The backlash against overtourism
economist.com
economist.com
Nearby Venice there's so much interesting stuff and small cities, a bit further are big cities. None of them really struggles with tourists as much as Venice. Maybe you'll see a huge line for Firenze Duomo but that's it, streets and other sights are practically lineless.
Why Florence struggles with Duomo and Venice struggles in general? Because they're famous all over the world for things they're struggle with. Everyone know about floating city of Venice, and Florence's Cathedral. Those things are being romanticised for centuries.
All Italy has to do is start load balancing tourists. Advertise other sights in the area, build easier public commute to other stuff. They have means to do so, they have tourism ad budget, they have 'city_name' cards which grant discounts to different sights.
I've been to Croatia this summer, they are struggling with Dubrovnik too. But most beautiful things are not there. Plitvice is like heaven and past 2pm I was walking there practically alone, Split's old city is as beautiful as Dubronik's and except 12-2pm is not crowded, beaches in Makarska and on Hvar are way more scenic and comfortable than Italy's and there's no crowds.
Go other places or rot in queues of over advertised sights.
I do know people who genuinely want to have a nice, relaxing vacation. They book holidays at the beach, in warm countries, at 5* hotels. They don't bother much with overrated and crowded touristy places, really.
Want to walk around the city walls? That'll be €20! And if over-priced, mediocre restaurants are your thing, there's plenty of them too.
This is the approach the city of Amsterdam is trying in order to alleviate the huge tourism pressure. I'm not sure how effective it has been. It has resulted in funny things like "Amsterdam Castle" or "Amsterdam Beach" in tourist promotions that have nothing to do with Amsterdam. But, if it spreads the load...
We actually found Florence to be busy almost everywhere, even with lots of people still wandering around at night. The Uffizi was the one place that was impossible to enjoy, mostly because of the tour groups. I wish they would limit the number of people in any given room at a time. But, we wandered across to the Museo Galileo and had it to ourselves.
The one thing that bugs me about museum tours these days is that they all wear in-ear headphones connected to the guide. Which means whereas before you'd mostly have groups of 5 people with one guide, you now have groups of 20 people walking 20 meters behind one guide because distance isn't an issue. Some rooms become unbearable, it's like you take a super busy street market in Mumbai and hang up some paintings and expect people to enjoy the art while navigating through a flood of people.
In a way it helps because you get fewer guides and possibly less shouting. You'd hope this makes things more quiet but it doesn't. It drops the costs of a guide for individuals to next to nothing due to the size of the groups, so you get massive groups and more groups.
Having a few groups of two or three individuals standing around isn't an issue. But when it's a blob of 15-20 people, it's no longer possible to navigate through it or look through/past it, you have to go around and if they're infront of an art piece, you're mostly out of luck.
As for the city, in many parts you hardly hear any Italian and if you do, it's someone in the tourist business trying to sell you something.
I'm not necessarily complaining, I'm part of the problem haha. Just sharing my experience.
Does seem to support the article's hypothesis that people are really determined to collect the marquee experience and don't necessarily feel motivated to do much else.
While medieval and in a certain shabby way as attractive as Firenze they only get a small percentage of the tourists.
One could argue that, by accounting for eight per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, tourism is killing the sights along with the planet.
Any unnecessary and polluting economic activity that is actively killing the planet, yes.
> A greenhousing effect would also not be harmful to all or even most tourist sites.
I doubt that. If it won't be directly harmful in the next 100 years, there will be as many as 143 million people that'll be displaced due to climate change by 2050. Even if the tourist sites in question are in relatively safe locations such as Europe, you will most certainly not recognize them.
All economic activity pollutes, and therefore according to your logic, is "actively killing the planet".
And if you want to be Spartan about it, a significant portion of economic activity is unnecessary, so your criticism is equally applicable to a major share of everything humans do.
In reality people need more than the basic necessities, and will pursue more than them. You're not offering a reasonable way forward with your over-critical analysis that singles out tourism as a harmful activity because of a particular set of properties that it has, that are shared by numerous other activities.
There's a reason they've been "romanticised for centuries", even when there was not a "lure tourists" motive: they are beautiful.
(Not that 90% of the modern tourists could appreciate beauty in anything else than a superficial way, as something to photograph semi-bored to post to their social account, when what they really want is a burger and some shopping -- but I digress).
Those other places, not so much. So, this "load balancing" can't work very well.
Are you arguing those other, less known places are not beautiful? I can't agree with that.
There are perfectly valid reasons why Florence and Venice are tourist bottlenecks: they are well known because they are historically important cities, featured in famous works of arts -- paintings, literature, etc -- all over the world. So of course I want to see Venice and cities like it: they have well deserved fame. But they are not the only or even the most beautiful cities, they are just the most well known (again, for valid reasons).
The same reasoning can be applied to many "tourist bottlenecks": of course it's reasonable to want to see the Mona Lisa or visit the Eiffel Tower: they are world famous! You learned about them in school! But are they the best or the most beautiful? Nope.
(For the record: I thought Venice was ugly. YMMV)
Well, yes. Milan or Napoli or Brindisi or whatever, is no Florence or Venice or Rome. And there are nice cities like Verona that are nonetheless not in the league of the latter.
You can find nice landscapes all around Italy, but if you want to visit cities, some are naturally more beautiful than others.
Like how Santa Fe is nicer looking than Oklahoma City.
>But they are not the only or even the most beautiful cities, they are just the most well known (again, for valid reasons).
Well, they are the most well known for their beauty. Part of it is totally objective reasons: they were huge wealthy patrons of the arts (Florence) and capitals of naval empires (Venice), so they have more major works (architectural, etc) built than others.
1. Gouge the hell out of tourists by jacking up the taxes on hotels & tourist attractions. Exemptions provided only for those with local IDs/passports
2. Redistribute the resulting tax dollars to all city residents
Either you will successfully drive away all tourists, or you'll be making so much money that your residents will love them.
The fact that no city is actually doing this, makes me think that no one really has a problem with "overtourism". They just love to complain about it, while still hooked to the GDP boost tourists bring.
One of the result is less and less “true” residents. That’s what is happening with airbnb, where some people prefer to move away and dedicate their appart to tourism, even if it’s only for part of the year.
Or restaurants and other services used by everyone get tourism focused, and while money flows in, quality of life goes down.
I think that’s one case where money doesn’t solve the issue (provided it’s an issue to solve, some might argue)
If someone has an example of a city that manages to use taxes/regulation on tourism to provide for the people who have to live there I'd like to hear it.
That does not solve the other large problem; most residents do not want to live in a hotel district with other tourists, and especially not as hallway or floor mates. And residents do not want new hotel builds or conversions competing with apartments. With traditional hotels this is solved with permits and zoning, but AirBnB is usable on pretty much all residential units.
Saying moving is an option trivializes how difficult moving can be, and is about as helpful as saying, "If you don't like the current president, why don't you just move to another country?"
The other argument I see is that it prices out locals. Sure, allowing someone to own a 6-unit building and rent it out as a de-facto hotel will increase housing prices. But allowing locals to rent out their apartment while they're traveling has the opposite effect - it makes property more affordable by increasing utilization.
Allowing people to rent out their apartment doesn't make property more affordable, it allows people to bid up rents with AirBnB income and it prices out people on the margins unable or unwilling to rent out their own home.
I don't get a dime if someone starts renting next door via airbnb to endless parties of nightlife addicted tourists.
I shit you not (believe me, I wish I were), the town is looking into running it's own pet cemetery. If that isn't boondoggle waste I don't know what is.
Locals still pay high vehicle excise taxes, town dump fees are sky high (the rust belt city I now live in takes my trash away every week for less $$), there's a big fee for a (local resident) beach parking lot pass, etc, etc so it's not like the town is using it's windfall to ease the burden on everyone else.
I think expecting a suddenly cash flush government to fairly distribute it is a recipe for disappointment. I would be very wary of the "profit centers" (e.g. hospitality industry) achieving something akin to regulatory capture whereby they get whatever they want because they're the money makers for the town.
I'd love for municipalities to be able to make money hand over fist using tourism and then use that money to provide for their citizens (like Norway does with oil money) but I have near zero confidence that can happen without being corrupted by special interests and the well connected.
Reading that as a child actually led me to travel less than I really want to as an adult. Instead, I enjoy making my small part of the world 'mine' instead of trying to make the rest of the world 'mine'.
If I want the sensation of being somewhere busy I could just drive an hour and walk main street in my closest city. I'm sure all the shops and attractions there would love to see you more often as much as the ones halfway around the world would.
And the good news is a lot of missing pieces (the grandeur and immersion that comes with being somewhere in person) can be improved on with VR. Really looking forward to virtual tours of places being commonplace within my lifetime.
To be fair its much the same problem remote work experiences. Its mostly subjective experience that people feel is lacking telecommuting more than anything physically being absent. Which makes it a personal thing if you are satisfied with it or not. But it just being an option means many people can experience 99% of something without having the immense marginal costs moving bodies around the planet.
What? Why wouldn't there be substantive human interaction as part of this process. If we can do that via text (see this post for an example), why not vr? Virtual Tour guide could be a thing. Or Just think of a VR version of Second Life, but with less sexual overtones.
What were you thinking of when you wrote this?
While European countries are on the top of the list, the cities? Not that much.
The first one is Bangkok. With around 22 million tourists. Paris is third with 18 million. Interestingly, Paris has more things to see, a more extensive metro system (actually waaa..y more extensive). Yet, I seem to be more bothered by tourists in Paris than in Bangkok.
In Bangkok, the tourism is spread around the city. There is the Sukhumvit line which is quite a lot of BTS stations. It is full of hotels but things are spread out. You do see lots of tourists but there doesn't seem to be a problem of tourists overcrowding as in Paris.
Paris has failed to grow outside of Paris 1-6. There isn't much space to build there, so things got messy. What Paris should have done is create a whole new region (regions?) for young tourists, couples, families, and old tourists. Each region is separate. They can be a bit far but not too far. Tourists traveling around will find their mates instead of stumbling on locals.
Other cities that adapted better to tourists: Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur. All on the top list.
This is how tourism works in LA. The tourist locations are so spread out from one another that the mobs of tourists can't overwhelm any particular part of the city.
That being said, events like this past weekend's Sportsmageddon and last year's Women's March demonstrated that LA is fully capable of handling large masses of visiting crowds without much negative impact other than more garbage.
You must be joking. Each of those cities is either one of the most boring major cities on earth, devoid of culture or tourist attractions beyond shopping, or a cesspool.
Hong Kong is hardly good for tourism, given how many small businesses have been replaced by luxury stores hawking brand-name products to Mainlanders.
He talked about how anyone could travel anywhere, and did, without ever reflecting that if you have a few billion people just travelling anywhere they wanted, it would be utter chaos in all the tourist spots.
It really underlines that he didn't even vaguely comprehend the incredibly privileged life he lived in (and I don't really either!), that he was so unfathomably richer than so much of the world's population that he couldn't even conceive the chaos of what he was proposing.
And now more of us enter that section of society (and still we are only a small fraction of the world's population) there simply isn't the capacity to accommodate us all.
There's a parable about what a deeply entrenched mind virus materialism can be hiding in there somewhere.
I travel quite a bit and always encourage / force the people with me to visit museums and cultural highlights of the location because the truth is that only by being in a new city/state/country can you expand your horizons. The only thing I see coming from this anti tourist attitude is more xenophobia from residents and ignorance from would be travelers.
I honestly can't imagine people learning history just by scrapping wikipedia pages and not actually going to the sites that history happened.
I went to Venice during the Winter and the reality is that if it wasn't for tourists the city would be half empty outside of hyper wealthy individuals who own a vacation home there, it's a shame that every other store was a souvenir store but the only other stores there seemed to be Luxury Brand stores that probably wouldn't exist either.
I don't know, I come from a country that thrives on tourism and I definitely understand the hostility, but in the end of the day many cities wouldn't exist without this new wave of low cost tourism.
Want to see where the French Revolution happened? Sorry, Haussmann blew it up and built today's Paris on the rubble. Venice? OK, a few bits of St Mark's basin were there when the galleys came back from the crusades. Dare you to say which bits. Cromwell and the Glorious Revolution? Nup, their Palace of Westminster burnt down in the 19th Century. Imperial China? It fell down and was rebuilt with every earthquake.
Archeologists can go to these places, but they have to work hard for it.
One of the essays in Parkinson's Law turns this into a law of nature. When the grand parliament house was built, parliament no longer mattered, and the country was really run from a dingy shed out the back. That shed was later demolished and a well-appointed cabinet room built in its place, but by that time cabinet no longer mattered, and the country was run by a king.
On the other hand, visiting exotic places makes me curious about how they got that way, which is one way to discover history.
FYI, it shouldn't be surprising that replacing critical words can change the meaning of a sentence.
In this case, it's a partially successful analogy. Both mass tourist and immigrants travel to foreign lands, but one of them does so optionally while the other typically does so out of real or perceived necessity.
That's a big leap there though, ignoring the context and intent of the quote. The main issue expressed there is the mindless greed of the "mass tourist" when visiting these places, not truly viisting them to be temporarily part of the magnificence, but to use it to boost their own ego and tick a notch in some list. The intent of the immigrant is for survival and better standards of living, the intent of this kind of "mass tourist" is superficial consumption, which is what he's warning against.
As when home, a spirit of joy and generosity is the best way to go about going to other places.
People have found other ways to broaden their horizon in the past.
But in other cases, for any reasonable tax the demand might still keep outstripping supply. I guess that leaves unreasonably high fees, or something new and much more creative.
Now it is an open air disney land for the tourist. The buzz is gone and most of us have retreated to Brooklyn.
I now fully sympathize with "rude" Parisians.
Obviously a place can be loved or touristed to death. Groups with a large number of people arriving all at once (whether by van or bus or ship) exacerbate it. But everywhere I've traveled, even very popular places, if you can find a way to avoid the large groups and peak times, you have a much more pleasant experience.
My initial impression of Venice when I visited it four years ago was: "this seems like a place Disney would build if it only could." Perhaps Venice should take a page from Disney's playbook: treat itself like a theme park and limit total daily access with time-of-day tickets for the most popular destinations.
I love the history of Venice to bits (I live in one of their former conquests) , but nowadays its indeed like a disney construction, you can't trust it to maintain a culture. Even the art students who frequent the various squares look like posers.
This isn't a case like Singapore where land is limited because you could just live in the mainland. The buildings are all historical treasures so modernizing the infrastructure is probably out of the question. So business need to thrive in a place that is hard to access, can't grow, and can't modernize itself.
Don't get me wrong, I love the place but the only people who live there are Millionaires that use those houses as vacation homes half the year and don't contribute much to the local economy. The local craftspeople are all masters so only the most wealthy could afford their wares so they have been replaced by Chinese souvenir shops.
It's definitely a shame but I don't see how a common Italian person is supposed to reap the benefits of less tourism.
Tourism sucks and the suck percolates through the entire local economy and everybody who has to participate in it (i.e. everyone who lives there). Even if you don't sell grossly overpriced goods or services to the tourists you make your living off of those that do. The non-repetitive nature of transactions means shady people get rewarded shady business practices and everyone develops this world view in which everyone else is a lying scumbag who will screw you for a quick gain until proven otherwise. Of course many people bury their head in the sand from a young age and convince themselves that wherever they live really is special (protip: it's really not). Drugs are rampant in whatever the off season is. People get all bent out of shape over "branding" issues (e.g. the color you paint your house, what kind of business you run, etc, etc) because your local "brand" is what attracts tourists and money. I could go on and on and on about specific downsides to having an economy dependent on tourism.
By trying to curtail tourism I think these cities are doing the right thing in the long term even if they could make a few dollars in the short term by selling out. This isn't a pro business/anti-business issue. It's a "what kind of business are we ok with" issue. Tourism unconstrained poisons local society the way a chemical plant will poison local waterways if left unchecked.
Also, FWIW all the negative predictions about cost of living in this article are correct in my observation.
I'm not getting any more specific than that.
Amsterdam is large, but everyone only wants to go to the centre, which has mediaeval-size streets. In Barcelona there are a few expected sights. Both cities are also normal cities.
27 million tourists to Canada — 82 million to Spain — 17 million to the Netherlands
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism_in_Canada and similar.
When I travel I have some pretty simple heuristics, if we're staying at a resort I prefer a smaller luxury resort, ideally w/o kids, and I like to go in the off season, which so far has meant Sept-Oct or March-April, depending on the climate of the location.
There are lots of smaller towns and cities near the big tourists hubs that have a lot of charm. When I visited Italy I went to Positano, a small town on the Almafi coast about an hour from Naples. The city was great and I was able to visit the island of Capri and check out Pompeii all while being stationed in a small, beautiful town. There were tourists but it did not feel overcrowded.
Likewise, pick your times and you'll have La Joconde (Mona Lisa in French) to yourself. And then scoot off to the other sections that are actually so much more interesting - including a literal castle in the basement.
That said the Louvre is one of those worth going to, and it's not hard to avoid the crowds. Yes, skip the Mona Lisa - it's in my opinion one of the least impressive pieces of the entire museum.
It's a giant museum with only a couple wings actually busy - at least when I went. The rest of the museum was almost empty.
I went to Galapagos, and they were thinking of limiting the total number of visitors. To me this make a lot of sense. You can't have hordes of people showing up, it'll wreck the place. I would do an auction, 10k or whatever highest bidders get to enter. A tourist attraction could then act like a monopoly and extract the maximum out of it, without straining themselves serving those customers (yeah I've got BT internet).
Granted, there will be a lot of politics about the distribution of that pie, but at least you can say you are getting the most out of the situation.
Having recently visited Iceland, I could see that the Reykjavik-area was near its limits. As was the airport (gate areas were overcrowded throughout the terminal). There's plenty of space elsewhere on the island, but the government and Iceland Air have done a really good job convincing tourists to do a quick stopover en route from the Americans to Europe.
And being a regular visitor to Scotland (Scottish by birth, though raised in the US), there are more and more tourists every time I go back. Skye is running into problems supporting the number of visitors at peak season - many showing up without planned accommodation, camping on roadside, etc. The NC500 route is similar - the area is desolate and lightly populated, but it's been pitched as a tourist destination - great to get people out of Edinburg, but facilities are barely adequate, at least at peak season.
It's also a popular layover destination, right?
IcelandAir also allows travelers to split their itinerary for no extra fee, so a few days in Reykjavik isn't too costly (just room/board). I assume WOW does the same.
I was there in mid-January and was amazed how busy both KEF and Reykjavik were for the "offseason." A few locals said there wasn't really an offseason any more.
Not saying it's fantastic, but if you have to ration a resource willingness to pay is a place to start.
I don't feel the same way about every resource (eg health and education) but whether you can visit some old town somewhere doesn't seem essential.
Those nice homes and cars have materials and resources invested into making them. The resources around tourist attractions are limited.
But I don't see why the locals living there would want to. They get to set the rules, and for them the money from rich tourists is certainly more attractive than being able to "show their culture" to a balanced sample of the world population.
No wonder so many HN comments are grandstanding about how they dislike or don't need travel: they aren't talking about meeting other people or experiencing other cultures. They're just talking about weekend travel packages where they're shuttled around to take some pictures.
How incredibly boring.
Your VR idea like saying you've been to Prague because you spent extensive time in Google Maps street view: I wouldn't even bother.
/s
At this point I'm most excited about travel where I know somebody who lives there and can make those connections for me.
"Half Dome -- BROUGHT TO YOU BY PEPSI"
I find cultural, people-oriented tourism, though, to be lifegiving for me. This is a bit surprising to me, given that I'm a kind of person that's lesser suited to it, as someone who tends toward shyness and also happens to be a picky eater (which is not great for sharing and enjoying meals in foreign countries). But on those times where I've been able to connect on a deeper level with locals, I've felt very fulfilled in my tourism experience. Having friends who invite me to visit the place they're now living in has been one gateway for me to be able to pursue this kind of cultural tourism (though I realize not every would-be tourist has personal networks that would provide this kind of opportunity.) Given our common language and culture and their local connections, these friends can help me enjoy their new home on a much deeper level much sooner than if I just went to that place by myself.
I realize that my tourism preference is personal, and that various other forms of tourism are perfectly valid and more enjoyable to others. However, if I were to generalize, I'd say that tourism that values, respects, and enjoys the places, people, and cultures involved for their own sake is commendable, while tourism that simply uses such places and people for narcissistic motives should be questioned. (These narcissistic motives typically revolve around showing others how much richer, more beautiful, more refined, classier, more knowledgeable, worthier, and ultimately better you are than them.) Loving a place, people, or culture might even involve leaving it alone, and enjoying them vicariously through other's tales, photos, and videos.
Speaking of motives, and on a somewhat-related note, you might enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V68SMFrpFt8 (First Person To Run A Marathon Without Talking About It)
personally I don't go there at all because tourists also dunno basic manners in public transport about letting elders and small children to sit or don't block space for prams, similar with sidewalks, them you have noise everywhere, especially in evening from drunk people and when I dared as local to visit park popular among tourists i was pushed by tourist who want to cut the queue to be with friends in front of me, while i was holding small child
when i see tourist outside city center heading wrong direction in tram i usually help them, but i can't really visit city center with my family anymore because they ruined the city center and am more and more disgusted by them
also companies dodging taxes while renting airbnb apartments don't help, if it would be up to me I would ban airbnb completely and hike accommodation tax to push away groups of young boys usually from UK/DE who come for cheap beer on their sausage parties
This is what they designed for.
Tourist bring a lot of money to local businesses you really shouldn't be killing the goose who lays the golden eggs if you ask me.
So what their basically saying is they would rather kick out tourists that bring in and spend quite a lot of money effectively boosting the economy in favour of some refugees the government will have to spend a large amount of money on... and you wonder why the contry's economy is in such a bad shape when the citizens advocate shooting themselves in the foot.
If you're not 14 or completely driven by greed you can understand the reasoning behind this.
Just the same way you don't give your money to a beggar on the street when you can barely afford to survives yourself the employment of personal boundaries is important for humans and countries.
So given that Italy is not doing so well at the moment I kind of have to question their thinking reducing their revenue stream in favour if immigrants.
The assumption that all immigration is good immigration is not true.
The US did immigration right before only allowing in people when there was a need for workers and only allow predominantly cultures that would attempt to integrate and get along with the existing population.
The current policy allows unregulated areas (no go zones) to exist where the refugees make the laws; police are afraid to go in and they are not required to integrate into society plus their cultural and religious beliefs create a propensity for hostility against the locals/infidels.
Honestly it's a powder keg waiting to explode and given the rise of terrorist attacks in Europe it's getting there at a short and steady pace. It will take generations before their views will be moderate enough for them to be able to get along with the local population and the higher the amount of people and the longer they are kept in their echo chamber the longer it will take.
In the mean time we will see a rise in draconian Sharia law type laws since they will represent a considerable amount of the voting population just like in the UK. See Lauren Southern held under terrorism act for social experiment [1]
Mind you the UK allowed the change to be gradual and their local Muslim population is quite moderate over all yet this is still happening.
[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJt7oZSONiU)
Anybody see the irony of a weak white canadian girl held under a terrorism act for distributing a bunch of fliers with some text on it?
Italy is a modern, advanced, wealthy economy - I would guess they are more wealthy than any country in the history of the world before 1970. They can do far more than afford to survive, and they can help those in need. Current people in Italy benefit from a long history of 'humanitarianism' by their predecessors; it's not an exceptional behavior, it's the norm.
Human beings are more important than money. Also, those human beings will grow the economy in the future - in the near future. In the long run they also keep the demographics from getting exceptionally old.
> The assumption that all immigration is good immigration is not true.
I'm not sure what that means, nor did I hear anyone say it.
On the other hand, why do you falsely assume that acceptance of refugees has to have no limits or conditions? I'm saying that you can achieve a level of practical balance for two different areas on unrelated motives.
Because it doesn't have a limit or conditions the overwhelming majority of assumed refugees are illegal immigrants brought over on the boats of NGO's. They haven't used the proper channels and haven't been checked what so ever in many cases it's not even possible to know their country of origin forget about anything else.
If they have completed the proper procedures and done all the paperwork for seeking asylum fair enough but that's not what's happening now they just show up.
The ideal was that as these people are treated with decency and respect and given a life not unlike any other Swede might receive, they would be able to integrate and ultimately just becomes Swedes. But this ideal did not really turn out to be justified. So what will happen to Sweden as these individuals begin to be one of the most relevant voting blocs? It's not a rhetorical question, since I don't think anybody really knows the answer. This scale of migration with people of such sharply contrasting worldviews is something relatively novel in the modern developed world. However, in my opinion Sweden's experiment is more likely to end up being seen as a cautionary tale than a model of humanitarianism.
[1] - https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/swedens-ugly-immigra...
The US has had multiple waves of immigration from most of the world, over the last few centuries. And there has been similar pushback from nativists over and over again. If that long history is any indication, Sweden will be fine.
1) The first is of course just sheer volume. Sweden has gone, in less than a single generation, from a mostly ethnically homogeneous nation to one where about 20% of the population is foreign born and that's only going to keep rising. The US is at record setting levels recently, with a foreign born population of less than 14%. And it's always been a rather diverse nation.
2) Relatively incompatible cultures. Large chunks of the migrants to Sweden are coming from backgrounds that hold very different cultural values on a wide range of fundamental issues. By contrast the vast majority of migrants to the US tend to hold quite similar cultural values.
3) Distorted migratory motivations. Throughout the US's history, migration has been about work -- in the past and present. People's motivation for coming here is to work. When the economy tanked in 2009, so did immigration. As it picks back up, so does immigration. Sweden, by contrast, is attracting people exclusively because they offer extremely generous benefits, particularly for refugees. They are attracting individuals that are only moving there because they can get more stuff from their government than they can from other nations. Ideally this could just be a liminal phase, but the current outcomes are far from promising. If people end up beginning to take the government handouts for granted, I think this would be a serious problem.
It'll merely no longer be recognizable as "Sweden" for people whose ancestors considered themselves "Swedes".
I can tell you that loud AirBnB hosts or the foreigners using my country as a landfill for their money, pricing people out of the inner cities, are not welcome.
So I don't get what you mean.
Indeed. Amsterdam, for example, is enriched by its diverse trinket shops selling "XXX" poof ball hats and crass t-shirts, and the options for stale pizza, cold waffles and Nutella crepes have never been so plentiful.
Mass tourism is dystopic. Living in a touristic area is like living in Disneyland: everything is fake. Did you ever wonder why 'experienced' tourists (we like to call ourselves travellers) don't like touristic areas?
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05507-0
Stop repeating this lie.
How will that give you the average income?
We could use a healthy backlash against the idea that everyone should strive to fly around the world. Sustainability must come first. This is a bitter pill for us "liberals" to swallow, I think.
Governments have been caring to maximize business profit. And in that pursuit, they have created cities where one cannot live anymore.
Unregulated tourism has make things worse. The rise of Airbnb and similar schemes are punishing buildings in popular neighbourhoods that instead of a place to live with your family they become a business without rules. And any regulation is sold as "any business" and "communism" by the usual internet trolls. Problems are so bad in some neighbourhoods that even that push-back from online discussions and the business themselves is overridden by voters.
Tourism is a very good thing. And that thought has not changed in the city. Abuses should not be tolerated, thou. That you bring money to the economy is not an excuse to be above the rules. Citizens first.
I moved from Sagrada Familia to Guinardo and its much nicer and not yet affected by the tourism etc.
It must suck to own a house in Barceloneta or something as it has changed completely although you would probably be able to sell it for a lot more money than it used to be worth I suppose.
We can't all go travelling, we won't fit in the same place and we'll boil the earth doing so.
We can't all have a car because we'll boil the earth. If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown.
We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either.
We can't all eat high quality meat as often as we want. We'll boil the earth and it'll require too much farmland, anyway.
I could go on.
We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition (e.g. cars devolving into gridlock, tourism devolving into queues and displacement, ...).
I find this to be an odd aspect of certain political movements at the moment - unwilling to accept that the Universe _is_ actually a big competition, and either some people lose, or we all lose.
It sucks. But what's the alternative?
It's perfectly reasonable to drag people out of poverty.
But the idea that everyone should be able to do the same things implies a set of "things" very different from what, say, the middle class families on my suburban street do today.
A few years back when I looked at solutions to "cooking this planet" that didn't involve anything that would cause much disruption to most people's lives. The reason we're not solving the problem isn't because of the hard choices we have to make. It's because a few industries that might make less money if we fight climate change try to stop efforts to combat it, politicians who get money from these industries say climate change is a hoax, the public at large is largely too apathetic to remove politicians who don't act, people who oppose all collective action oppose collective action to fight climate change, the media doesn't report on it because it doesn't get ratings, etc.
Could we have everyone's standards are close to the current standards enjoyed by developed countries without destroying the planet? Maybe, maybe not. It's insanely premature to pretend that we know it's impossible. Not only have we not seriously tried to solve the problem, but a large part of the U.S. is actively opposed to even stopping the problem. "There's no solution" is an easy way to absolve us from our failures.
https://thinkprogress.org/the-full-global-warming-solution-h...
What about this is not hugely disruptive to lifestyles and standards of living? Its hardly an 'easy' solution to tell people to give up many modern conveniences or radically change behavior...
Exactly. The "eternal growing of the economic cake" which the majority of the related policies are based on, ignores limits to growth (e.g. energy, rare materials, food, etc.) and doesn't care about externalities.
Under that model 10 billion people could all live like middle class Californians eventually.
(Religious-like faith in technology, and "it worked thus far so it will work forever" wishful thinking also play a role - it also helps to ignore the law of diminishing returns and low hanging fruits).
Under reality, there will be huge cutting back and, quite possibly, big human toll, before we reach a livable equilibrium.
Plus the totally scientific, but not so glamorous and cavalier, concern for storage safety and other externalities.
With several tons of barrels of waste just dumped in the sea (and even the best guarded ones just an accident away, e.g. during transport), one would have thought we'd have rethought this "let's use the most dangerous materials and waste possible to create energy, what could possibly go wrong".
Why aren’t they stopping driving which causes nearer one death an hour than one death per 50 years
Reducing this crisis, which is ongoing, to "1 death" demonstrates a profound lack of empathy and understanding of what this nation has had to deal with because of these reactors.
While there is likely still a limit assuming economic growth must stop entirely is overly simplistic. There are many areas where the limit is research - drugs themselves are fairly cheap to manufacture but expensive to develop, test, and set up initial manufacturing infrastructure - but once done the expenses are marginal. Essentially to continue growth we need to work smarter not harder - often by increasing efficiency and decreasing input needs.
But a better designed game or app doesn't necessarily require more energy to run. I can envision a economy where people trade trade digital goods, and that economy can keep growing pretty much without limit because the value is all based on intangible factors.
Imagine a hypothetical world where everyone is a programmer and everyone has the same small 20 watt computer. Would people just give up and stagnate? Or would they continue to improve and create more value for other users by making more efficient use of the 20 watt computers they are stuck with?
Lots and lots of people have tried to discredit Malthus and his reasoning in the last 200 years but we keep going back to him, he must of have been right in a way (if it matters, I think he was). The same way idealist political thinkers tried to discredit the writings of Hobbes and Machiavelli but it turns out human nature is closer to the writings of those two great political minds compared to whatever is fashionable at any given.
Malthus - and later Ehrlich - made specific predictions about the sustainability of population increase, and they were proven flat out wrong.
Extrapolating a trend and showing disaster looming is much easier (and gets more attention) than recognizing that humans are adaptable and we shouldn't be so negative about humanity's future.
Just yesterday there was an article saying that we've managed to wipe out 60% of the animal populations since 1970, the collapse of the insect bio-mass is also a relatively recent man-made phenomenon and it also looks like man-caused climate change is almost irreversible at this point. Disaster is indeed looming and imho has already started. This is not being "negative" about the future, these are facts happening right now.
i don't know if this counts as a huge cutting back or a big human toll or something else, but Southern California residents could save millions and millions of gallons of gasoline if they would just stop sitting in traffic one person per car
pretty much anyone who's ever driven to work in Los Angeles must have noticed what a magnificent, prodigious bacchanalia of petroleum product wastage that place is
No, those aren't the experiences we have today, but I'm not consuming all my performance entertainment as live acts in a theater because doing so would have been unsustainable for the scale you want to produce at. We evolved the technology into film and later television and now we watch what we want, when we want, where we want. The marginal cost of that entertainment went from stadium sized buildings with productions that took years to refine and practice with crews and casts in the hundreds able to perform for a thousand at most to millions of people being able to repeatedly enjoy hand crafted frames and sounds for the marginal cost of cents of power and wire.
A hundred years from now mankind won't lament missing out on driving any more than most people don't crave horseback riding today. Because we innovate our way to better solutions.
And its insane hubris to think mankind is anywhere close to the potential limits of physical science that we won't dramatically, in ways we can't even comprehend or imagine, refine our condition in the decades to come, and for centuries thereafter if we at last that long.
That said:
> if we can do full body VR immersion wherever we want to go
At this point we're basically post scarcity. You plug yourself into the wall, hook yourself up to the IV and that's that. The rest of your post (and all of mine) becomes irrelevant.
It's pretty much an "all bets are off" scenario. :P
You have a peculiar and non-standard definition of the word "travel"
Will that include simulated human interaction?
That's a good one.
I suppose we'll need to shard it. And simulate some "real" individuals (i.e. non tourists). Maybe they can be NPCs.
Gosh.
Competition will always exist, and we should accept that, but it's not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. I for one would be happy to see our society move to a less competitive, more collaborative mode.
Not only does the environment suffer, but the locals also have no sense of what their locale is like normally without tourists. Thay don’t get to experience their own baseline.
That doesn't sound extreme at all. In fact, charging for entrances is a basic technique to moderate demand. The question is what would be the economic impact of such a measure, because the tradeoff between charging admission and restricting access, thus restricting other sources of income and therefore jobs, might not be positive for an economy.
https://www.stadt-koeln.de/politik-und-verwaltung/steuern-ge...
It is absolutely possible for every earth citizen to become a tourist, there is no economic impediment to do it.
> We either eliminate these experiences, accept economic inequality, or watch the experiences be eliminated via attrition (e.g. cars devolving into gridlock, tourism devolving into queues and displacement, ...).
Specifically, the last part. If everyone is a tourist, what it means to be a tourist is very, very different.
Consider:
We strictly have enough jet fuel and aluminium and so on to fly everyone about all over. What happens if we actually do that?
Venice is bloody underwater, that's what.
That said - I'm an optimistic physicist and engineer. Let's fix this, shall we?
Right, I've invented and scaled electric aeroplanes and fusion power.
Let's try again. What happens if we actually do that?
Venice has more tourists than people.
Bugger.
The easy, facile answer is to move all the residents out, turn the old city into Historic Venice Amusements District, build a commuter transit line out to New Venice (with no tourist attractions), and all of its civic services are then paid for by income from the tourist trap. Everyone has ready access to service jobs in the tourism and public safety sectors. If tourists want to see real Venetians, they pay to bring some in on the train, to be photographed in a nearly-authentic setting.
"Nobody goes there anymore--it's too crowded."
You shouldn't curse your own success. Plenty of cities would dearly love to have throngs of visitors that seek only to look around, have fun, eat, drink, and otherwise spend their vacation money. I know of one in Florida that was specifically built, from the swamp up, for that single purpose.
If you don't want all tourist attractions to become Disneyworld, you have to visit places that aren't yet well on their way to that endpoint. There are many places on this planet that are fun and interesting for visitors. I can very easily choose to no visit locales that have been overrun and ruined by overtourism. It's not difficult. If an underemployed local is trying to sell you discounted show tickets or pass out ad-laden maps of local attractions, you're in one. If your hotel has posted a warning about pickpockets, you're in one. If you can't discern the boundary line between the gift shop at the exit to the last attraction and the gift shop at the entrance to the next one, you're in one.
My girlfriend and I stayed at a bead & breakfast in the new city. Most of the tourists are locals from France, but enough people speak English that communication is not a problem.
If demand were high enough, someone could build a replica out in the deserts of southern Nevada or northern China.
I'm not very keen on tourism in general, if you couldn't detect my tone. When it's not part of a parting-cash-from-visitors industry, tourism can actually be quite inexpensive and enjoyable, but all the incentives are for locals to establish such an industry once the numbers rise high enough. The only way around it is to not visit the same places (away from home) too often, and to not go anywhere with too many visitors. Once businesses start to differentiate between those serving locals and those serving visitors, the slope starts slipping.
Human kind is exceptional at finding substitutes and while not everyone on earth can get a turn to go to Venice, there are literally thousands of alternative options, and the basic economic interactions will make the available to all.
Which of those methods is "reasonable" for you to use as a tourist. The bike is clearly out. You can take a ferry across the Mediterranean once you get to it, but that's a whole thing. There is no train and buses would be...a lot. A straight car ride is 104 hours, or just over 4 days each way. And again, you make $804 USD/year.
Is OP's example helpful to the conversation: IDK, possibly? But the idea that it's reasonable for a tourist might be a bit much. IDK, who am I to say what's reasonable for people who make less in a year than I do in about 3 days.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/n'd%C3%A9l%C3%A9/venice/@25....
Your freedom is a prison. Don't talk to me about totalitarianism.
This is defeatist. Technology decoupled agricultural output from the natural fertility of farmland, thereby allowing less farmland to make more food; technology now looks close to decoupling animal meat from sentient animals.
I've read this 5 times. I can't figure out the relation between tourism and everything else in your post. Are you just expounding on the fact that not everyone lives an equal life in the world or is there a greater point I'm missing?
Tourism is not a special case. The same issue applies to tons of activities. We either limit these activities to a privileged few, or the activities cease to exist in their original form.
Everyone loses in the latter case.
IMO the logical outcome would be that the most trendy destinations will get more expensive, thus overpricing many tourists and regulating itself, and that it will open a new opportunity for many places which are not today super touristic.
SO everybody will be a tourist, just not at the same place.
It is already happening actually, you have much more touristic places than it used to be and the potential is huge. I mean just look how many tourists you can fit in France or Italy and imagine if Asia and Africa scale tourism in the same way. Many costs are under/mis-used. The brazilian cost could be much more used than it is right now.
This has also already happened before. When Spain got more expensive, tourism grew in Tunisia and Turkey, and there is still a lot of potential there. Eastern Europe also still has a lot of underused potential.
New touristic places just appear naturally when you have a market. Not everybody goes to Tahiti, but there is potential for some destination for everybody.
Running a lottery = limiting to the privileged (lucky) few.
Creating a reserve / national park / protected area = limiting access to the privileged (science-related, or just well-connected) few.
There's no way that everyone who would not mind to visit a carnival in Venice could fit the city, if getting there was free and instant. This is a fact of life, and I personally am fine with it. People have different priorities, so let them (us) choose what group of limited few we can concentrate on entering.
For what I cannot afford to access, VR helmets exist.
Are there other perfectly nice places that you, guy who is in some way limited in your ability/means, could go to instead of the moon? Of course there are. But the moon is off limits to you because you don't have the money to charter the mission there, or the authorization of your government.
If by used you mean "used up and robbed of any natural beauty to accomodate 'selfie experiences'", I agree.
Ideally we would stop breeding and keep world population at a certain number. In reality population will probably keep growing and we can only hope that technology will help avert a disaster.
There's a huge contradiction here. Either you do "something" to control population or else all the measures to control climate change are stillborn. We are struggling with the current population!
The episode is not favourably looked on, in general.
https://www.pop.org/a-once-and-future-tragedy-indias-sterili...
I am aware that this probably won't happen in a harmonious way so my prediction is that we'll keep growing and exploiting the planet but hopefully technology will keep up. Ideally we'll load ourselves into computers and don't need the physical environment anymore.
In order for places we hold dear to avoid being trampled into the ground by people like herds of buffalo, there has to be some sort of gatekeeping that takes place to protect them. In theory, it would be fantastic if places could be open and appreciated by people from all over, but what happens in reality is more people creates more chaos. We can't expect that people will follow common behaviors and understandings because, if they did, then there wouldn't be a need for rules and oversight in the first place.
There's many beautiful places in the world and we should do our best to keep them beautiful for future generations to enjoy. Unfortunately, there's unavoidable costs to doing so, and not everyone will be able to get things the way they want. A finite reality with infinite intentions are going to end up at odds with each other.
In addition: Quotas to the game parks are strictly limited and enforced.
You can go cheaper (but never cheap) by joining an organized camping tour, which is actually a huge plus.
Camping tour groups get assigned places in the middle of the game reserves (they must apply for permits 18 month in advance and leave the sites in pristine condition).
You can visit the parks individually with a reservation, but are only allowed camping in the entrance area.
The kicker is that if you stay in a very expensive lodge, which can be north of 1000$ a night you will never be sleeping in a park, since commercial exploation is illegal.
It is an expensive country for tourists by design. They rather have a small, but well heeled number of visitors. And while people may moan that it's unfair it's probably the best way to drive "quotas". That, and limited supply of the main attractions.
You could implement a fair system giving everyone the equal opportunity to access (e.g. a tourist destination), even if not everyone gains access (via some sort of lottery).
There's also enough places and opportunities on the planet that not everyone will want to do everything, certainly not all at once. So you could implement cap and trade.
A lottery is inherently inefficient (someone who really wants to go somewhere gets the same chance as someone who only barely marginally cares) and likely to lead to a black market.
> There's also enough places and opportunities on the planet that not everyone will want to do everything, certainly not all at once. So you could implement cap and trade.
That's a better idea, and seems like what some of these places are already implementing (the article mentions Easter Island; Nepal does something similar for Mt Everest).
You hit the nail in the head.
The only way for 7+ billions humans to live sustain-ably on planet earth, is to accept high density living and shared spaces.
High density living in the form of apartments with common gardening, grilling areas, shared yards and complete reliance on public transportation.
I would love to see card become an entirely rental / on demand thing.
It would take a lot to make such a massive cultural switch, but it is the best thing we can do for sustainable living.
Did you just describe most of EU and some of east coast US cities? ;)
Have 1 town every 10km (so 6km of country between them) and that’s a 6:1 country:town ratio and a density higher than that of even the Netherlands.
Separately, while I concede that some of these aspects may very well not scale, there isn't enough attention paid to the idea that some may scale better. First world countries tend to have lower brith rates than third world ones. Perhaps if we raised the quality of life enough across the globe, we'd actually level off the population demands dramatically as a result.
Similarly, while some people certainly do want cars, what most people actually want is to get from point A to point B. If we can get to a world of self driving cars, the grid lock problem may disappear and be replaced with a perfectly feasible alternative that's actually safer.
So yeah, I think its quite possible that not everyone will be able to do the same "set of things", but I don't see how that has any bearing in trying to make any particular thing more accessible to everyone. I assure you a new "thing" will pop up that will still be only accessible to a few. That's the way its been so far in history anyways, not sure what's special about now.
I suppose the main thrust of what I wanted to get at was that the concept of reducing inequality is problematic, there's a hard limit somewhere and we're starting to see the first signs of that.
Raising the baseline is certainly possible and a good aim.
But as you say, there will always be some 'thing' that some can do and others can't. Maybe there's a state in which the more damaging things aren't desirable and most people can do most things they want. I hope so.
I have the sense that a _lot_ of things that people want are basically status markers. And if that's true, then we can't really make everyone happy, because it's inherently hierarchical.
Humans being what they are, people just won't accept being told that they can't fly to New Zealand for their 2 week adventure holiday.
However if the price of the tickets reflects the cost to the environment - say it costs $10K instead of $2K - then the environment can be protected, and the lucky few can continue to indulge, while others must forgo or get there by e.g. deck handing on a yacht (by which I mean a sailboat, not a Larry Ellison style super yacht).
Not every city is as famous as Venice. No, everyone can't go to Venice. Everyone can go somewhere, though.
> If we develop EV's and don't boil the earth, they won't all fit downtown.
Gridlock is a rounding error compared to air pollution. Sure, congestion is bad. But it doesn't deserve to be compared to the worst environmental crisis ever. (After all, studies showing induced demand are also showing that people choose to sit in traffic -- they can't hate it that much.)
> We can't all eat high quality meat as often as we want. We'll boil the earth and it'll require too much farmland, anyway
Lab-grown meat is an easy fix. We don't eat very much "high-quality" meat to begin with, at least, not most of us. Most of us eat Taco Bell, which is already only 30% meat or whatever.
> We can't all live in the country, that's not sustainable either.
No, but it's possible for a significant fraction to live in well-designed small towns. Obviously cities are necessary; we've never been without them. But you can fit a lot more people into three-story houses on 1/12 acre lots (33' by 110') than into one-story houses on half-acre lots. We have a lot of the latter these days. There's no need to jump all the way to small apartments in mid-rises on car-free streets. (But building some of these is good because there is clearly some demand from people who would like to live there.)
>But the idea that everyone should be able to do the same things implies a set of "things" very different from what, say, the middle class families on my suburban street do today.
I don't disagree with the general claim, but most people's predictions are far too dire. These problems are much more addressable than some people seem to think. They won't be, if population continues to skyrocket, but at current loading, the Earth will be okay.
(Unfortunately, some surveys indicate that people are choosing not to reproduce because they're unhappy. If we make those people happy, the population problem could come back. That's my greatest worry in the long-term.)
Limits, such as a lottery, might drive people to disperse more and find a greater variety of great places to see.
But then, I'm more drawn to cozy small towns than the Eiffel Tower.
Have you been to Venice? 2500 people visiting the bits of Venice people want to visit has a much bigger impact than 10000 people visiting Paris or Rome.
I think the points stand whether you call it something else though.
Basically, the lifestyle that lots of people aspire to (whether it's viewed by me, you or anyone else by a good ideal or not) isn't achievable at scale.
That's what I tried to get at with the 'eliminate these experiences' bit. Reducing their desirability so that they sort of fall out of existence is one way of doing that.
For cars, you'd do it by making other forms of transport better, for example.
[0] https://www.gapminder.org/topics/fertility-child-mortality/
Why is this viewed as such a given that you state it without any evidence? Once people stop commuting for jobs, it's very feasible for everyone to spread out and live cheaper in smaller cities/towns and rural areas.
Someone who lives in the East Bay and commutes to Sunnyvale every morning has a much larger carbon footprint than someone working remotely from Yuma.
Life is competitive, yes, but it is not just that. You could reduce all of human history to competition, but obviously we put a great deal more meaning into it than that. Why give up now?
:-\
Two surprising ones that I've found:
We can feed everyone on earth. Current daily food production per capita exceeds the recommended 2500 Cal/day in all regions [1], even in Africa, and exceeds 3500 Cal/day in some regions (North America, Europe). With current technology, we could feed the expected 2050 population of 9B. We may not be able to feed them meat, because it takes roughly 25x as much energy to produce beef than corn, and roughly 6x as much for chicken or pork. [2] We also need to fix severe distribution and supply chain leakage problems to get the food to where it needs to be.
We also can produce enough renewable energy to give everyone a developed-world standard of living, subject to construction & storage costs. Energy use in the U.S. was 4.1 TWh in 2016 [3]; divided by 8760 hours/year, that's a mean power usage of 472.2 GW. (Peak power generating capacity in the U.S. is about 1100 GW, so that implies 50% utilization, which is about right.) Scaled up to 9B people (30x), that implies a global energy consumption of around 14 TW. Solar flux on the earth is 1.361 KW/m^2 [4], so at 10% efficiency, that requires an area of 104,010 square kilometers covered by solar panels. This sounds large, but laid out into a rectangle, it's only about 250 * 400 km. Such an array could easily fit into the Mojava, Sahara, or many other deserts on earth, with plenty of room left over.
We likely can't all live in the country - total habitable acreage on earth is about 15.77 billion acres, so with 9B people, each person gets about an acre and a half, and that has to include all the public commons, infrastructure, industry, etc. as well. We also probably can't all have a car - we could if we all lived in the country, but if you take say SF's density (20K/mi^2), give everyone a car, and multiply that by the space the car takes up in parking (say 200 ft^2) and roads (depends on density, but let's say equivalent), you're looking at 8M ft^2 taken up by vehicles alone out of a total available space of 27M ft^2. If everybody used motorcycles, pods, or scooters to get around, it could work, though.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/food-per-person
[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/115/15/3804
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#Co...
Fewer people.
You're not thinking broad enough! It seems to me that you view the determination of what can be done as derived purely from economics. I have money so I can do what I want, you don't so you can't, and you view that as natural. But economic determination of our freedom is as unnatural as the world it takes place in. Basically, why? Why should it matter that you have more money when we determine who can eat meat and travel? Check out Walzer's idea of complex equality, there are certain things that just shouldn't be linked to your existing wealth.
>unwilling to accept that the Universe _is_ actually a big competition, and either some people lose, or we all lose.
Hmm? The Universe isn't a competition! And there's no reason that some people have to lose. It seems to me that you just assert all these things as true and natural and unmovable and so from that follows this necessary society where many people aren't very free but you are relatively high up the heap and so are pretty free. But those things don't seem true or natural or unmovable to me, they seem completely fluid and it doesn't seem so wrong to take some of the freedom you enjoy away from you and give it to other people who have a lot less.
You're right that the competition dynamic doesn't have to be the one we choose.
So I suppose there's a fourth option which involves some sort of other distribution mechanism. You're still going to have a privileged group though, unless you choose to eliminate experiences (e.g. there's no way of fairly distributing private jets, they're not private any more if you do that).