Efact International Conference 2007

It all started at 8:30 A.M on 27st of October 2007!

Young men in suits looking hot, girls in formal skirts or just like me in formal trousers and a white blouse, laptop bags, coffee & tea, international faces and different languages talking about different economical topics, caressing my ears,… Oh I just loved this atmosphere; it was telling me I would never change my major ever again.

I went to the registration desk and they asked me the known simple, though problematic question: “what is your name?” I pronounced my name, and somehow it even felt strange to my own ears! I started spelling it, the young guy tried to remember it and went to find my card, and in the meanwhile I was again, for the 1000st time, really considering changing my name.
Fari would be a lot shorter and easy to remember, and Arya would be a great last name, it would still mean what my full last name means and is much easier to pronounce. Finally, before my mind had chosen other disastrous solutions for my name problem, the handsome Dutch guy came back with my attendance card and gave me a bag full of goodies! A nice black stationary for instance and information on the “Economics of Climate Change” the topic of this year’s Efact’s International Conference.

When we all were seated in the big Conference room of the Tilburg University, I totally forgot about my own pen and papers, and start using the chic black stationary they had given us.

At first Albert Luggenhorst, a student who also was the chairman of the Efact Conference Committee told us how President Bush had become really eager to organize a similar conference in America with the same topic, just as he had heard about our conference here in Tilburg. And what do you know, he even managed to do so that the conference in America was planned on the same date as ours. Each lecturer approved the above statement which all by all itchs me to write this next sentence: Bush grow up, Efact is just a student organization!

Mr. Hein Oorschot took the welcome word. Somewhere in his speech he mentioned ‘the changing of the names of the buildings of Tilburg University some weeks ago’, which was totally untrue. Mr. Oorschot, were you in a coma for a year? They were changed in august of 2006! But as many of the attendances were from other universities, they either overlooked this or didn’t care to say anything. It wasn’t a big disaster anyway, since the conference had nothing to do with the names of UvT’s buildings.

Then we had a lecture by Sir Nicolas Stern which was very interesting. He used to be Blair’s advisor and his Stern Review is the largest report on Climate Change (for those of you who thought Al Gore came up with this phenomenon, you are soooo mistaken! By the way Gore really had to deepen himself more to this topic, cause the name Global Warming is so vulgar and wrong!). Sir Stern kept on explaining many things which I was so amazed of! Correct me if I'm wrong but would you not be amazed if an Economist talked to you about natural science, and afterwards told you that all what he just said is based on “his” assumptions of what will happen at a 15degrees change, that it is “just” a modeling because the world has not experienced this yet and we should actually use a scientific modeling but scientists are very conservative about that so most models are until 5degrees change! And the rest is just his assumption. His assumption, meaning: an social-scientist's assumption on a natural-scientific topic!
In fact when Mr. Pronk (chairman of the day and an ex-minister of Dutch Parliament) asked Sir Stern how he had came up with the idea of a research in this field, Sir Stern explained he was in Africa and Mr Brown had asked him to research on this subject.

I so love the natural-scientists. They just don’t risk their whole careers which they have worked so hard for, for some political issues. Economists on the other hand do! As the biggest part of daily political issues depend on economical circumstances, economists fill a large part of (visible and direct- or non-visible/ indirect-) vacancies in politics. That was also the reason I was enrolled to the second parallel (afternoon) session: “Energy and Global Politics” and not the first: “Making Money out of Climate Change”. I thought the first session is good for business students.

You see, the whole day, we had Lectures by former ministers, members of the second chamber of Holland, President of IEA and even CEO of Rabobank, telling us all, with their variety in angels of bringing light to the subject, how important it is to become less Energy dependant. Mr. Franssen (President of International Energy Associates) talked to us about Iran and Russia who together have half the oil of the world, what these countries policies are and how unstable and insecure the western countries were made because of them. And there, right there I got it.
This topic had nothing to do with beautiful environment, and generations to come and yatta yatta yatta, it was about becoming independent from countries like Russia and Iran. It was about new technologies and budgeting new inventions to reform the whole western lifestyle which were impossible to realize if they didn’t fool the environment lovers as well as business lovers. (I am not saying whether this is a bad or a good thing, actually I think it is a brilliant solution to become independent).


All together, the conference was a perfect experience for me, I learned so much which I just can’t write here one by one. Things that help me develop myself into becoming a good Economic analyzer one day. And one thing I will never forget, as Mr. J. Terlouw suggested to us through a video Intermezzo: “never believe everything you hear”.

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PS. Almost a year later when I read this article again, it surprizes me to see, how I always end up falling in love with words of wisdom which are used by D66's faces.

Perdono il mia brezza...

Tiziano Ferro - Perdono

Hofstede's Framework for Assessing Culture

Our brains were full of micro-economical formulas when the Chinese professor left the room and the management lecture started.
It was the second half of the management program so we were supposed to expect a new professor walk in the room and teach us management behavior.
The professor was a French guy, with a big belly! He started the lecture with “Fogh zoz of you who doz not know me, my name is JMD and I’m from Fghans”. Yes well his R’s were more a GH (the French kind of R) and the zzzz’s pronounced by him, meant a simple English TH.
Aaah, but who cares about the accent, we have professors from east Europe, China, and Dutch professors who sometimes forget that the lectures are in English and most of the students are foreigners, and they just keep half of the lecture in Dutch!!
Mr. D was ok. He was joking from his first lecture, made eye contact with almost every one of us and was telling interesting things.
As he was telling us about how diversity of culture can be important to managers, he talked about Hofstede’s Framework for Assessing Cultures. He explained the five value dimensions of national culture which on employees and managers vary. And he gave us an example for “Uncertainty Avoidance” as follows:

“Some while ago I was in a cafeteria here in Holland, somewhere in the corner there was a coffee machine. Because the coffee was quite hot, people usually asked the lady who worked or maybe ran the cafeteria to simply give them a second empty cup, (you know! One of those plastic one-time-to-use cups) to put the full cup inside of it, so that their hands won’t get burned.

One day I asked the lady for a second cup, and she wasn’t very happy about giving me one, she looked around but she didn’t know how to tell me no, so she uncomfortably gave me a second cup. But the day after, when I went to the cafeteria, there was a paper pasted on the machine where the lady had wrote ‘an extra cup costs 5cents’ and thát is a simple example of uncertainty avoidance. In countries where people are very uncertain, people are always looking for written rules to back them up.”

Well it sounded ok, when I was at the lecture, but later-on when I was thinking it through one more time, it did not add up somehow.
For starters it is hard for me to believe that the people in Holland are very uncertain. We are talking about a Social Democratic country, with obligatorily insurances and social security bank. Let’s assume that they “are” insecure because of some systematic disorder in the country (which someone really has to fill me in on), but it still doesn’t make sense. Where I come from, and for those of you who don’t know: it’s Iran, the lady in the example above would not write something on the machine and refer to that when she wants to charge the costumer 5cents, instead she will yell and scream at the customer and tell him it will cost 1 dollar extra (!!) take it or leave it.
And as you know Iran, people certainly don’t feel secure about A-N-Y thing at all. So this is either a bad explanation by Monsieur D, or a good subject for the master students to research on.