As any researcher will tell you, the difficultly of visualising complex datasets is quite simply, the challenge of finding a way to represent the numbers so that they actually mean something to the person who uses it.
In the interesting US/China trade example, the line weight gives an immediate indication to the size of the number, while color shows inports versus exports with Red being exports and green imports.
Given that, we see immediately some key facts. First, the US imports far more than it exports. In fact, the trade deficit is a whopping 810 billion USD. Inversely, China exports more than it imports to a tune of 31 billion USD difference.
We also see that Canada and China are almost neck and neck as importers to the US, with Canada at 335.6 billion USD and China at 337.8 billion USD, a mere 2.2 billion USD difference.
Looking at exports however, we see that Canada is a far more strategic trading partner for the US in terms of exports. In fact, the US exports more to Mexico at 151 billion USD, which is no surprise after NAFTA, than it does to China at 71 billion USD. What’s interesting is that the EU seems to be better at negotiating trading relations with China to the tune of an additional 60.7 billion USD a year worth of EU imports! The trade gap is also lower, at 168 billion USD versus the US’s 267.4 billion.
Diving deeper into the chart, Mint.com calls out the top 5 trade areas, little of which will come as a suprise to anybody who looks at any “Made in” labels in the US. So naturally, we have Apparel and Footwear, Computers and Parts, Toys and Bicycles, Televisions and Furniture being the top 5 import areas to the US, while the US is shipping soybeans, semiconductors, aircraft, plastics and copper to China.
Bearing that in mind, take a look at this next data visualisation from Armin Reller of the University of Augsburg, and Tom Graedel at Yale University.
Much of the exotic raw materials used to make consumer electronics, such as TV’s and Phones, are expected to last for only another 20 or so years if demand in emerging markets continues to grow as fast as it is now.
So by 2029, we will need to find new materials to make our TVs with, which, given the fast development pace of elctronics, seems completly doable. Although a good percentage of our raw materials can be recycled, such as copper and silver (we can always melt down our jewerly to get more), while others such as uraninium is not. Which means sometime between 19 to 59 years, we need new sources of energy.
What’s interesting about the two charts is that growth in trade, which the US constantly pushes like used car salesmen, will in fact cause an increasing strain on resources. In turn, fewer resources means that the cost of goods reliant on those resources go up and investment in companies reliant on them starts to look worse and worse.
And this is the inherent problem with the US (and British) economic model. If you are dependent on an ever increasing amount of global production to justify an ever increasing demand for profit, at some point you will hit the limit of your resourcing. We see this fastest in services based industries such as advertising where a company’s ability to deliver is linked directly to the number of people they have employed. Less people means less money.
The global answer to this limitation problem is to simply do more with less. Eventually however, the cost of stretching the usage of limited supplies available to the last possible moment will exceed the cost of switching to new solutions and technologies. This is what we are starting to see in the energy industry, where the cost of exploration, drilling, refining, shipping and distributing oil is growing to the point where alternative energy sources such as hydrogen, with all of its challenges, will actually be cheaper to develop than to maintain the status quo.
The future therefore, lies either in those companies that can innovate themselves out of the resource pit, or in the new companies that have found better ways to solve our global needs. Either way, growth in innovation is critical to ensure business continues in the future. Whether it’s technological innovation designed to maintain our current economic models, or economic and business innovation to discover alternative models for measuring and running future business.
