Ways an Economist Says I Love You

I like applied microeconomics and graphs. Valentine’s Day was yesterday. Here is one of the 14 ways an economist says I love you :-)

(from Elisabeth Fosslien’s portfolio)

2 graphs from CMR made readable

A nice thing of having a copy of the slides during class is that you can take note directly on it (and take fewer notes and more quickly since most important points are already printed on the slides). The drawback is of course that each slide is very small. During the CMR (Corporate and Managerial Responsibility) classes for instance, we recently saw two of such slides.

The first slide is about sustainable development and the current development paradox. The slide shows a graph of the UN Human Development Index -vs- the ecological footprint (of countries). The goal is to show there is an ideal area where there is a high human development within the earth’s limits. But the printed slide is very small. One Wikipedia contributor kindly re-build the graph but you feel one can still do better. As always, it’s better to directly go back to the sources: the UNDP and the Global Footprint Network. The best starting point to explore this chart is this page from the GFN. But as usual you can find and explore these data with the excellent TrendAnalyzer tool from Gapminder.

UN HDI -vs- ecological footprint of countries (highlighted countries are the international trip destinations for Vlerick PTMBA students)

The second slide is the roadmap to Vision2050 designed by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). This roadmap is again very small below (you can also click on the image to have a bigger one). But the report contains the full roadmap. And for those who thought the vision is a bit fluffy, the WBCSD also has a *huge* pathway mural with more details than the vision.

WBCSD Vision2050

And for those who are really interested in this Vision2050, I invite you to the Closing Ceremony of the International Year of Chemistry, on December 1st 2011, in Brussels. There, among other things, “a team of young people/scientists will open a debate and introduce their expectations from the lifesciences and chemistry, industry and governments to build a better world in 2050” (disclaimer: I’m part of that team :)).

Applied microeconomics

This evening, at the end of the microeconomics class, Prof. Dr. Hans Geeroms left us this model to analyze. Strange, isn’t it?