10 ms·

The Netherlands may be the first country to hit the limits of growth

74 points by montalbano 4y ago

c-fe 4y ago
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F4c56c9b2-f4ad-4956-9216-655acebd845d https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...
Proven 4y ago
wsc981 4y ago
Without paywall: https://archive.ph/kWbfR https://archive.ph/kWbfR
anovikov 4y ago
It will only limit growth in sectors where productivity is more or less fixed, like cafes and care homes. No problem about sectors where it can actually grow. It's not a "limit of growth". And labor shortage is a natural situation during actual economic growth: if you have too many people and not enough jobs, economy is in crisis. Now we have the opposite.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  If you can’t find housing or babysitters for your employees, how are you going to grow? By increasing employee productivity $somehow? Currently we have a labor, housing and energy shortage. Cost of living is huge (in my humble opinion), and I don’t see this problem being fixed in the next 10 years.
  - dr_dshiv 4y ago
    Secret: babysitters in Amsterdam are $12/hour. Secret: housing is cheaper than most American cities. Secret: graduating CS engineers make $45k. Secret: the Dutch urban template is well suited to produce/expand new cities. And 50 years ago they made a massive new province just 15 minutes from Amsterdam by raising the land out of the water. There is plenty of room for growth.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      >Secret: housing is cheaper than most American cities. Whatever my housing costs are, it's irelevant to compare them to US housing costs since I don't make US wages. I make local wages, and compared to those, housing is expensive.
    - stingraycharles 4y ago
      These are not secrets. $12/hr is a lot of money on a monthly basis. It also doesn’t help if there aren’t enough babysitters to fulfill demand. Housing is cheaper, but so are the salaries. Try figuring out how to pay for housing and a babysitter in Amsterdam on a $45k salary. Also, most people aren’t CS graduates.
  - vishnugupta 4y ago
    Isn't child care sort of socialised in Dutch? Through a combination of generous parental benefits, child care facilities (day-care/school) etc.,? I lived in Amsterdam for a short period and no one I knew had a regular babysitter. It seemed as if there are regulations around having a child care facility in the vicinity of every X number of houses.
    - GekkePrutser 4y ago
      Sort of, but it's also an unforgiving maze of regulations where any misstep is punished with extreme prejudice. A lot of people avoid the subsidy for this reason. One government fell over this (unfortunately the same government stepped right back in as if nothing had happened) and there was a big inquiry. But trust in the system is still minimal.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Housing costs is something that gets more complicated the closer I look. The mere material shell is literally dirt cheap, and can be made by someone in a jungle who starts by looking for rocks to bash together to make an axe to chop wood to fire clay into bricks and use the ash as mortar: https://youtu.be/eesj3pJF3lA https://youtu.be/eesj3pJF3lA But the shell isn't the expensive part. Even for much newer and fancier places, like where I live, most of our iconic cityscapes are either over a century old or from the immediate aftermath of WW2, and in either case made with and for a much lower income economy. What's really expensive is the land, and for that we bid against each other for the right to be close to the interesting things. The interesting things can be specific cultural centres, or good schools, or economic hubs; but it also includes the physical infrastructure, the roads and electricity and sewage systems.
  - anovikov 4y ago
    I have already explained labor shortage. And yes, when you have a growing economy you don't get babysitters: you need kindergartens. Anyone can get a babysitter in India. Almost no one can get one in Japan (where there is labor shortage, no immigrants, and no systematically poor underclass). Babysitters are a thing in either very poor or very unequal country, if anything, a middle class person being able to afford a babysitter is a very, very bad sign for a country. Cost of living means cost of labor (because for anything else productivity is unlimited), expensive place = well-developed, rich place. Energy shortage in a rich country can be solved through renewables and energy efficiency and only country i can think of which is better suited for that than Netherlands, is Denmark (maybe).
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  Right. "Labor shortage" is equivalent to "rising wages".
sime2009 4y ago
Even if the whole country was turned into one big urban area, 507 people per square km is no where near the population densities of many large cities in the world.
- AlchemistCamp 4y ago
  Taiwan has huge swaths of barely populated mountainous regions and yet its average is 673 people per sqkm. To put it another way, it's 1/10th the size of Japan and has about the population of Australia. The Netherlands has a lot more land suitable for residential housing and a lot less density. If this is hitting "the limit", then they're not doing it right.
  - simplotek 4y ago
    > The Netherlands has a lot more land suitable for residential housing and a lot less density. If this is hitting "the limit", then they're not doing it right. Why do you presume that all land suitable for residential housing should be destroyed by residential housing? There are far more types of uses than that. There is far more to life than having a place to work and to sleep.
    - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      I'm not making those assumptions. You should come to TW and do some bike-riding around the island sometime. It's beautiful.
      - durkie 4y ago
        i'm planning to in a few months! would love any pointers or recommendations :)
        autarch 4y ago
        Not GP but I highly recommend visiting the east coast of the island. The population density is much lower and it's really beautiful. You have to visit Taroko Gorge, which is a canyon with marble walls. It's amazing!
amelius 4y ago
They shouldn't export so much. Doesn't 90% of fresh flowers come from that country?
- jsty 4y ago
  > Doesn't 90% of fresh flowers come from that country? 47.9% of the global cut flower market in 2019 [0]. They do grow 90% of Europe's orchids [1] [0] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/netherlands-floriculture-market https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/netherla... [1] https://londonflowerschool.com/journal/inside-the-dutch-flower-industry https://londonflowerschool.com/journal/inside-the-dutch-flow...
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  The Netherlands has the majority of the worlds exports of fresh flowers. That doesn't include domestically grown and sold flowers.
pmoriarty 4y ago
They could always build down, or up, or just reclaim more land from the sea. I'd be more worried about completely land-locked countries, or ones who (unlike the Netherlands) don't have experience reclaiming land from the sea.
- kristo 4y ago
  The sea is pretty effectively reclaiming land back from them at this point. It's not a winning battle these days. It's also not so simple to build Manhattan style buildings on a sandpit
  - tdehnel 4y ago
    There is no logic to your claim at all. It is simply an engineering problem.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      The problem is natural disasters and catastrophes can beat human engineering most of the time.
  - Zeebrommer 4y ago
    I'm curious which lost land you are referring to. Building skyscrapers on former swamps is indeed difficult.
- pelorat 4y ago
  Sadly there's a huge resistance from the population and local municipalities to build high-rises. The municipalities usually have some rule that no building can be taller that the the old clock tower that virtually every town and city in the Netherlands have, this limits building height to about 70 meters. Then there's those people who will live in the shadow for 30 minutes and complain that this lowers their house price since they get less sunshine on their balconies or terraces. Then you have a faction that want every new building to look like a traditional building (2-3 stories tall made of bricks). Then there's the fact that towns and cities are very old, so you have these people who want to preserve the look at all cost.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
vasco 4y ago
The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more. Regarding the rest, it looks like a fake problem because they still have schemes like the reduced tax for several years to attract foreigners. Can't be both ways, politians can't say there's too many people while keeping the incentives. The practicality of the tax law speaks more than speeches. As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages". One only has to see that they've paid over $100m in compensation for missed flights to airlines yet at the end of August rolled back an extra €5 / per hour that they added to fight the problem. Result? Everyone quit again. Now they rolled out an extra €2.5/hour per security guard. Only if you are blind you don't see there's more at play here than simple "staff shortages". People haven't died, they just don't want your shitty job when they can do remote customer support for some startup for more money and not deal with rude tourists all day.
- jacooper 4y ago
  > The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more. This is honestly just dumb. Many of the climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy are really really dumb. > As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages". But why? Is it also to reduce emissions? They don't want to actually do something meaningful, so they cause havoc in the Airport to reduce emissions? What is going on?
  - TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    > climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy It's not a climate action. It's an environmental action, which there's an overlap with, but which is not the same thing.
ndlzk 4y ago
Many of the problems seem to be because of the EU - maybe they should fix that instead of stopping growth?
- mhitza 4y ago
  What do you mean by "fixing that". Increasing even more emission limits? We are already going down a serious climate change path, so let's contribute even more on that front?
  - ndlzk 4y ago
    If that’s what people in the Netherlands want why not?
  - acta_non_verba 4y ago
    Fixing it here would mean acknowledging that you cannot run an entire continent of different peoples, languages and cultures (which affect priorities, such as climate be economy) using one central entity.
  - pelorat 4y ago
    If more people could live in the cities they would not need cars. Seriously, cars are the biggest problem in the NL. Not emissions from farming or construction.
    - ghusto 4y ago
      Emissions from cow farming are a big problem. Even if you don't think it's worse than car pollution (which I'd argue it is, by a long way), the solutions are not mutually exclusive, I think we can agree on that. As for more people being able to live in cities, those who live outside them do so out of choice. You couldn't pay me enough to live in a place like the Hague or Amsterdam. They're fine places, just not for everyone. And there's the real issue: The Netherlands is full, not because it's not possible for it to grow further, but because it's not possible without reducing the quality of life. This idea of growth being beyond reproach is thankfully not present in the Netherlands.
mkl95 4y ago
I recall reading Iceland could roughly sustain 50k people before the industrial era. It took them a long time to sustain the hundreds of thousands that live there today.
jokoon 4y ago
Sometimes I wonder if I'm not depressed because of all those economic choices that makes no sense to me. I have known about climate change for 20 years now, since I was a teenager, which is why I never really wanted to have a car or get money. I guess one person can become depressed because the world doesn't make sense.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  > economic choices that makes no sense to me Economics makes no sense. End of. That's why it's econ-omics and not econ-ology. Don't get disheartened over the idea that there's some super-smart people out there who ought to know what they're doing. There isn't and they don't. Like Art, it's whatever you want it to be.
- tdehnel 4y ago
  Of course it makes sense to become depressed. You have been convinced that shrinking into a hole is necessary to save the planet. You’re obsessed with environmental purity and afraid to make a mark on the world. What if the opposite were true?
  - more_corn 4y ago
    There is probably a third way.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    I have seen way more articles about how millennials,etc should cut back on avocado toast (an euphemism for shrinking into a hole) than I have seen anyone say to reduce consumption for climate change. The ones people are shrinking into a hole for are previous home and landowners.
- jacooper 4y ago
  This article is for you. (Yes its about kids, but it talks about how its not doom and gloom like the media says). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-should-you-have-kids.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-sh...
walnutclosefarm 4y ago
Seems very questionable to me to call out Netherlands as having reached some hard limit that a country like Singapore has blown right by. Singapore has a 40% greater GDP per capita, 16 times (!) the population density, and would starve in a matter of weeks without food imports, or grind to a halt almost overnight, without energy imports. 3/4 of its GDP is services based. All of which is to say, a small nation with the right niche economic model can blow by the supposed limits Netherlands is encountering, albeit at the cost of any semblance of having a balanced or remotely self-sufficient economy.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  > 16 times (!) the population density This might come as a surprise to you, but that's the nightmare Europeans don't want. Europeans don't want to live as cramped as people in the big Asian metro areas do, and neither do the people living there which is why they emigrate if they can. So yeah, while it's technically possible to keep increasing population density several times over, most Europeans don't want that, as it means a decline in living standards and quality of life. We might as well just live in pods in giant towers like the humans farmed for energy in The Matrix, if that's the end game of human living density, but nobody wants to live like that.
  - pelorat 4y ago
    I don't know about you, but I live on the 3rd floor in a NL city where building limit height is 70 meters. I have 12 hours of sun on my balcony and it's honestly great, but if I could move into a 200 meter high mega tower and have a balcony, maybe an inner yard as well, and a cool roof terrace with glass around it, I would in a heartbeat.
    - Tade0 4y ago
      Problem is, your downstairs neighbours all the way to the bottom have progressively worse quality of life - especially those on who your tower is casting its shadow.
  - tinus_hn 4y ago
glitchc 4y ago
At the limit of growth while still supporting a (large) monarchy. Correlated?
AdriaanvRossum 4y ago
> Fantastically productive Dutch farms have made this tiny country the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter. In 2021 30% of total agricultural export is re-export. [1] Also interesting: “Re-exports to the UK down by 35 percent due to Brexit” [1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/03/agricultural-exports-exceeded-100-billion-euros-in-2021 https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/03/agricultural-exports-e...
55555 4y ago
Is this a real problem or a fake problem? Every airport is struggling for the most part because they lost all staff over the past few years and have to hire them all back at once. Besides I was at Schiphol recently and it was fantastic -- no queues. I didn't notice any issue with restaurants in Amsterdam. Housing costs in AMS are also relatively acceptable in my opinion. Have a few statistics and a lot of anecdata been stretched to their breaking point in this article? Is there even a problem?
- jacooper 4y ago
  > Every airport is struggling for the most part *In the West. Come to Dubai, Doha, Riyadh or any of the eastern airports and you won't find any problems. Probably your are going to find even better service.
  - CobaltFire 4y ago
    Dubai isn't a good place to be championing; they rely on slave labor [0] to keep their economy moving, and that has effects all the way up the chain. [0] https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=jss https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
    - jacooper 4y ago
      If we are going to talk about slaves, Then that also includes America which has slave labor from prisons, where people work an entire month for less than a dollar. And of course that's without talking about countries America destroyed and stole their Natural resources like Iraq.
      - CobaltFire 4y ago
        I don't typically engage with people who don't address the argument at hand and instead engage in diversionary tactics. What I addressed was your holding up a slave/petro/religious state as an example of anything good (I can't think of any major lessons they can give to anyone on anything to do with civil rights or labor practices). In this case, I abhor the US stance on prison labor enough that I feel compelled to agree with you. It does not excuse any of the slavery in the Middle East, but the US does have its own issues. As a clarification, the lowest wage I could find was $0.13/hr, so not a month for a dollar, but not functionally different ($1/day or so). As for the Middle East wars... yeah. Not a fan of those.
jacooper 4y ago
> while liveable land is shrinking due to climate change Why? The article doesn't go into detail about this. Is it because the climate is getting hotter and people are migrating to colder places? Instead of you know using air conditioning. Then this just feels a country that doesn't want to grow, not that it hit any actual limits. Isn't this also similar to what's happening in Japan?
- egman_ekki 4y ago
  My guess would be that lots of the country actually lies below the sea level and so some land is lost to the rising sea. https://www.politico.eu/article/when-will-the-netherlands-disappear-climate-change/ https://www.politico.eu/article/when-will-the-netherlands-di...
tamade 4y ago
"Importing more migrant workers isn’t a popular idea..." well there you have it.
LatteLazy 4y ago
The whole idea of limits of growth is just bullshit. It would require a limit not only to population and resources, but also hard limits (that happen to all occur in the 2020s) to innovation, marketing, creative industries, social and demographic change, efficiency increase, changes in management and government action. The only way to stop economic growth is to stop all change at every level in society, including all individuals' preferences and fashions.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Infinite growth is very easy. Just collapse the economy and rebuild in an endless cycle. You will end up with less total economic activity than if there was no addiction to unnecessary growth but ok, let's fight to our deaths via wars because of it anyway.
samson8989 4y ago
https://archive.ph/kWbfR https://archive.ph/kWbfR Paywall free link

74 points by montalbano 4y ago

c-fe 4y ago

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2F4c56c9b2-f4ad-4956-9216-655acebd845d https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ft.com%2Fcontent%2...

Proven 4y ago

wsc981 4y ago

Without paywall: https://archive.ph/kWbfR https://archive.ph/kWbfR

anovikov 4y ago

It will only limit growth in sectors where productivity is more or less fixed, like cafes and care homes. No problem about sectors where it can actually grow. It's not a "limit of growth". And labor shortage is a natural situation during actual economic growth: if you have too many people and not enough jobs, economy is in crisis. Now we have the opposite.

stingraycharles 4y ago
If you can’t find housing or babysitters for your employees, how are you going to grow? By increasing employee productivity $somehow? Currently we have a labor, housing and energy shortage. Cost of living is huge (in my humble opinion), and I don’t see this problem being fixed in the next 10 years.
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Secret: babysitters in Amsterdam are $12/hour. Secret: housing is cheaper than most American cities. Secret: graduating CS engineers make $45k. Secret: the Dutch urban template is well suited to produce/expand new cities. And 50 years ago they made a massive new province just 15 minutes from Amsterdam by raising the land out of the water. There is plenty of room for growth.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    >Secret: housing is cheaper than most American cities. Whatever my housing costs are, it's irelevant to compare them to US housing costs since I don't make US wages. I make local wages, and compared to those, housing is expensive.
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    These are not secrets. $12/hr is a lot of money on a monthly basis. It also doesn’t help if there aren’t enough babysitters to fulfill demand. Housing is cheaper, but so are the salaries. Try figuring out how to pay for housing and a babysitter in Amsterdam on a $45k salary. Also, most people aren’t CS graduates.
- vishnugupta 4y ago
  Isn't child care sort of socialised in Dutch? Through a combination of generous parental benefits, child care facilities (day-care/school) etc.,? I lived in Amsterdam for a short period and no one I knew had a regular babysitter. It seemed as if there are regulations around having a child care facility in the vicinity of every X number of houses.
  - GekkePrutser 4y ago
    Sort of, but it's also an unforgiving maze of regulations where any misstep is punished with extreme prejudice. A lot of people avoid the subsidy for this reason. One government fell over this (unfortunately the same government stepped right back in as if nothing had happened) and there was a big inquiry. But trust in the system is still minimal.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Housing costs is something that gets more complicated the closer I look. The mere material shell is literally dirt cheap, and can be made by someone in a jungle who starts by looking for rocks to bash together to make an axe to chop wood to fire clay into bricks and use the ash as mortar: https://youtu.be/eesj3pJF3lA https://youtu.be/eesj3pJF3lA But the shell isn't the expensive part. Even for much newer and fancier places, like where I live, most of our iconic cityscapes are either over a century old or from the immediate aftermath of WW2, and in either case made with and for a much lower income economy. What's really expensive is the land, and for that we bid against each other for the right to be close to the interesting things. The interesting things can be specific cultural centres, or good schools, or economic hubs; but it also includes the physical infrastructure, the roads and electricity and sewage systems.
- anovikov 4y ago
  I have already explained labor shortage. And yes, when you have a growing economy you don't get babysitters: you need kindergartens. Anyone can get a babysitter in India. Almost no one can get one in Japan (where there is labor shortage, no immigrants, and no systematically poor underclass). Babysitters are a thing in either very poor or very unequal country, if anything, a middle class person being able to afford a babysitter is a very, very bad sign for a country. Cost of living means cost of labor (because for anything else productivity is unlimited), expensive place = well-developed, rich place. Energy shortage in a rich country can be solved through renewables and energy efficiency and only country i can think of which is better suited for that than Netherlands, is Denmark (maybe).
BurningFrog 4y ago
Right. "Labor shortage" is equivalent to "rising wages".

sime2009 4y ago

Even if the whole country was turned into one big urban area, 507 people per square km is no where near the population densities of many large cities in the world.

AlchemistCamp 4y ago
Taiwan has huge swaths of barely populated mountainous regions and yet its average is 673 people per sqkm. To put it another way, it's 1/10th the size of Japan and has about the population of Australia. The Netherlands has a lot more land suitable for residential housing and a lot less density. If this is hitting "the limit", then they're not doing it right.
- simplotek 4y ago
  > The Netherlands has a lot more land suitable for residential housing and a lot less density. If this is hitting "the limit", then they're not doing it right. Why do you presume that all land suitable for residential housing should be destroyed by residential housing? There are far more types of uses than that. There is far more to life than having a place to work and to sleep.
  - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    I'm not making those assumptions. You should come to TW and do some bike-riding around the island sometime. It's beautiful.
    - durkie 4y ago
      i'm planning to in a few months! would love any pointers or recommendations :)
      - autarch 4y ago
        Not GP but I highly recommend visiting the east coast of the island. The population density is much lower and it's really beautiful. You have to visit Taroko Gorge, which is a canyon with marble walls. It's amazing!

amelius 4y ago

They shouldn't export so much. Doesn't 90% of fresh flowers come from that country?

jsty 4y ago
> Doesn't 90% of fresh flowers come from that country? 47.9% of the global cut flower market in 2019 [0]. They do grow 90% of Europe's orchids [1] [0] https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/netherlands-floriculture-market https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/netherla... [1] https://londonflowerschool.com/journal/inside-the-dutch-flower-industry https://londonflowerschool.com/journal/inside-the-dutch-flow...
frosted-flakes 4y ago
The Netherlands has the majority of the worlds exports of fresh flowers. That doesn't include domestically grown and sold flowers.

pmoriarty 4y ago

They could always build down, or up, or just reclaim more land from the sea. I'd be more worried about completely land-locked countries, or ones who (unlike the Netherlands) don't have experience reclaiming land from the sea.

kristo 4y ago
The sea is pretty effectively reclaiming land back from them at this point. It's not a winning battle these days. It's also not so simple to build Manhattan style buildings on a sandpit
- tdehnel 4y ago
  There is no logic to your claim at all. It is simply an engineering problem.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    The problem is natural disasters and catastrophes can beat human engineering most of the time.
- Zeebrommer 4y ago
  I'm curious which lost land you are referring to. Building skyscrapers on former swamps is indeed difficult.
pelorat 4y ago
Sadly there's a huge resistance from the population and local municipalities to build high-rises. The municipalities usually have some rule that no building can be taller that the the old clock tower that virtually every town and city in the Netherlands have, this limits building height to about 70 meters. Then there's those people who will live in the shadow for 30 minutes and complain that this lowers their house price since they get less sunshine on their balconies or terraces. Then you have a faction that want every new building to look like a traditional building (2-3 stories tall made of bricks). Then there's the fact that towns and cities are very old, so you have these people who want to preserve the look at all cost.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

vasco 4y ago

The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more. Regarding the rest, it looks like a fake problem because they still have schemes like the reduced tax for several years to attract foreigners. Can't be both ways, politians can't say there's too many people while keeping the incentives. The practicality of the tax law speaks more than speeches. As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages". One only has to see that they've paid over $100m in compensation for missed flights to airlines yet at the end of August rolled back an extra €5 / per hour that they added to fight the problem. Result? Everyone quit again. Now they rolled out an extra €2.5/hour per security guard. Only if you are blind you don't see there's more at play here than simple "staff shortages". People haven't died, they just don't want your shitty job when they can do remote customer support for some startup for more money and not deal with rude tourists all day.

jacooper 4y ago
> The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more. This is honestly just dumb. Many of the climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy are really really dumb. > As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages". But why? Is it also to reduce emissions? They don't want to actually do something meaningful, so they cause havoc in the Airport to reduce emissions? What is going on?
- TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
  > climate actions taken in European countries like stopping nuclear energy It's not a climate action. It's an environmental action, which there's an overlap with, but which is not the same thing.

ndlzk 4y ago

Many of the problems seem to be because of the EU - maybe they should fix that instead of stopping growth?

mhitza 4y ago
What do you mean by "fixing that". Increasing even more emission limits? We are already going down a serious climate change path, so let's contribute even more on that front?
- ndlzk 4y ago
  If that’s what people in the Netherlands want why not?
- acta_non_verba 4y ago
  Fixing it here would mean acknowledging that you cannot run an entire continent of different peoples, languages and cultures (which affect priorities, such as climate be economy) using one central entity.
- pelorat 4y ago
  If more people could live in the cities they would not need cars. Seriously, cars are the biggest problem in the NL. Not emissions from farming or construction.
  - ghusto 4y ago
    Emissions from cow farming are a big problem. Even if you don't think it's worse than car pollution (which I'd argue it is, by a long way), the solutions are not mutually exclusive, I think we can agree on that. As for more people being able to live in cities, those who live outside them do so out of choice. You couldn't pay me enough to live in a place like the Hague or Amsterdam. They're fine places, just not for everyone. And there's the real issue: The Netherlands is full, not because it's not possible for it to grow further, but because it's not possible without reducing the quality of life. This idea of growth being beyond reproach is thankfully not present in the Netherlands.

mkl95 4y ago

I recall reading Iceland could roughly sustain 50k people before the industrial era. It took them a long time to sustain the hundreds of thousands that live there today.

jokoon 4y ago

Sometimes I wonder if I'm not depressed because of all those economic choices that makes no sense to me. I have known about climate change for 20 years now, since I was a teenager, which is why I never really wanted to have a car or get money. I guess one person can become depressed because the world doesn't make sense.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
> economic choices that makes no sense to me Economics makes no sense. End of. That's why it's econ-omics and not econ-ology. Don't get disheartened over the idea that there's some super-smart people out there who ought to know what they're doing. There isn't and they don't. Like Art, it's whatever you want it to be.
tdehnel 4y ago
Of course it makes sense to become depressed. You have been convinced that shrinking into a hole is necessary to save the planet. You’re obsessed with environmental purity and afraid to make a mark on the world. What if the opposite were true?
- more_corn 4y ago
  There is probably a third way.
- imtringued 4y ago
  I have seen way more articles about how millennials,etc should cut back on avocado toast (an euphemism for shrinking into a hole) than I have seen anyone say to reduce consumption for climate change. The ones people are shrinking into a hole for are previous home and landowners.
jacooper 4y ago
This article is for you. (Yes its about kids, but it talks about how its not doom and gloom like the media says). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-should-you-have-kids.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-sh...

walnutclosefarm 4y ago

Seems very questionable to me to call out Netherlands as having reached some hard limit that a country like Singapore has blown right by. Singapore has a 40% greater GDP per capita, 16 times (!) the population density, and would starve in a matter of weeks without food imports, or grind to a halt almost overnight, without energy imports. 3/4 of its GDP is services based. All of which is to say, a small nation with the right niche economic model can blow by the supposed limits Netherlands is encountering, albeit at the cost of any semblance of having a balanced or remotely self-sufficient economy.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
> 16 times (!) the population density This might come as a surprise to you, but that's the nightmare Europeans don't want. Europeans don't want to live as cramped as people in the big Asian metro areas do, and neither do the people living there which is why they emigrate if they can. So yeah, while it's technically possible to keep increasing population density several times over, most Europeans don't want that, as it means a decline in living standards and quality of life. We might as well just live in pods in giant towers like the humans farmed for energy in The Matrix, if that's the end game of human living density, but nobody wants to live like that.
- pelorat 4y ago
  I don't know about you, but I live on the 3rd floor in a NL city where building limit height is 70 meters. I have 12 hours of sun on my balcony and it's honestly great, but if I could move into a 200 meter high mega tower and have a balcony, maybe an inner yard as well, and a cool roof terrace with glass around it, I would in a heartbeat.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    Problem is, your downstairs neighbours all the way to the bottom have progressively worse quality of life - especially those on who your tower is casting its shadow.
- tinus_hn 4y ago

glitchc 4y ago

At the limit of growth while still supporting a (large) monarchy. Correlated?

AdriaanvRossum 4y ago

> Fantastically productive Dutch farms have made this tiny country the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter. In 2021 30% of total agricultural export is re-export. [1] Also interesting: “Re-exports to the UK down by 35 percent due to Brexit” [1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/03/agricultural-exports-exceeded-100-billion-euros-in-2021 https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/03/agricultural-exports-e...

55555 4y ago

Is this a real problem or a fake problem? Every airport is struggling for the most part because they lost all staff over the past few years and have to hire them all back at once. Besides I was at Schiphol recently and it was fantastic -- no queues. I didn't notice any issue with restaurants in Amsterdam. Housing costs in AMS are also relatively acceptable in my opinion. Have a few statistics and a lot of anecdata been stretched to their breaking point in this article? Is there even a problem?

jacooper 4y ago
> Every airport is struggling for the most part *In the West. Come to Dubai, Doha, Riyadh or any of the eastern airports and you won't find any problems. Probably your are going to find even better service.
- CobaltFire 4y ago
  Dubai isn't a good place to be championing; they rely on slave labor [0] to keep their economy moving, and that has effects all the way up the chain. [0] https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=jss https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...
  - jacooper 4y ago
    If we are going to talk about slaves, Then that also includes America which has slave labor from prisons, where people work an entire month for less than a dollar. And of course that's without talking about countries America destroyed and stole their Natural resources like Iraq.
    - CobaltFire 4y ago
      I don't typically engage with people who don't address the argument at hand and instead engage in diversionary tactics. What I addressed was your holding up a slave/petro/religious state as an example of anything good (I can't think of any major lessons they can give to anyone on anything to do with civil rights or labor practices). In this case, I abhor the US stance on prison labor enough that I feel compelled to agree with you. It does not excuse any of the slavery in the Middle East, but the US does have its own issues. As a clarification, the lowest wage I could find was $0.13/hr, so not a month for a dollar, but not functionally different ($1/day or so). As for the Middle East wars... yeah. Not a fan of those.

jacooper 4y ago

> while liveable land is shrinking due to climate change Why? The article doesn't go into detail about this. Is it because the climate is getting hotter and people are migrating to colder places? Instead of you know using air conditioning. Then this just feels a country that doesn't want to grow, not that it hit any actual limits. Isn't this also similar to what's happening in Japan?

egman_ekki 4y ago
My guess would be that lots of the country actually lies below the sea level and so some land is lost to the rising sea. https://www.politico.eu/article/when-will-the-netherlands-disappear-climate-change/ https://www.politico.eu/article/when-will-the-netherlands-di...

tamade 4y ago

"Importing more migrant workers isn’t a popular idea..." well there you have it.

LatteLazy 4y ago

The whole idea of limits of growth is just bullshit. It would require a limit not only to population and resources, but also hard limits (that happen to all occur in the 2020s) to innovation, marketing, creative industries, social and demographic change, efficiency increase, changes in management and government action. The only way to stop economic growth is to stop all change at every level in society, including all individuals' preferences and fashions.

imtringued 4y ago
Infinite growth is very easy. Just collapse the economy and rebuild in an endless cycle. You will end up with less total economic activity than if there was no addiction to unnecessary growth but ok, let's fight to our deaths via wars because of it anyway.

samson8989 4y ago

https://archive.ph/kWbfR https://archive.ph/kWbfR Paywall free link