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- Hacker News
- It's always interesting watching counties try to lift the birthrate, and doing things that don't actually help improve the conditions that lead to the issue in the first place.
Look here's an idea. If you're under a certain age, and you want to own a home and move to a small village etc.. you are granted 100% protection from the government from your employer and you can work 100% remote. Enshrined into law. Nothing the employer can do about it.
Make it a whole nationalism thing to get the right wing on board.
I know a whole bunch of people who would move to a country town in a heartbeat if they could, heck lots of people did it during the pandemic, the minute that remote work became a possibility.
It's great they're chasing these digital nomads, but I'm not sure that's the solution that's going to work long or even medium term.
by intothemild - With digital nomads is like with standard, recreational tourism. It is always promised by local decision-makers it will bring multiple benefits to locals, including economic boost, but it always a pact with a Devil where few reap rewards while rest are left impoverished, delegated to toilet cleaning and food serving, and local customs and culture are eroded.by wolvesechoes
- And with likes AirBnB lead to increasing property values thus increasing rents thus taking even larger share of the income of those workers. Or entirely forcing them to be displaced. For little gain to them.by Ekaros
- Like... whom? Zuck or Larry? They're 10 years late to the party, digital nomads are no more. They can count on German and British pensioners, although personally I'd prefer to be poor than to cater to this demographics.
- Because the trend is over and people stopped living of sweepstakes calling that nomad lifestyle does not mean it's over?by herbst
- > I'd prefer to be poor than to cater to this demographics.
What's wrong with pensioners?
- I have spent quite a bit of time in Andalusia and other poor Spanish regions. A lot of those towns are empty and have mainly older people left. Young ones do anything they can do go to a bigger city looking for opportunities. Some of them serve as retiree/vacation spot for mainly Spanish people from wealthier regions. They are ghost towns during the winter (when digital nomads want to come).
In more touristy but still poor regions (like Tenerife) the official argument for anti-tourist policies is that most of the surplus economic value is captured by property owners while causing strain on infrastructure and making life more expensive for the locals.
To me the obvious solution is to raise property/land value taxes and use the money to develop infrastructure and lower taxes for local working population. This way the incentives are aligned for everyone.
The problem is politics is captured by property owners so it's easier to make villain out tourists/nomads to redirect anger of the locals while continuing like normal for as long as possible.
Nomads are a group that doesn't drain welfare resources, pay for themselves and don't cause crime. They don't even take "your jobs" - they may even create some if enough of them come. If your policy is against them you truly lost it in my view.
by bluecalm - It will always boil down to real estate ownership, squeezing and extracting the last available cash with rents. The taxation has to proactively prevent it. Once you allow non-residents to purchase, even if they have local passport, the prices go instantly to the moon.
- Throughout the developed world, small towns and the countryside are developed. It seems clear that cities are preferred (probably because it's easy to control people in concentrated areas.) People like Bill Gates would prefer the countryside was full of automated farms and the Tetrapak heir would rather clear the countryside of peasants and turn them into some kind of safari.
However, I do not think this digital nomad stuff
by nephihaha - The town: Benarrabá, Málaga province, Andalusia.by ks2048
- Which is an hours drive through twisty mountain roads to anywhere. No public transport.
Why would a digital nomad live there, when for just a little bit more you can have a walkable town with public transport? Isn’t that where all the Americans are flooding Europe for?
by retired - I think if the right to work from home was encoded in law for any job which was practically possible to do remotely, you'd have a better shot at keeping rural villages alive without relying on foreigners. That would keep the local culture living instead of replacing it.
But this is better than nothing I suppose, at least it prevents ghost towns
by amarant - How do you define a job "practically possible to do remotely"? It is not practically possible to attend in-person daily meetings remotely. While replacing in-person meetings with Zoom meetings is a choice many companies can and have made, I don't think anyone is saying that they're the exact same thing. If your job requires attending meetings to work on a team (and given that almost every job contains an aspect of teamwork), I don't see a clear way for the government to define when having in-person meetings are "required" for better team coordination. I certainly wouldn't want it to regulate by fiat whether zoom meetings were a required replacement for in-person meetings--that would be the same as the government defining Pi as 3.2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_pi_bill)by nightpool
- Whether digital nomads contribute economically to local villages is a fine question.
But - what is happening to Spain? It has among the lowest fertility in Europe and has only avoided collapse in population through migration form LATAM and North Africa. Why is spain suffering from this?
What's happening in the villages is a symptom of something larger.
by xyzelement - > Why is spain suffering from this?
A lot of good answers to which I'd like to contribute a personal understanding as someone from the euro south:
These countries were decimated by free trade. A significant amount of the populace is not interested in having a "career" and follow a race to the bottom by competing 24/7. I would say culturally they are incompatible the the free marketeering that has been going on in the past decades.
We need to get protectionism back up and running. Work is a necessary evil that needs to take as little of our life as possible.
by kakadu - > Why is spain suffering from this
The same reason Italy, Portugal, and Greece are - they never fully recovered from the Eurozone collapse, and as a result were unable to completely climb up the value chain on time.
> has only avoided collapse in population through migration form LATAM and North Africa
Spain's TFR is still in the 1.0 to 1.2 range and it's median age is still amongst the oldest in Europe (44.5).
> LATAM
It's still not attractive for much of LatAm. Much of the current LatAm wave in Spain and Italy is from Venezuela or Colombia, and most Venezolanos who could use immigration by descent have largely immigrated already.
Spain doesn't have the same pull factor for LatAm that Canada or even the US still does thanks to higher incomes and pre-existing diaspora networks - especially given that Spain is still dealing with an ongoing braindrain to Western and Northern Europe.
And any immigration from LatAm (excluding Venezuela) irrespective of Europe or NAM is fleeting as much of LatAm has developmentally caught up with Eastern and parts of Southern Europe.
by alephnerd - it has happened what it's happening in almost all the world, at different speeds. It's a combination of factors, economic, cultural, gender roles and general societal expectations (secularization, individualism, self-realization over family, etc.)
Particular factors in Spain compared to other European countries are: chronically high unemployment rates, especially among the younger ones, low salaries and exploitation at the start of the career and general work culture with little respect of workforce (you are always replaceable, be thankful to your bosses). This makes children very unaffordable, people wait until they are "stable enough", which never happens.
The issue with these small towns in Southern Europe is that they don't offer services, because they are abandoned. No schools, no shops, no hospitals... you end up being isolated, struggle for a lot of basic needs, and you leave. Not enough people -> less and less services, and the cycle goes on. There may be a few exceptions of course.
by dariosalvi78 - It’s happening not just in Spain but across most of Europe, the USA, and East Asia. But lots of Europe and the USA have immigration to offset the population decline. China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, are in dramatic population declines. Even India has stared to level off and expected to decline.by ronnier
- by axiologist
- As I understand it, these attempts to use digital nomad money to revive impoverished areas tend to become controversial when the impoverished locals realise what it means to compete with (from their perspective) extremely wealthy blow-ins. Maybe in particular circumstances it can work, like if the locals actually get most or all of the money spent by the newcomers (rather than going into the pockets of absentee landlords or large corporations).
The article opens by noting fears about Spain's "vibrant culture" dying out. Needless to say, this won't help with that problem and may well accelerate it, unless Spanish culture is coding workshops and padel (per the article).
by NoboruWataya - Many of them won't care about Spanish culture or care about the locals. I agree with your assessment.by nephihaha
- From the native point of view of one of such countries, Portugal, the problem is a problem of scale.
When it is a couple of folks, bring life again to the village, small town, all good.
Now when then it gets daily YT shorts, and TikTok videos, of how great the life is, and how "cheap" everything happens to be, while the locals pay through the nose for basic stuff.
No the taxi ride, the restaurant bill, the supermart car filled all the way to the top isn't cheap when one is barely touching over 1000 euros after taxes, on average.
So when it gets too much, the locals no longer find it as advantageous as they originally thought, and then votes into right wing parties rise, even from elderly folk that should have known better from dictatorships that ended in the 1970's.
Naturally not everyone is like that, and many do integrate into local culture, and even do have videos calling out such behaviours from fellow nomads.
by pjmlp - > attempts to use digital nomad money to revive impoverished areas tend to become controversial
That depends on the circumstances, doesn't it? In crowded areas, it automatically leads to competition, but these villages are empty. Having a few remote workers there is only going to help essential services. But if you think that not everybody will see it that way, you may be right.
> this won't help with [Spain's "vibrant culture"]
That is true. Even the idea that small villages form Spain's vibrant culture is a bit of an overstatement.
by tgv - It worked in my village, at least for the local who want to work with the incoming nomads; they all need things done and for them up to 10x the local cost is still cheap, so here the locals are thriving. And now everything looks/works better.by anonzzzies
- > As I understand it, these attempts to use digital nomad money to revive impoverished areas tend to become controversial when the impoverished locals realise what it means to compete with (from their perspective) extremely wealthy blow-ins.
I don’t see it like this, it may as well be that digital nomads are bringing much needed cashflow to the local community; of course this phenomenon should be monitored but digital nomads are so few that they can’t have a meaningful impact in sectors like housing or good prices.
by Lucasoato - In Cuenca, EC you have a lot of retirees and a few digital nomads. Most people don’t make a big move to spend more money than they would in their home country. So they frequent all of the same small local businesses and markets as the locals. No one learns Spanish so some money funnels into interpreters and facilitators. I ended up spending a lot of money on restaurants started by immigrants because I don’t like Ecuadorian cuisine that much. All of this to say that the money is distributed more than one might think.
- > when the impoverished locals realise what it means to compete with (from their perspective) extremely wealthy blow-ins
It's also more socially acceptable to complain about this stuff when the newcomers are seen as wealthy. We saw this in Canada when Chinese nationals started buying up houses in Canada. To the point the government started limiting foreign ownership of residential real estate.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-da...
by dmix - > (from their perspective) extremely wealthy blow-ins
I’ve had some friends do the digital nomad lifestyle. One thing that stood out to me was how many of them were not really doing that well financially. The stereotype is someone with a $100K per year job living like a king in a place where the median wages are 1/10th of that
Most of the people in their digital nomad groups were actually not full-time employed. They were trying to do contract work and then stretching out their earnings between jobs so they could travel. Living in these cheap locations was almost required to allow them to work the way they wanted.
There were people who were lucky enough to have the six figure remote jobs at companies that were okay with them not being available during normal business hours. Those jobs were at high risk of getting cut at the next economic down cycle.
It reminded me of how much the indie hacker scene all fantasizes about being like the levels.io guy making crazy money selling simple services to his giant follower list, but most of them can barely get a couple dozen sales for their SaaS if they’re lucky. Everyone thinks of levels.io, but few people think of the long tail of people making less than they’d get at any full time job.
by Aurornis