3 ms·

Well yes that and, many in the world have gotten ridiculously rich. You don't see middle class tourists from Malawi flooding the Vatican Museums despite them ha

Well yes that and, many in the world have gotten ridiculously rich. You don't see middle class tourists from Malawi flooding the Vatican Museums despite them having access to the same information on their smartphones, you do see it happening with Chinese tourists because there's a ton of them who can actually afford it. I mean, I've traveled to four different continents as a student on minimum wage jobs. A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back. And especially if you're from a rich country, traveling means the odds are in your favour of actually spending less on things like food or local transportation than if you'd just stayed at home for the week. How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me. Owning a home with a toilet, access to a self-driving shared vehicle and a computer is an actual possibility for the hypothetical 3 billion middle-class people of the future who could afford it. But having an access ticket to Paris, despite 3 billion people being able to afford it, is not going to be feasible, ever. In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them.

csomar 8y ago
Well the 3Bn won't be visiting Paris every year. If they visited it in their lifetime (40 years) then it'd be 75 million per year. Not a small number but definitively feasible.
- IkmoIkmo 8y ago
  That's five times the 15m annual visitors today. (not tourists, visitors... for comparison, about 7m people visit the Eiffel tower each year, so it's more like 10x tourists, but let's assume 5x) On the contrary, I don't think that's feasible at all. The average tourist stays about a week. That means you've got about 1.4m tourists in the city on average, on a population of 2.2m. In other words, tourists as a group are about 60% the size of the local population. Then consider that tourism follows a sort of bell curve with months along the x axis. A month in July has about 2x the monthly average, so at peak holiday season you're looking at there being more tourists than locals in the city. That's an insane proposition. Similarly, tourism isn't spread out, but rather concentrated, the city centres become uninhabitable. Then consider the dynamics on the local economy. If you've got 3 billion (or 75 million) people's worldwide income bidding for some real estate, some food etc, against 2 million locals, prices will go through the roof. Local population will atrophy and the city turns into an open-air theme park. And that's assuming a single visit. I've been to Paris half a dozen times and it's not even a place I ever deliberately thought about wanting or needing to visit. And I'm sure I'll be there another 10 times in my lifetime. None of this is feasible if you ask me, outside of the extremely limited scope of stating it's strictly logistically not impossible to accommodate these numbers. The sociopolitical and cultural dynamics will break.
awucs 8y ago
> A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back. I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country. > How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me. It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company. > In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them. The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.
- sidibe 8y ago
  >I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country. Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe. People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice place.

csomar 8y ago

Well the 3Bn won't be visiting Paris every year. If they visited it in their lifetime (40 years) then it'd be 75 million per year. Not a small number but definitively feasible.

IkmoIkmo 8y ago
That's five times the 15m annual visitors today. (not tourists, visitors... for comparison, about 7m people visit the Eiffel tower each year, so it's more like 10x tourists, but let's assume 5x) On the contrary, I don't think that's feasible at all. The average tourist stays about a week. That means you've got about 1.4m tourists in the city on average, on a population of 2.2m. In other words, tourists as a group are about 60% the size of the local population. Then consider that tourism follows a sort of bell curve with months along the x axis. A month in July has about 2x the monthly average, so at peak holiday season you're looking at there being more tourists than locals in the city. That's an insane proposition. Similarly, tourism isn't spread out, but rather concentrated, the city centres become uninhabitable. Then consider the dynamics on the local economy. If you've got 3 billion (or 75 million) people's worldwide income bidding for some real estate, some food etc, against 2 million locals, prices will go through the roof. Local population will atrophy and the city turns into an open-air theme park. And that's assuming a single visit. I've been to Paris half a dozen times and it's not even a place I ever deliberately thought about wanting or needing to visit. And I'm sure I'll be there another 10 times in my lifetime. None of this is feasible if you ask me, outside of the extremely limited scope of stating it's strictly logistically not impossible to accommodate these numbers. The sociopolitical and cultural dynamics will break.

awucs 8y ago

> A flight across the world and back can be had for $500, in some EU countries like where I'm from, you can make that kind of money with three nightshifts in a bar as a young student. That's pretty ridiculous if you think about it, spending a few days serving drinks lets you go to the other side of the world and come back. I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country. > How you can sustain that if you have a few extra billion people in the middle-class is beyond me. It is certainly not a small problem. But that is always why every growing economy spawns these industrial giants that do a bit of everything like GE, Samsung or Hisense. The latter being a state owned Chinese company. > In that regard I have some major concerns about the future of certain cities, a lot of our consumption can scale with our wealth, but tourism to prime locations like the Vatican Museums or even certain cities just isn't one of them. The greatest difference (other the obvious access to information) is that it used to be sort of self-regulating, if not plain regulated. Because it only makes sense to have so many hotels in one place when you have to consider things like off-season. So if some city got popular at a certain time it got expensive to tourist there and you did care much because you just went somewhere else. When 'everyone is a hotel' you instead essentially compete with locals.

sidibe 8y ago
>I don't think the price itself is ridiculous. That would be the whole vacation budget for the year when I was growing up and surely is for many people even today. What is ridiculous to the point probably even sounding cliché is that inequality is out of control. The reason you can make a plane ticket in salary over a few days is because that is what it costs to sustain yourself in a major city if you don't own things like housing. And all the people who did own housing got rich so they can pay you. You are basically a migrant worker in your own country. Inequality is another issue, but this "overtourism" is because of the massive growth in the global middle class. It used to be only a tiny fraction of Chinese citizens could afford to go overseas. Now hundreds of millions of them can. And Europeans are also able to get around very cheaply now within Europe. People travel more. I think that's fine, sorry if you lived in a picturesque town, but I think it's fair to share it with the world if you live in a nice place.