locally accountable stewardship. Essential reading for anyone concerned with public asset governance.]
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. [The veil of ignorance as a test of procedural fairness in collective decisions.]
Stăncescu, C. (2024–2026). Randament [opinion note]. Published online. The founding text of this essay; cited in full as a primary cultural document in the introductory section.
Varoufakis, Y. (2023). Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, London. [The theoretical framework for analysing rent extraction from institutional position.]
[Note for international readers on Romanian language sources]Several foundational texts in the tradition of Romanian political and cultural criticism exist only in Romanian and have not been translated into English. These include Constantin Noica's Sentimentul românesc al ființei (1978), Petre Țuțea's political writings, and the complete journalism of Ion Luca Caragiale (1852–1912), who is Romania's most significant satirist and the closest analogue to Jonathan Swift in the literary tradition of this region. Readers interested in the cultural background to texts like Stăncescu's may find useful starting points in Lucian Boia's Romania: Borderland of Europe (2001, Reaktion Books), written in French and available in English translation, and in Katherine Verdery's What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (1996, Princeton University Press).
Questions worth keeping, and considered answers
1. Why does Stăncescu say the problem is management, not the building? Because an asset performs according to how it is administered, not according to its legal status. The same building, under the same poor management, will produce the same results regardless of who holds legal title. Changing the owner without changing the logic of administration moves the problem; it does not resolve it.
2. What does it mean that a public administrator lacks correct incentives? It means the system in which he operates does not reward him for developing assets and does not sanction him for allowing them to deteriorate. Munger is explicit: behaviour follows reward structure, not declarations of intent. A manager who receives the same salary, the same job security and the same status regardless of whether a building is developed or sold below market value will invariably choose the option that minimises his personal effort and risk.
3. Why is sale a pseudo-solution? Because it eliminates the symptom (the asset "that is not performing") without treating the cause (the management that is not performing). If those responsible for degradation remain in post after the sale, the same cycle will repeat with other assets. The pseudo-solution is more comfortable than the real solution — it is fast, visible, and appears decisive. That is precisely why it is preferred.
4. How does the Rawlsian test apply to decisions about public assets? If those making the decision to sell did not know whether they would subsequently be administrators or citizens who might benefit from the services housed in the building — would they make the same decision? Probably not. The veil of ignorance test reveals that decisions concerning public assets are consistently made by those who will not bear the consequences of losing them.
5. What does Ostrom propose as an alternative to privatisation or bureaucracy? Local accountability systems: clear rules of use and maintenance, monitoring from within the community, graduated sanctions for those who do not meet standards. Ostrom demonstrated that common-pool resources can be managed efficiently over the long term without privatisation — if genuine accountability systems exist, not merely formal ones.
6. What does it mean that "the building stirs"? Stăncescu's metaphor functions as an inverted accusation: it is not the building that is inert and devalued, but those who administer it. The stirring is unactuated potential — present, waiting. Those who propose sale do not hear the stirring because hearing it would mean hearing their own responsibility towards it.
7. What is the difference between "incompetent" and "acting in bad faith" as diagnoses? Incompetence is a problem of capability — addressable through more rigorous selection, training and supervision. Bad faith is a problem of ethics and incentives — addressable through transparency, real sanctions and the removal of conflicts of interest. Stăncescu places them side by side because in practice their effects are identical: the building deteriorates or sells below value in either case. But the remedies differ, and confusing them produces wrong interventions.
8. Why does "the party never take responsibility" in Stăncescu's formulation? The abrupt withdrawal of the accusation from the party, immediately after it is made, is a refined rhetorical gesture. The party functions less as an institution with responsibility and more as a protective screen for individual behaviour. It provides membership, connections and cover, without absorbing the cost of poor decisions by its appointees. It is a system for socialising benefits and privatising responsibility — which is, incidentally, a form of political technofeudalism in Varoufakis's sense.
9. Are there examples of public asset management that work? Yes — and Ostrom documented them. At the international level: European cities with coherent policies for rehabilitating historic buildings (Vienna, Prague, Kraków, Ghent). At the national level within Romania, there are isolated examples of local authorities that have developed assets through coherent public-private partnerships or through cultural and educational use. Exceptions do not confirm the rule — but they show that the rule is not inevitable.
10. What would change if management treated public assets "as though they were their own"? The time horizon of decisions would extend — a private owner thinks long-term, not in terms of the next electoral mandate. The criterion of success would shift — not the number of files processed, but the value generated by the asset for the community. Tolerance for degradation would fall — a property owner does not tolerate broken windows in his own home. And accountability would become personal rather than bureaucratically distributed until it disappears. This is not a utopia. It is a description of public service in its correct form.
Author's note
on how this idea developed
Stăncescu's text is brief, and this brevity is deceptive. On first reading, I read it as civic indignation — legitimate, well-formulated, but not exceeding the boundary of observation. On subsequent readings, the analytical structure surfaced: the inverted diagnosis, the pseudo-solution identified and refused, the obstacles enumerated with precision, the final withdrawal that is more accusatory than direct accusation. It was an essay compressed to the length of a long tweet.
I chose to integrate his text not as an illustrative pretext but as a semantically active document — tracing its internal logic through each section and amplifying it with analytical frameworks that can make it more precise and more useful. Munger entered naturally, because the law of incentives is the key to the entire mechanism Stăncescu describes. Ostrom completed Hayek — both speak of knowledge and accountability, but from different directions. Rawls served as a moral test for disposal decisions. Varoufakis supplied the structure of feudal extraction.
On limits: The central argument — that the problem is management, not the building — is correct as a general diagnosis and incomplete as a solution. I have not offered a plan for reforming public administration, because an essay is not the appropriate place for such a thing. I have offered, instead, the framework within which such a plan would need to be conceived: correct incentives, genuine accountability, local knowledge valued, sanctions applied consistently.
On tensions: The principal tension is between realism and prescription. If the incentive system is so wrong and so stable, Stăncescu's appeal to "think of assets as though they were yours" is morally correct and practically difficult to implement at scale. I mentioned this tension in the counterarguments section but did not resolve it — because there is no simple resolution.
On subjective errors: I have given more weight to the management mechanism and less to structural conditions (underfunding, weak legislative framework, shortage of qualified staff). Both are real; I chose to follow the direction of Stăncescu's text, which centres on disposition and responsibility rather than resources.
On theșopârlein the text (Aesopic language):
[Context note — șopârle]"Șopârlă" (plural "șopârle") — literally "lizard" in Romanian — is a term in Romanian literary and journalistic tradition for embedded arguments that communicate more than they state explicitly: the idea that slips in quietly beneath the surface of a text, which the attentive reader will recognise but which the censor (or the libel lawyer) cannot easily pursue. The tradition derives partly from the necessity of writing under censorship during the communist period and partly from the older Romanian rhetorical habit of indirect critique. The author uses the term as part of his standard critical apparatus, identifying the hidden argumentative moves within Stăncescu's deceptively simple text.
"The building stirs" — the personification of the asset as a living entity waiting for its custodian is more than a stylistic figure. It inverts the relationship: it is not the administrator who has a problem with the building, but the building that has a problem with its administrator. Subject and object are deliberately exchanged, and this exchange contains the entire critique.
"Simple" — the word with which Stăncescu introduces the solution is a rhetorical weapon. If it is simple and is not done, the problem is not technical difficulty — it is will. Simple transforms inaction from failure into choice.
"No — not the party! The party never takes responsibility" — this abrupt withdrawal is a form of irony through negation: I formulate the accusation and immediately withdraw it — not because it is untrue, but because the subject is incapable even of assuming responsibility for its own people. It is a more profound condemnation than direct statement.
"Incompetent or acting in bad faith" — the disjunction with no third option is a rhetoric of excuse elimination. There is no mitigating context, no circumstance, no but. Whichever option you choose, the conclusion is the same: you are unsuited to the post.
"Stirs. Barely waiting." — the verbs attributed to the building are verbs of life and expectation. The contrast with the passivity of those who administer it is a contrast between an inanimate entity full of potential and human beings who ought to be active and are inert. The inversion is total and deliberate.
What you can do tomorrow
Five concrete suggestions
Check a single public asset in your municipality. Not all of them — just one. A building standing empty, a plot of land unused, a space inadequately or never rehabilitated. Look in the local official gazette or on the municipal website for information about it: who administers it, what its book value is, what has been spent on it in the last five years. One asset. One verification. If it becomes a habit, something shifts.
[Note for international readers]In Romania, the legal framework for public asset transparency includes the Local Public Administration Law (Law 215/2001 and its successors), which requires municipalities to publish their asset inventories, and the Freedom of Information Law (Law 544/2001), which gives citizens the right to request administrative documents. In practice, access varies significantly by municipality. EU member states are additionally subject to public procurement transparency rules (EU Directive 2014/24) governing the disposal of public assets above certain thresholds. The procedural mechanisms exist; the systemic will to use them is the variable.
Apply the Rawls test to any public disposal decision. When you hear that a public asset is to be sold, ask: do those deciding know who will bear the cost of losing it? Are they among those who will benefit from the sale or among those who will lose the services the asset might have provided? The test does not offer answers — it offers better questions.
Demand transparency in valuation. Any sale of a public asset requires a valuation. Valuations are public by law. You have the right to request them, to compare them with market values and to ask whether independent appraisals exist. You do not need to be a lawyer or an economist — you need to ask the question.
Identify who benefits, not what is sold. Stăncescu says that the distributing company reveals who had the initiative. The same principle applies to any public asset sale: who is buying, at what price, and with what relationship to those who decided the sale. The information is public, or should be. Following it, you understand the mechanism.
Propose an alternative use before the sale. If a building is to be sold because it "is not performing", the simplest civic act is to propose an alternative public use — a public consultation, a petition, a submission to the local council. It does not always succeed. But it makes visible the fact that alternatives to sale exist and that citizens can formulate them.
What to avoid
Five actions that sustain the cycle
Do not accept the asset diagnosis without verifying the management diagnosis. Whenever you are told that something "is not performing" and must be sold, what is not told to you is who is responsible for poor performance. Accepting the asset diagnosis without asking this question makes you complicit in the inversion of responsibility.
Do not confuse sale with reform. Selling a degraded asset is easier than reforming the administration that degraded it. It is also less useful in the long term. We should not mistake it for a courageous or reforming decision — it is a comfortable decision and, frequently, a profitable one for those who make it.
Do not ignore the sale price relative to real value. Public assets are systematically sold below market value in the absence of independent and transparent valuations. The difference between real value and sale price is a rent extracted from public patrimony — paid, ultimately, by citizens.
Do not reduce the problem to corruption and stop there. Corruption exists. But if you reduce the entire mechanism to corruption, you lose sight of the incentive problem — which persists even in the absence of explicit corruption. An honest manager, in a system that does not reward genuine stewardship, will produce the same results as a corrupt one. An incomplete diagnosis produces incomplete remedies.
Do not abandon civic oversight because it is slow and frustrating. Civic control over public patrimony is inconvenient, time-consuming and rarely spectacular. But it is the only mechanism that makes the cost of negligence visible and sanctionable. Without it, the system reproduces itself undisturbed, with or without intent.
Methodological note
This essay employs structural analysis applied to a short journalistic text — Stăncescu's piece — as the starting point for a broader reflection on the governance of public assets.
Stăncescu's text is treated as a semantically active document rather than an illustrative pretext: every argument in the essay can be traced back to an implicit or explicit observation in the founding text. This is an acknowledged methodological constraint — and occasionally a small hermeneutic violence, in the sense that we amplify intentions that in the original are more compressed.
The sources combine classical political philosophy (Aristotle, Rawls), economic theory (Hayek, Ostrom), applied behavioural psychology (Munger), critical political economy (Varoufakis) and cultural sociology (Bourdieu). The combination is deliberate: the problem of public asset governance cannot be reduced to any single discipline without significant loss.
Munger is used as a psychologist of incentive mechanisms, not as an investment guru. Ostrom is used as a theorist of common governance, not as an economist of property. Rawls is used as a philosopher of procedural fairness, not as a representative of political liberalism in its entirety. Each appears at the point in the text where he or she adds a dimension absent from the frameworks already present.
The local examples from Botoșani are autobiographical and unsystematic. They are not empirical data — they are narrative anchors connecting the abstract argument to concrete experience.
[Translation note — methodology]This English version is not a literal translation of the Romanian original. It is an adaptation — in the author's own hand — for an anglophone readership unfamiliar with Romanian institutional context. Several passages have been expanded, restructured or supplemented with contextual notes that the Romanian original does not require because its intended readership shares the context directly. The analytical framework, the argumentative structure and the personal reflections are reproduced in full; the contextual notes are additions specific to this version. The rhetorical register targets the standard of The Guardian Long Read and Aeon — long-form public-interest journalism that assumes an educated generalist reader rather than a specialist audience.
About the author
Petru Cojocaru is the founder of Absolut Web Expert SRL, a web agency based in Botoșani, north-eastern Romania, specialising in digital presence for public institutions and private companies. He writes essays at the intersection of technology, culture and political philosophy, published across his editorial network: petrucojocaru.ro, servicii-web-alex.com, absolutweb.ro and cojocarupetru.info.