Comment by lemoncookiechip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lemoncookiechip | Hacker News Reader

lemoncookiechip

There's two sides to this story. Claiming that tourism is just a negative is just plainly wrong:

[1] 2021: Barcelona started to recover, recording direct tourist spending of €3.7 billion with 4.5 million visitors. This marked a significant improvement as the city began reopening and international travel resumed.

[2] 2023: Tourists in Barcelona spent €9.6 billion in 2023, up 14.7% from 2019 More than 12 million people visited the Catalan capital last year, 6.9% less than four years ago. Employment and Job Creation: The tourism sector significantly contributes to employment in Barcelona. In 2023, the sector employed around 100,000 people, with nearly 130,000 contracts signed. Notably, more than half of these contracts were permanent, underscoring the sector's role in providing stable jobs .

[3] In fact, the entire tourism industry generates 12% of Catalonia's GDP and low-cost tourism is part of this.

[1] https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/city-council... [2] https://www.catalannews.com/business/item/tourists-in-barcel... [3] https://www.catalannews.com/life-style/item/tourism-boom-in-...

The subtext, which is absurd when made explicit, is that if not for tourism then those 100,000 people would not have jobs. In reality, jobs are created in response to demand, and you can obviously have arbitrarily large economies that are ~0% reliant on tourism and there's no reason to suspect Barcelona et al couldn't or wouldn't produce such an economy for itself in lieu of tourist demand.

Moreover, whenever someone says "XYZ brings money to the area" you need to look at who in particular it's bringing money to. It's not like this money is being dropped out of a helicopter uniformly over the area's people. It's largely going to a relative few businesses and property owners, who spend a fraction of it in the local economy, who itself spends a fraction locally and so on.

The jobs being created aren't high-paying professional jobs either, they are largely service jobs in areas too expensive for the workers to live. So they have to commute long distances on often underdeveloped infrastructure.

the Barcelona Metro (+ other public transit) is well developed, easy to use, and cheap

Yup and usually it has a really bad effect on the housing market, especially for cities that are touristy the whole year

All the waiters and tour guides can't just re-train as semi-conductor technicians.

Even given time, it's not obvious that Barcelona or Spain has the necessary pre-conditions to be globally competitive in another industry that would bring in the same amount of dollars per capita.

It's an extremely ambitious, all-hands-on-deck type of national undertaking to shoehorn your way into something. Japan did it with auto-manufacturing in the 30s. East Asia in general with high tech manufacturing.

Uhh right, which is why allowing your economy to become a tourism-dependent monoculture is not good.

You can argue on the basis of principles that tourism is bad. The fact remains that tourism cannot be stopped cold-turkey without massive job loss as seen during covid. If you wish to stop tourism and preserve the well being of the people that depend on its income, then you need a plan for what replaces tourism and how to re-skill your workforce. There’s clearly no such plan in place.

I'm not arguing that tourism is bad, nor am I arguing for cold turkey cessation.

Barcelona is surprisingly competitive in the tech sector. Primarily foreign companies though.

There's winners and losers behind any aggregate economic statistic like GDP and the ones you cite. I think that should be obvious. Do you think those people with the water pistols are winning?

Honestly, they could be. Their feelings of aggression are not evidence of a factual basis for them.

I actually think this is better examined not as winners-losers, but costs-benefits, because most people will be experiencing both the “winning” side and the “losing” side simultaneously.

We'd do so much better as a society if we debated things in costs-benefits, not winners-losers, but the former doesn't make great soundbites.

My city is not Barcelona but it's getting a growing tourism phenomenon. This goes into few pockets and against everyone else, and people is getting pissed about it.

In "expat" groups foreigners complain we're rude and uninviting, but why wouldn't people be, we were perfectly fine before. Almost nobody here lives off tourism.

> Almost nobody here lives off tourism

You don’t need to be directly receiving tourist dollars to benefit economically from tourism. Tourism can inject a significant amount of money into the local economy, which then circulates and supports business and employment outside of tourism.

(Of course, not all tourism is equal. Day visitors from cruise lines spend little money onshore, for example.)

We've been living without tourism fine, we have industry, big companies, etc. I only see negative externalities in exchange of filling a few big pockets.

Our quality of life worsens in exchange of nothing good for most of us.

>Claiming that tourism is just a negative is just plainly wrong

This is strange framing, and apparently the opposite of my reality.

Tourism is seen as good, and this indicates there are bad sides, too.

Any evidence that the money went to the actual people living in Barcelona, and whether the money that did go offset the rent and other cost increases?

> Claiming that tourism is just a negative is just plainly wrong

Would be a logical step if your real goal is to attack the economy of the country. Foreign agents are getting short of ideas in the book it seems

Or surely I'm paranoid and some morning lots of people waked up as a single organism with the genius idea of stopping tourism harassing people and squirting water on them and their cameras and phones, just because

We have seen before variants of the "is just water haha" stunt used on politicians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADrXpW33RNk

A seemingly innocuous zero legal consequences method to spread paranoia if needed, or Legionella if convenient. Specially if you can convince a bunch of useful idiots to provide lots of cover for you.

Also used by idiots to torment a political opponent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muzsNEEQOjU

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