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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.

> 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.

>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.

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.

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.

> The truth is that some places are nicer to live or visit than others, and if you don't have the money to play the game then you aren't welcome.

Yes, and in the good old days, that niceness was a local property: The rich got the nicest places in the area and the poor got the shittiest places in the area.

I guess when globalisation is fully realized, according to this, the rich will get the nicest places globally and the poor will get the shittiest places globally.

Why do we want that future again?

That already happened. A friend of mom, his aunt, owned a house in a bay in Ibiza during the 1960s. She bought it for €150k back in the day (which still was a lot of money back then).

A few years ago, she sold it for €12 million.

According to this [0] calculator, $150K in 1965 is nearly exactly $12M in todays dollars (not sure how to inflation-adjust euros back into the sixties :-) ).

[0] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

It's $1.2m actually according to the calculator, not $12m. So the asset went up 10x more than inflation in those 55 years.

I am getting $1.2M. What it would make more sense. Ibiza in the 60s was dirty cheap compared to what it is today.

There's a shortage of nice places, so they will be rationed out, either by money or by politics and violence.

Has anyone considered making more nice places?

Almost all the examples of “nice places” I’ve seen on this post have been artificial.

That works, with a few caveats.

1. It takes time.

2. The places need to be intrinsically nice, not "generically pleasing to tourists at this moment" - those wear out quickly.

3. Popularity breeds popularity, so the tried-and-true sites stay popular.

It comes down to the world moving faster than the infrastructure was designed to handle.

And that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think it's a net good that so many more people can afford to go the Paris, own an internet-capable device, read about happenings on the other side of the world.

Having so much data changed the game, and we're struggling to catch back up.

Optimistically, I do believe it is self-correcting, as more and more people learn that the crowds are too big, and the prices have gone up too much.

> but more basically as an unavoidable side-effect of globalization.

Globalization or overpopulation.

If you moved the entire population of the Earth to the United States and spread it out evenly, there would only be about 2000 people/square mile (7% as dense as New York City).

So not overpopulation as much as everyone wanting to live in/go to the same handful of places. And now they are all mostly making choices based on the same sets of data (Yelp reviews, AirBnb etc etc).

This statistics-speak is pointless. There are not that many places you would want to live at. Mojave dessert, mountainious area? Sahara, Greenland ...

Personally speaking, the main reason I wouldn’t want to live in any of those places is because of the lack of people — cities and buildings can be designed around the terrain… but if no one else is there, what’s the point?

Counterpoint: Las Vegas is in the middle of a desert - yet immensely popular.

Yet there are people who live in those places. Pointless? That statistic really puts in perspective for me how much empty space there is in the world.

Most of the available land that is capable of the agriculture needed to support the current populations are in use though.