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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

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).

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).