The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, setting up their family with generational wealth, is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful.
This was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas. And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying.
Working hard is necessary in its own right for many reasons, but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. So is shaming anyone who fails to achieve it as "lazy", when it was never going to be possible for more than a fraction.
Land is not scarce in the US. My road trip through Nevada to Salt Lake City convinced me of that much. What is scarce is land people actually want to live in - with safe neighborhoods, good schools, restaurants, shops, etc. Restrictive zoning and NIMBYism is definitely making this worse.
I don't think the amount of "unexplored" or "undeveloped" land is a good metric for social mobility. Economic growth is. New "frontiers" are created all the time. They do not have to be in the physical world (e.g. computers, the web, biotech, the App store, social media influencer, crypto, and now AI). Even in the physical world, frontiers can sometimes expand. Desirable land can be created in the middle of a desert (e.g. Las Vegas), we just don't want to anymore.
Despite its many flaws, I think the US is still better than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Agriculture, the Saudis get five harvests of alfalfa a year by leasing unlimited water rights in Arizona for practically nothing. The Az Governor could call the leases and stop that, but they haven't for some reason. Most water in AZ is for Manufacturing and Farming, very little is used for people.
This is one of the reasons I wish companies embraced remote work more, and which I wish the government encouraged more. Plenty of locations could be rebuilt and revitalized simply by moving working families there, and plenty of people would be happy to buy up the cheaper housing and contribute to the local economy if their places of work allowed for such flexibility.
Its a real shame that both state and federal governments do not see the advantages of this...
Most of that rust belt infrastructure from mid century population highs is actually at end of life. Some cities are having a crisis with things like their sewer systems right now. Its underreported because no one cares about the intricacies of stormwater and sewage movements, much less in a smaller midwestern city.
They are currently attempting to essentially be annexed by the small community of Suisun City in exchange for being allowed to develop the land according to their vision.
Not really, no. The land the BLM owns is mostly scrubland suitable for cattle grazing and basically nothing else. I suspect whoever told you that has an ideological bone to pick with the BLM and is bullshitting you to try and make you equally mad at them.
By the way, this is such a textbook example of how planted counter narratives brainwash people into deflecting actual criticism on a topic.
People interpret the speaker as if he is “one of those people”, who believes the counter narrative the listener has heard about.
Rarely does the listener move past this point, and check in on whether the speaker is actually one of those people, or if he is someone who has never heard of those people, or if he has ignored those people because he thinks their views are just as stupid as you think they are, and he is actually independently criticizing the topic.
Define "orginally". You might be interested to research how the Native Americans interacted, especially the Lakota. Rights by conquest was not a new idea.
Well the obvious response is then "can I conquer your land by force too?". No. Because there is a construction of "lawful property rights" that starts with the appropriation of land by force but protects the new owner from the same.
Well technically the land can still be appropriated by force, only you have to apply it against the entire system which enforces "lawful property rights"
Native Americans did have dogs. They didn't have sheep, but the Incans did have access to wool-bearing animals in the form of the alpaca (though the Incan Empire was geographically isolated so these animals never reached North America). Guinea pigs were also domesticated in this region. There were neither cows nor chickens, but there were other forms of poultry such as turkeys and ducks.
You need pack animals for civilisations. Transport is the backbone of industry and is required for the high degree of specialisation in trades that produces technological advancement.
You've drawn this argument from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. There are a few problems with the theory:
1) Diamond's argument rests on the idea that world historical developments are effectively determined by geography (and implicitly, by factors which precede the existence of a civilization). While I can't make a strong argument against historical determinism, the conclusions Diamond draws are strange. The chief problem is that Diamond is trying to make the case that the exceptional prosperity of Northern Europe and all of its colonies was effectively a fluke of geography. The problem for Diamond is that this pattern repeats over the course of about four hundred years all over the world, not just in the places where Europeans had the advantage of small pox on their side.
2) Native Americans had access to pack animals by way of the llama.
3) The Aztecs lacked access to pack animals. They still had specialized tradesmen and constituted a civilization.
The germs argument is the only one of Diamond's that I think holds any water with regards to the European conquest of North America, and perhaps I was being too brash in my original assertion (these civilizations existed, but were decimated by small pox). The issue with this argument is that it doesn't address European colonialism in Asia (where the disease factor is absent) and Subsaharan Africa (where the disease factor actually worked against Europeans).
The fact of the matter is that Europeans (and specifically Northern Europeans) happened upon a method of conquest that worked. This could have been an accident of geography, biology, or ideology, but it's absurd to pretend that the model didn't exist when it was the basis of a successful campaign to conquer the world. It had nothing to do with having access to pack animals.
The Llama is not a very good pack animal, you would know this if you ever looked at one. Pack animals are not necessary for any specialisation, but the are for the degree that brings technological advancement. If you want advanced society, you need to move lumber from forests to cities and ore from mines to furnaces. It's difficult to do this by hand.
> it was the basis of a successful campaign to conquer the world
I am referring specifically to the conquest of America here. You can see that there were several advanced societies at the time (China, India, Europe, Middle East) and it is essentially luck which of them won out. There are also many places which could not have feasibly conquered the world, America was among them precisely due to the lack of pack animals barring further societal advancement. By the same token, aboriginal Australians and Polynesian islanders had little chance dominating the world.
>The Llama is not a very good pack animal, you would know this if you ever looked at one.
They are pack animals with carrying capacities comparable to donkeys and slightly less than horses.
>America was among them precisely due to the lack of pack animals barring further societal advancement.
You never addressed the issue of Tenochtitlan, which was constructed without the use of pack animals, so this isn't a compelling claim to begin with. Even so, North America had plenty of candidates for domestication that would have made serviceable pack animals (e.g. moose, caribou). Diamond makes some weak attempt to claim that the animals available were too temperamental to be domesticated, conveniently forgetting that the ancestor of man's flesh-eating best friend is the wolf.
> By the same token, aboriginal Australians and Polynesian islanders had little chance dominating the world.
You're making this argument because these places are islands. This was not a hindrance to the British. You'll then make the argument that you were really arguing that these places are isolated (which is maybe valid if we're talking about Polynesia, less so for Australia), to which I'd reply: "Isolated from what?" to which you'd reply: "The pack animals, the germs, and the steel," to which I'd inquire: "Why were these things found in Europe and not Australia?" and that is where we get to the root of the matter. Europe's conquests were not a matter of luck or an accident of geography. There was something in their method that simply worked better than the methods of those peoples that they conquered. I haven't reached a conclusion as to what it was in that approach that led Europe to becoming the dominant power of the last five hundred years, but there's no compelling case to be made that this method didn't exist.
>I haven't reached a conclusion as to what it was in that approach that led Europe to becoming the dominant power of the last five hundred years
500 years is a blink. Anatomically modern humans have existed for 150,000 years, yet civilizations as we understand them are at most 5000 years old. You are comparing two continents that have been isolated during that timespan, with different geography, diseases, and domesticable animals, and which developed a virtually independent separate history until the 1500s. How can you assert that all of this is irrelevant and that it was pure "Northern European superiority" or whatever that meant European colonialism was successful?
> How can you assert that all of this is irrelevant and that it was pure "Northern European superiority" or whatever that meant European colonialism was successful?
Because the alternative is doing what James_K is doing and claiming that these events were essentially chance developments; that is, that there was nothing endogenous to European civilization (or, perhaps, as you're inferring, European peoples themselves) that led to these world conquests, but that they were instead either just a series of coincidences or a product of the environment.
This discussion can get quite philosophical because like I said earlier in the thread, I can't refute historical determinism - I don't know if there is any way that we can really exit the chain of causality and determine events for ourselves, so in that sense, the underlying claim that it's all just the environment (or more accurately, antecedent causes) is correct, but this doesn't tell the whole story.
The fundamental question at hand here is if European civilization had anything within it that led to its rise to power. What you, James_K, and decolonialists everywhere are preoccupied with is the idea that if this is true, it must mean that this "thing" (which I will refer to as the European method) originated as a result of European intelligence, or more broadly from its biological characteristics. It is then inferred that this will necessarily lead to normative scientific racism and subsequently a world-homogenizing genocide.
There is reason to be weary of these things. They do not refute the notion that the Europeans possessed something endogenous which allowed them to conquer the world. Drawing the conclusion that Europeans did possess this endogenous thing would not validate any normative moral claim; we can only do that ourselves.
I don't know who that is and have never read any of his work.
> Tenochtitlan
> Even so, North America had plenty of candidates for domestication that would have made serviceable pack animals
Weirdly enough, Tenochtitlan is the rebuttal to this question. Why do you think they built a city on a lake? It's because they didn't have any pack animals so boats were the best way to move stuff around. This is a disadvantage that makes everything else much harder and therefore slows development.
> conveniently forgetting that the ancestor of man's flesh-eating best friend is the wolf
If literal millions of Native Americans could not domesticate the other animals, but they could domesticate dogs, I'm going to guess that the other animals are harder to domesticate than dogs. You might not feel that this is the case, but your feelings don't stack up to the practical results of a thousands-of-years-long experiment run on an entire continent where these animals could not be domesticated.
> Why were these things found in Europe and not Australia?
Because Europe has horses and Australia doesn't, and horses cannot swim therefore could not reach Australia. The moon also doesn't have horses for a similar reason. In fact, you'll find that horses only really inhabited areas reachable by horses, until someone put them on a boat and took them to other places (which didn't happen for Australia until quite late). You have this strange assumption that all areas are secretly equal in geography and must be equally hospitable to human flourishing, but this is not true. Europe is more hospitable than Australia, therefore humans flourished more in Europe than Australia. All you need do is assume differences in geography exist and you'll reach the conclusion that humans in more amenable areas are more likely to conquer those in less amenable areas.
> Europe's conquests were not a matter of luck or an accident of geography
You say this with precisely no proof. The closest you get is saying "other people didn't do it, and Europeans did so it couldn't have been luck". The idea that knowledge is what held other areas back, as opposed to luck or geography, is ridiculous and trivially disprovable. Knowledge exists in equal quantities for all people (unless you believe certain races are inferior to others). The difference between regions is geographical or in fortune, which could include the fortune of having a particularly skilled leader or successful sequence of conquests.
> Weirdly enough, Tenochtitlan is the rebuttal to this question. Why do you think they built a city on a lake? It's because they didn't have any pack animals so boats were the best way to move stuff around. This is a disadvantage that makes everything else much harder and therefore slows development.
They built their city on a marsh because an eagle landed on a cactus and they interpreted this as a sign from heaven. They subsequently conquered the city-states that already existed there. It had nothing to do with considerations surrounding the ease of transport as they were a nomadic people and were initially forced to settle in a marsh on the fringes of the lake.
Further, you are getting away from your original claim, which was: "Transport is the backbone of industry and is required for the high degree of specialisation in trades that produces technological advancement." This was not the case for the Aztecs. "Ah," you say, "but we can amend my claim to include analogs to pack animals which facilitate the movement of materials, such as Tenochtitlan's canal system," at which point I would draw your attention to the Cahokia, the Pueblos, the Mayans, and the Olmecs, none of which fit this pattern, all of which formed complex civilizations that soundly refute your claim.
> If literal millions of Native Americans could not domesticate the other animals, but they could domesticate dogs, I'm going to guess that the other animals are harder to domesticate than dogs. You might not feel that this is the case, but your feelings don't stack up to the practical results of a thousands-of-years-long experiment run on an entire continent where these animals could not be domesticated.
Dogs were domesticated thousands of years prior to the arrival of humans in North America.
> Knowledge exists in equal quantities for all people
There is no evidence of this whatsoever and plenty of evidence to disprove it.
Yes: You made the erroneous claim that Native Americans domesticated dogs. I corrected your error by pointing out that dogs were domesticated prior to the arrival of humans in the Americas. Thus, knowledge is not evenly distributed.
"I meant intelligence, not knowledge," you counter, to which I retort: The idea that intelligence is evenly distributed among populations has been soundly refuted. There are demonstrable differences in every metric of intelligence thus far devised both between and within populations. Incidentally, intelligence by itself is not sufficient for colonialism. The Han Chinese typically score higher on IQ tests than Europeans, and yet it was the latter that conquered the world, not the former. "You're proving my point!" you protest - I never made the claim that Europeans conquered the world due to their intelligence, I rejected the notion that this had anything to do with luck, because it kept occurring over the course of dozens of geographies and hundreds of years.
Let's suppose it was luck. Do you have this luck? Can I see it, have it defined? What would it mean for Europeans to have conquered the world by means of luck? Does it manifest out a magical aether like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow?
Would you say this of the Jews during WW2, or do you have the understanding that it's a little less than tactful do describe the victims of genocide as "suckers"?
This article is saying the native Americans spread the horses faster than the Europeans spread. They still sourced the original horses from Europeans in the 1600s.
> The Americas had no horses before Europeans brought them.
> Long since debunked
I mean, the linked article says horses were introduced in the 1600s (brought by Europeans), and then spread throughout the Americas without requiring further European distribution.
Horses in North America are a weird one. I believe the current thinking is that horses started in North America, migrated to Asia, then the population died off after the continents split. So there were horses in the Americas prior to the Europeans, but also potentially before humans.
Humans and horses probably did that thing where you're looking for someone and you go to where they are then they go to where you are and you both miss eachother.
And then died out, before Cortes brought them back to the continent in 1519. Native Americans then discovered the horses before they ran into the Europeans and began spreading them across the country.
> Horses evolved in the Americas around four million years ago, but by about 10,000 years ago, they had mostly disappeared from the fossil record, per the Conversation. Spanish settlers likely first brought horses back to the Americas in 1519, when Hernán Cortés arrived on the continent in Mexico. Per the new paper, Indigenous peoples then transported horses north along trade networks.
There were a few hundred thousand of them across the entire continent. In the best case scenario, most of them still would have died to disease. Unless you believe a few hundred thousand people own should own an entire continent as their blood and soil birthright the land was always going to end up like this
There’s still a lot of land out there. The only problem today is nobody wants to start over with no plumbing, electricity, or other modern conveniences.
You’re right, I mistook the Canadian numbers for all of North America. I know south and Central America had a much higher population but that’s not what this thread is about. It looks like a more accurate number is in the low millions so my point still stands.
I'm gonna go conquer Georgia, then. Genocide some country folks, burn every Confederate flag I see, end some bloodlines forever. There's not many people living there, right by conquest, etc., plus Reconstruction wasn't finished properly anyway.
The truth has always been and will always be that the people who are most technologically advanced will end up with the land, weather by force or purchase.
Simply due to the fact that it's more valuable in their hands. Driving out some campers to build a town is the rule, not an exception.
European colonization of the world is a unique enough phenomenon to not hand wave it away as business as usual. Further, the industrial intensification and financialization of this colonization through the 18th-20th centuries alone is singular on its impact on human civilization with no precedent.
Apart from the Sentinelese, I can't think of one civilization that hasn't warred and taken over land and resources from others. And we really don't have proof the Sentinelese didn't do this at some point themselves.
You can think of many examples of war and conquest, but what happened in America is more than just war. Genocide is more than just war. Framing the atrocities upon which the US was founded as merely "historically normal" is a deeply revisionist view of history. Technological development at that time allowed for many great evils which were simply not possible before.
How do you know that what happened to the natives was so much worse than the hundreds if not thousands of similar fates that must have befallen other cultures over the last several tens of thousands of years?
Because the things you're referring to didn't happen. That's why you say they "must have happened" instead of "actually did happen". I can think of some examples of similar treatment, for example the British in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland around that time, but even then we see that there are many living natives in those lands today. America is unique in that the overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry.
> overwhelming majority (97%) of the population is non-native and has no native ancestry
Em. First, numbers of "native ancestry" are almost all self-reported which has more to do with self-identified culture than genetic ancestry.
Second, trying to argue through the use current numbers of native ancestry is nonsensical given the US has been an outlier in terms of immigration for a very long time making it impossible to compare against. For goodness sake, around a tenth of the population has been foreign born for the better part of two centuries which has had a dramatic effect on ancestry (both genetic and self-reported).
Most first nations at first contact had 0 conception of ownership, rather seeing it as some sort of stewardship (or if you put it in modern terms you could use the marxist notion of personal property where it's 'use it or lose it') as well as low enough populations that they figured there was enough to go around to share the land with settlers.
Some of the nations were large, such as the Aztec. And at least a few of them understood right by conquest. They also had extensive trade routes across the continent, seeming to disprove the lack of ownership.
You seem to be confusing the concept of "ownership" with that of "private property" (on immovables, especially). The "Marxist notion" of personal property still requires the concept of ownership.
And if there happened to be people on the land they “wanted” well then there’s guns and smallpox blankets to take care of those pesky details.
“The people there didn’t have the concept of ownership” but some pioneers sure as hell made sure to enlighten them by laying claim to that same land and then threatening anyone for encroaching on it.
genocide is an intentional act. Smallpox did 90% of the work and nobody lifted a finger, at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population.
After smallpox when the population of the Americas had been reduced by something like 90% they most certainly didn't need all the land.
If the settlers had done what the first thousand or so invading cultures did and just exterminated the natives, they would have been able to cast them in whatever light they chose. Instead they gave them rather a lot of autonomous territory relative to their population, along with legal monopolies designed to prevent them from being forced into wage slavery.
> at the time nobody could have forseen the effect of smallpox on the native population
Are you really unaware that the colonials intentionally spread smallpox to the natives? This is not some obscure detail - it's in approximately all of the history textbooks in a fair bit of detail.
The few references to potentially intentionally spreading disease, all well after they were spreading in the Americas, are unlikely to be the cause of more than a tiny sliver of deaths due to disease. The timelines simply do not match.
I can't say I fully agree with the premise, but suppose we run with it.
If someone acted with clear intent to commit genocide, but the mass deaths would have happened anyway, does that clear them of the charge?
Put another way, if I stab someone, the knife goes in and all, but as I'm doing it a car also runs over him, am I no longer guilty of murder? Seems pretty questionable to me.
The people who committed genocide (or simply murder without cause) are clearly to blame for those they killed, directly and in many cases, indirectly.
As for your example, that's a bit convoluted. Perhaps clearer would be if you intend to genocide say, a town and meteor hits killing everyone before you get there as well as the neighboring town, it would be difficult to argue you're to blame for their deaths. That doesn't mean you're a nice person and we'd generally still lock you up for attempted genocide of the town you attempted to murder, but not of the town you didn't.
The meteor in real life was disease. By some estimates, 90% of the population in the Americas died from diseases the Spanish accidentally introduced by 1600, most the Spanish did not know existed.
It was an intentional act. They wrote about it being an intentional act. The violence was not an accidental nor rare event either, it was an intentional act too.
The east expansion took a lot of time, involved quite a few massacres and invonluntary relocations.
A big part of the problem is that too many people want and/or have to live in very tiny portions of the country: major cities.
There is a lot of cheap land and even a lot of cheap houses for those willing to live in a different place. Even many of my friends in Seattle, for example, have discovered that if they move 30-60 minutes away their housing costs plummet dramatically. This has opened the door to many of them moving even farther away, unlocking an entire new world of affordability.
There was a brief moment where all of this looked like it was a very real possibility for many of us, but the rubber band is snapping back with remote work and now many are being required to move back to those few cities again to find the best jobs.
> but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing.
I don't think most people believe that you can just work hard and then have generational wealth for your heirs. That feels like a strawman argument. Generational wealth has always been a difficult feat for the few, not something we promised everyone could achieve.
However, people also underestimate the power of compounding for retirement savings. Obviously not helpful to someone working at McDonalds and trying to pay rent in a big city, but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years. Not "generational wealth" or "setting up your heirs", but enough to make big contributions to education, helping kids with emergencies, possibly leaving some non-trivial inheritance. This happens all the time and continues to happen with millenials, as it will happen with Gen Z. Again, not literally everyone but to suggest that it's out of reach is really out of alignment with the reality of what we see people earning and saving.
> but people working average mid-life jobs at average salaries who consistently save $100/month or more can amass significant retirement wealth over 30-40 years.
You’re off by at least a factor of ten.
40 years of $100/month savings at a generous 5% compounding is $148,242. And that’s in future dollars. Drop it to 4% and you’re down $116,606.
The real formula to consider is what percentage of your monthly spending you are savings. If it’s 100%, then every month worked is one month of retirement. If it’s 50% then two months of working is one month of retirement. If you live frugally and save 400% of your spend, each month counts as four retired months.
It’s a simple fraction with the numerator as your net savings and the denominator your total spending. And lowering the denominator scales things much faster.
No he said 5% 'is in future dollars', i.e. not inflation adjusted to a present value... When in reality the nominal S&P500 returns are 10% leading to the same 'future dollars'. That is conservative.
Plus if 7% real returns (after a 3% inflation) is the historical average, how is 5% real returns generous? That's still conservative even if he meant to claim a 5% real return.
> Even many of my friends in Seattle, for example, have discovered that if they move 30-60 minutes away their housing costs plummet dramatically.
And there are plenty of nice places to live in that radius! I'm in Tacoma which I really like. And Seattle is plenty accessible for shows, events, a night out.
I did what your friends did. After 6y of paying off student loans and saving cash (not even being frugal - enjoying Seattle for sure), we looked at Tacoma and realized "oh we have our pick of wonderful homes here."
America isn't overpopulated. The pyramid scheme you're describing is not a Malthusian constraint but the product of bad monetary policy privileging non-productive investments in real estate. There's still no better place on earth for normal people to build wealth, unless you're playing the digital nomad game.
I would contest the idea that this construction isn't happening - it's largely just resulting in sprawl at the periphery of existing cities. America has a lot of space available and a lot of space actively being developed.
As to why new cities aren't being built in completely empty areas, I would have to know where you're talking about to make a guess as to why they aren't being developed. Off the top of my head:
1) Environmental concerns
2) Expropriation concerns making projects politically untenable
3) The concerns of aboriginals
4) Cost of infrastructure development
5) Lack of market demand
To elaborate on the fifth point, I would posit that people don't tend to populate such greenfield cities unless there is a compelling reason to do so; either by being pulled (e.g. by resource extraction opportunities, a growing economy, educational opportunities, etc.) or by being pushed (e.g. fleeing a war, the effects of climate change, or political persecution). China is the example to look at here. They spent most of the 2010s buying up an enormous amount of resources to build cities that ended up just sitting empty before eventually being demolished. A lot of this was just fraud (the buildings weren't constructed to be habitable to begin with), but at least some proportion of it had to do with the factors I mentioned above. The cost of physically moving to a new city, as well as the loss of social capital resulting from such a move make relocating to a new city both undesirable and prohibitively expensive for most people.
I do (becuase I've heard it from a buddy of mine who's an MD at a Bulge Bank) - there is no capital to invest in consumer real estate anymore.
Large portions of that industry died out in 2008-12, and capital for large real estate projects like a housing community tend to be allocated 2-3 years before ground breaking, and then an additional 1-2 years to build.
So to build a brand new community by 2020, you should have done all the leg work in 2014-16. And to build a new one today, it should have been done in 2019-20.
Any pipeline that even existed is now dead, because manufacturing construction was the asset class of choice in the 2022-24 period along with high interest rates (making projects much more expensive) and tariffs on Canadian lumber, so the housing shortage is about to get even worse.
It does not come about magically from monetary or even fiscal policy. The demand for housing (and other construction) was and is real. People find use for, and like having much space, while being close together. What was and is lacking is supply.
It was never implied that this mechanism was magical.
If you reread the original post, the claim being made is:
> The idea that an average person, working hard, can eventually own part of a nation's land and resources, [...] was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing.
This is manifestly not the case. My response was that, insofar as a pyramid scheme exists, it has nothing to do with some fundamental Malthusian limit on how many people can fit in a given space; this limit exists, but is not the reason that the rich are getting richer, which instead has to do with monetary policy.
You make cheap money available to those with good credit. These people take out loans and use the money to buy real property with the expectation that they will be able to rent it out for more than the carrying cost of the loan. This causes the price of real estate to rise artificially beyond what it would if the cheap credit had not been made available. The key issue here is that this credit isn't being made available to everyone at once - you have to qualify for the loan first.
"
This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas."
And why you guys are looking at Mars now.
Here in latam we haven't filled the land at all, you guys have been hard working and filled with riches. But our laziness might give us more longevity, we are playing the long game with the amazon
LATAM will get a lot of remote work if the wages stay lower than the US since they're in better-for-US-company-timezones than India or others overseas. That's what my company is outsourcing to.
Doubtful. Digital nomads, short-term rental tourism, real estate investors (prompted by the former two) are increasing housing costs and CoL in all the popular destinations. Costs in some regions like Barcelona almost got equalized with costs in major US tech hubs. The same is happening in places like Buenos Aires. So its unlikely that the trend in LATAM will continue as it is.
Also, this is very bad for not only the locals as they get gentrified from living in their own city/urban centers (and in some cases even rural zones), but also the local companies: The US and other rich Western companies dump their healthcare and housing costs onto the locals through arbitration while making it harder for local companies to keep up with the CoL increase through wages, therefore increasing their expenses and reducing their competitiveness. And the reduced taxes that the nomads etc pay doesn't help it. (that is, the ones who actually pay).
> The US and other rich Western companies dump their healthcare and housing costs onto the locals [...] And the reduced taxes that the nomads etc pay doesn't help it. (that is, the ones who actually pay).
Most nomads are going to be getting private health insurance. It's true that a lot of them are not paying their taxes, but if you're talking about Latin America that's true for a large portion of the domestic population as well. I looked into relocating to a country in South America a few years ago and had a lawyer tell me to not even worry about filling out the relevant visas because he had clients from China who had been living there for decades with no papers (I opted not to retain his services). The key here is that even if they aren't paying taxes, they are bringing money into the economy and are generally not competing with local laborers. This attitude has started to shift in places like Mexico City because a lot of the expats are not digital nomads but instead run-of-the-mill immigrants competing with the working population for jobs.
> Most nomads are going to be getting private health insurance
Those private health insurances are subsidized by the public healthcare because they piggyback off of the public healthcare system. That's why they are affordable, unlike the US. And as a result, those nomads end up congestion the public healthcare system because the private health insurers also send their own patients to public hospitals for anything serious. Im telling this from a place that is experiencing precisely this.
> It's true that a lot of them are not paying their taxes, but if you're talking about Latin America that's true for a large portion of the domestic population as well
The amount of taxes avoided by the poor majority in such countries don't compare to the taxes avoided by the rich white collars. Nomads earn 2 to 5 times more than the local white collars as well. Even in some European countries.
> The key here is that even if they aren't paying taxes, they are bringing money into the economy
They don't. People think that but neither tourists nor nomads nor short term-renters (whatever the kind) bring money into the economy:
The nomad doesn't buy 10 shoes every month, 2 cars every year, eat out 20 times every day or buy 50 loaves of bread every day. He consumes just like any other human being (obviously), and his consumption does not move the needle of the local economy much.
What nomad's consumption boosts is a few local/luxury shops that cater to the rich or nomads, and maybe one or two local shops or services that they also use. Those few businesses make bank even as other businesses in the same neighborhood rot. And those few businesses that benefit don't buy dozens of employees to make up for the added workload - they hire one or two and everyone works harder and that's it. So what nomads end up doing is enriching a few local, already-well-to-do shop and business owners. On the other side, they cause a 20 to 30% increase in rents (even in Europe), housing prices and significant increases in CoL.
> This attitude has started to shift in places like Mexico City because a lot of the expats are not digital nomads but instead run-of-the-mill immigrants competing with the working population for jobs.
It started changing in Europe too. In places like Barcelona, Madrid, Southern Spain, Portugal, some central European 'bohemian' destinations etc. Mostly because of the sharp gentrification the nomads are causing even for the white collars. But especially the English-speaking foreigner population concentration in some places became way too visible and they started outnumbering the locals. In Barcelona there seems to be a lot of cafes in the city center where the waiters don't know Spanish or Catalan, people having difficulty hearing either language being spoken in the city center etc.
In any case a strong reaction came to being against nomadism and its not looking good.
> Those private health insurances are subsidized by the public healthcare because they piggyback off of the public healthcare system.
Most nomads I know have insurance that is either global or based in their home country. If I had been injured in my host country I would have been required to pay full price for my medical services, which is why I bought insurance in my own country. If you're at the point that you've purchased insurance in the place you are living, are you really a nomad anymore?
> The amount of taxes avoided by the poor majority in such countries don't compare to the taxes avoided by the rich white collars.
Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just speculating? I've read about this with regards to South America and what I took away from it was that the informal economy is largely made up of low wage laborers, not white collar professionals. In either case, this is kind of irrelevant to the discussion because any taxes the nomads pay represent revenues that the host would not otherwise have had. As a nomad you aren't going to be consuming more in services than you're spending unless you're camping in a tent and end up breaking a leg.
> They don't. People think that but neither tourists nor nomads nor short term-renters (whatever the kind) bring money into the economy:
I spent more on rent in 3 months in my host country than most people spend in a year. I ate out at restaurants almost every night I was there, and took taxis every day. These aren't normal consumption patterns where I was living. Your point might hold if you're talking about Europe; but if we accept that it does, we would then have to ask how it's possible for nomads to be driving rents up.
> Those few businesses make bank even as other businesses in the same neighborhood rot.
Does the economy improve or does it not?
> And those few businesses that benefit don't buy dozens of employees to make up for the added workload - they hire one or two and everyone works harder and that's it.
This is pure speculation on your part and there's no compelling reason to think that it occurs.
> Most nomads I know have insurance that is either global or based in their home country.
I don't think any really 'global' insurance exists as it would be unmanageable as it would bankrupt the 'global' firm. All such insurances probably pass through some local subsidiary or intermediary firm. And where I am, all nomads have to buy local private insurance as that is the one that they can legally prove having. And that means they use the public healthcare system when they have anything serious.
> If you're at the point that you've purchased insurance in the place you are living, are you really a nomad anymore?
Purchasing private insurance that you can confirm is obligatory to get DN visa here.
> Do you have any evidence of this, or are you just speculating?
Speculation is unnecessary as numbers are public. The amount of taxes that the nomads pay is at most ~24% even in the popular European spots. That is if they actually pay anything because most of them use the 180 day rule to avoid having to be resident in those countries. If they exit schengen in the 180th day and stay somewhere else for what, some ~3 months, they can reset the duration and stay another 180 days in that country without becoming a resident and paying taxes. Then there are the assholes that stay more than that but dodge taxes by using Delaware corporations, other shell companies etc.
In contrast to this, wherever they cram into, they cause a 20% to 30% rent and housing price increase every year. When you consider that the income of the average nomad is $5000/month according to statistics, even if they actually pay their taxes what they pay amounts to something like $1000 per person/month on average and does not do sh*t to make up for the CoL increase they cause. Especially the rent and housing.
Its bad, really. The intention for the DN visa here was to stimulate the information technology sector. But it ended up as a scheme in which mainly the US companies dump their healthcare and housing costs onto the locals while still getting the labor of the nomad. So it is not the local technology market that is benefiting from this at all. If anything, it is getting harmed because the CoL increase makes the local companies' employees suffer and the companies cant raise salaries to keep up.
> As a nomad you aren't going to be consuming more in services than you're spending unless you're camping in a tent and end up breaking a leg.
Merely the extra load they cause in the public healthcare system would be enough to consume more, even before talking about the CoL and local economic issues above.
> I spent more on rent in 3 months in my host country than most people spend in a year. I ate out at restaurants almost every night I was there, and took taxis every day. These aren't normal consumption patterns where I was living.
Yes, and those raise the CoL. All landlords in your region will now be jacking up prices and will try to rent their spaces to foreigners - which will also bring in the private investment plundererers who will start buying up the local housing to do it themselves instead. There are cases in my country where foreign individuals rent the housing they bought in my country and rent it to nomads without setting foot in the country or any locals getting involved. They pay a pretty meager property tax, and all their income tax goes to their own country because they reside there.
> Does the economy improve or does it not?
Abso-fkin-lutely not. Im in one of the major hotspots, and not even the worst, but people cant afford housing, they don't have jobs and there doesn't seem to be anything that is stimulated. If you don't count American investment corps and 'investor' individuals coming in and starting to scoop entire neighborhoods - which exacerbates the crisis even more.
> This is pure speculation on your part and there's no compelling reason to think that it occurs
That is exactly what we see happening. The economic numbers confirm the same reality. Higher CoL and no change in jobs even in the supposedly boosted 'information technology' sector.
Can you post some listings from both to show what you mean? If you’re comparing the city center of Barcelona to some distant suburban neighborhood that looks like Long Island but is technically part of Queens maybe it’s true, but if you’re comparing like to like I’m pretty confident NYC is still way more expensive.
Yeah, looks like the go to strategy, but I may have to pass on the gold mine and go for the higher payoff of a decent living but a more spiritually fulfilling trade diplomacy
In international trade there's complementary/productive trade, you have gold, we have silver, let's trade. And you also have redundant/substitutive trade, you have soy, we have cheaper soy, buy our soy.
I don't believe from the bottom of my heart in substitutive trade for similar reasons I don't believe in (most) inmigration. We've conquered the americas, now we have to populate it, god won't reward desertors who revert their ancestor's decision by running back to the old continent, and the excuse of "I was born in the wrong hemisphere" is also quite petty, we rolled the dice and this is what we got.
Substitutive trade isn't far from immigration, the poor want to go to the rich countries, and the rich buy the cheap labour. Where is the pride in that? In both sides. Leave your country for another with a different religion, leave your mother your brethren, and serve. Leave a war instead of fighting? Take a 1 hour bus to a fancy neighbourhood to serve coffee and wash dishes. Conversely, you can wash your own dishes, you can use a bottle of water and fill that up before you leave, we don't need a migrant washing our dishes, and we don't need to migrate to wash dishes.
So I'm trying to focus on trade that is not replaceable with local labour, hopefully countries start nailing down remote work and we start locking those behind visas.
And unfortunately india and philipinnes get that productive trade, they can cover night shifts.
We'll find stuff to export. There's not much, as Trump said "they need us more than we need them".
Local entertainment, sports and games will always be there, it's like cybertourism.
there might be an argument for redundant trade as a counterweight to an unbalanced productive export. But I don't think that works long term.
There's also localization services, in language and legal, but those are just costs of exporting really.
Lithium is probably the lesser evil, super extractive, but we gotta pay somehow.
Sorry about the super rant. Lately I've been more using forums as a way to write things that I already had drafted in my mind.
In the US you can buy land at quantity for, say, ~$1k/acre in places where there aren't people/infrastructure/etc...
There is no shortage of land in the US. There is a shortage of land in a few high density areas. But increasing their density makes them more attractive.
I don't think it's reasonable to make the pioneer comparison-- if you want to do what pioneers did and build something from almost nothing in the middle of nowhere with great effort then there is still an analogous route open to you.
Indeed, though at $1000/ you can be proximal to subsurface water at least... Perhaps not enough for intensive agriculture, but absolutely enough to live.
The Puritans became settlers in the New World because they were hated and thrown out of Europe / England so they set up shop and managed to derange society to this day in the US.
"is derived from the pioneer days when land was plentiful."
Land is still generally plentiful. The need to all live in one spot is more social/artificial and really accelerated in the late 19th and early 20th centuries due to rapid urbanization.
And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying.
Land use is a complex topic, but you’re basically right. Everything good—not just land but social opportunities—is spoken-for and what we’re seeing in South Korea and Japan is probably the best solution: peaceful natural attrition and non-replacement of capital’s reserve army that is unwanted labor.
It always strikes me as bizarre that people can "own" land. It existed before you and will exist after you, so how can a short-lived being really "own" it?
It would make so much more sense if land "ownership" was related to whether you live on or work that particular piece of land rather than relying on arbitrary pieces of paper that were mainly decided before any of us were even born.
Isn't the tax paying towards a society that will respect your "ownership" so that you can have access to legal redress if someone prevents you using it?
I wonder about the economics of places with declining population like Japan and South Korea. I always read that declining population is bad for the economy but feels like those countries will have more opportunities for the young in the future.
Look at Georgism, and LVT. A 100% "tax" on the value of unimproved land would ensure the forces of market itself would push away from the situation you describe.
of course this was never going to last forever, we have more than 8 billion people in the world, if even 0.00001% of people wanted to do what you proposed, eventually own a part of a nation’s land, thats 80 thousand people.
This is a fairly simplistic/wrong view. If this were the case, say, you’d expect housing costs to be fairly reliably lower in low density European countries than high density ones. Spoiler: nope.
In practice housing costs are driven by shortages of _housing_, not land. And these are quite different.
This was never going to be able to last forever as long as the population keeps increasing. This is why settlers left Europe etc in the first place to seek fortune overseas. And since there is no un-owned land remaining, the market price for land will match or exceed regional population growth worldwide forever, unless a whole lot of people start dying.
Working hard is necessary in its own right for many reasons, but promising everyone that if they "work" hard enough, they too can set up their heirs, is pure marketing. So is shaming anyone who fails to achieve it as "lazy", when it was never going to be possible for more than a fraction.