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).
> 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.
In Canada , it wasn’t limited to areas with economic struggles/lack of investment.
Most of the investment was in major metropolitan cities, leading to a statistically significant percentage of residential housing stock being bought up with foreign(imported) capital. Many of these units were subsequently used as store of investment (left empty)
Since policies did not support building at the pace that met increased demand(mainly immigration), and many foreign buyers were comfortable bidding up housing: this was a significant contributor to housing prices inflating to mutiples that were much higher than previous trends (i.e. upto 20 times median salary vs 5/7 times previously)
And the foreign buyer ban did lead to a measureable decline in prices
The primary thing cornering Canadian real-estate was investor corporations, rather than Chinese nationals. But it was easier politics to highlight Chinese nationals, esp. coming up to their election.
> 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.
You haven’t lived in Medellin, Colombia if you don’t think digital nomads can have an effect on housing prices.
My experience is from 2015-2024. I did the digital nomad thing for 9 years and lived in Medellin 4 separate times over that period for 6 months to a year each time.
I saw rents for normal folks, not furnished and not Airbnbs, do a 4x in that time period. Laureles was a middle class suburb for locals in 2015 and was just overrun by nomads by 2024. Poblado, Laureles, even as far as La Estrella saw a really noticeable impact.
Clearly I contributed to the issue and nomads did inject money into the economy but it also had a really visible effect on housing. I don’t have any ideas on how to do it right but it is something that should be approached carefully or locals get priced out.
EDIT: I believe they started more tightly regulating things in 2024 with required registration for <1 year rentals. Not sure how that has played out. Also added the specific neighborhoods that I saw things shoot up.
My social circle was largely nomads when I lived there so I was very aware of CoLiving, CoWork, and other business almost exclusively catering to nomads. Those exploded in number during this time period.
Poblado was already one of the richest neighborhoods in the whole country in 2015. One of my neighbors was an Emmy winning pianist. So, gentrification isn’t going to be a thing in neighborhood like that.
It is a single data point of my lived experience in that part of the world. I am not presenting it as a peer reviewed study. But, there are also examples like Portugal which has had more recent studies done on this.
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.
Yeah, Build The Wall rhetoric is pretty popular worldwide. While most associated with Trump, it’s a general view that people demand their neighbours be blood-and-soil compatriots.
> Yeah, Build The Wall rhetoric is pretty popular worldwide. While most associated with Trump, it’s a general view that people demand their neighbours be blood-and-soil compatriots. Immigration is generally seen as a threat to the local populace
The point GP was making is that digital nomads are generally in a particular place only temporarily not permanently. So, feelings towards nomads is not the same as feelings towards immigrants. The latter are building community. The former simply feeds off of it.
Most actual immigrants are nomads, at least where I live, and are "passing through". They do not intend to settle permanently. Which most governments love, by the way, yes to income taxes, no to pensions later.
Is it sustainable? No. Not for the governments receiving these people. Not for the immigrants.
And yes, everybody makes financial projections as if that's not the case. Why? Doing it like that means more money to spend ... and for now creditors (ie. the central bank) accepts the reasoning.
> Most actual immigrants are nomads, at least where I live (Western Europe), they are "passing through". They do not intend to settle permanently. Which most governments love, by the way, yes to income taxes, no to pensions later.
It doesn't work like that for Europeans, your work years accumulate across European countries, we are free to collect the related portion to the paid taxes, when leaving the country, or leave everything to retirement age, at which point the social security of the official residency country will take care of collecting from across Europe, provided the necessary paperwork.
All EU countries are changing their pension systems at the same time, and not for the better. Do you really believe they won't at some point drop this?
Well, I suppose the relevant question is if you're willing to be your future they won't do this, because that's what you're doing.
The most famous actual wall in Europe is the Berlin Wall, which wasn’t about ethnicity or built to keep anyone out. And even Trump’s wall isn’t about blood or soil - CBP and ICE would collapse without the Spanish speaking Hispanic population of Texas and the southwest filling their ranks.
> (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.
I did contract work so I could stay traveling and lived on money I made in previous full time jobs. It was a very nice way to live compared to the 9 to 5 even though I made less money.
Having enough money to live the way you want is all you need. Hostels are fun.
But in the free time I had, I did end up making a SaaS that set me up very comfortably for the rest of my life.
"I did nothing but play basketball when I was in high school and I got into the NBA. Cynicism will keep you in your 9 to 5. Anybody can do what I did."
Also: found the guy who had wealthy parents to fall back on so he was always safe to take this sort of risk.
Yes. Salary is compensation for sacrifice. Many (most, hopefully, but interestingly not all) would rather have less sacrifice than more compensation. Not spending your life doing what someone else wants leaves more life to do what you want with.
Up to a point. Hostels are very irritating now in that there is always someone on their phone at all hours lighting up the entire room. Also some noise issues.
I find quieter hostels much better. When I was over in Ireland, the ones in Belfast and Dublin were awful, and in county Galway. I found wonderful ones in Co. Donegal, Armagh and Limerick.
I'm 58 and still choose hostels over hotels but I avoid party hostels. Sometimes I hang out with someone older than me, sometimes with someone younger than me. Usually I hang out on my own and don't mind it. I've had bedbugs in a "business hotel".
> But in the free time I had, I did end up making a SaaS that set me up very comfortably for the rest of my life.
There were examples like this of people in the groups hitting on something and making enough money to retire (if they managed their money right)
It was the rare case. The end result for most of them was moving back home and taking a normal job when hopping between hostels and digital nomad group homes stopped being fun and none of their business ideas got traction.
> 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
The thing is, having a Western passport and earning $10k-20k a year (untaxed) in countries where the median household incomes (ie. 2 working adults) are at best comparable to that is living like a king comparatively speaking.
There's a reason western expats are looked down on derisively by locals across ASEAN and the only ASEAN state with a semi-functional democracy (Malaysia) is also one of the least budget tourist friendly - the middle class and above look at tay ba lo with disgust as losers, and the lower class only look up to them for the opportunity to get a more powerful visa. The high rate of "passport bros" also doesn't help.
The reality is, most kinds of tourism only lead to the development of extractive economic institutions at the expense of human capital development and higher value economic sectors that would benefit from that.
>>The reality is, most kinds of tourism only lead to the development of extractive economic institutions at the expense of human capital development and higher value economic sectors that would benefit from that.
Those are dying towns. Tourism/digital nomads are their lifeline. There is no "human capital development" to speak of. Young people there do everything they can do migrate to bigger cities. Have you ever been to the region? Many of those towns look like ghost towns.
Realistically I’ll take 4 to 8 weeks off while looking for work back in the US.
I had a revelation a few years back.
Taking real vacations is absolutely necessary.
If I can work 12 months at 70 to 80$ an hour I generally can afford 8 to 12 weeks off as long as I as I’m not in the US or Europe.
When I think out of the box, I do imagine working on my own ideas during my travels. Met a brilliant 23 year old last year who speaks 3 languages, and programs in Python and Java
I could probably hire him at 10$ an hour.
Vs some 23 year old American who will demand 45$ an hour and tell me Python sucks.
But then I wake up, back to looking for my next contract.
You could get more bang for your buck. I'm currently freelancing at ~$50/hr and for every sixtyish hours I can live for two months, so I could afford to work half the year at a leisurely pace and not work the rest of the year, or worth one month full tilt and then take five months off. This is while living comfortably, not having to be frugal or anything.
>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
It's about the travelling and lifestyle, not the earnings over some regular stationary job.
But even $50K/year is still bad from the perspective the parent notes, if the locals making $10K or $30K/year have to compete for rent and services with those nomads in their own area.
This is the bit that I don't get though, if it is all about the "travel and lifestyle", then why would I want to end up in a rural village in Spain. My travel is more limited, and I'm hardly following the "digital nomad lifestyle".
Not saying it can't be fun, but you can live in a country town almost anywhere, if I just want a permanent base hours from any airport, and they all tend to be a lot cheaper than living in the "big smoke".
> Not saying it can't be fun, but you can live in a country town almost anywhere, if I just want a permanent base hours from any airport, and they all tend to be a lot cheaper than living in the "big smoke".
I think folks from the US tend to underestimate the difference in proximity and services available in rural Spain vs rural US.
I emigrated to a tiny rural village in a far-flung corner of Spain, and I have an excellent highway 10 minutes away, the airport is 45 minutes (basically the same amount of time it took me from downtown Seattle to the airport), a decent city is also 45 minutes away. There are less than 1,000 folks in the entire district, but we have gigabit fibre to every house, a healthcare centre covered by national healthcare, dental clinic, two supermarkets, 6 cafes...
>This is the bit that I don't get though, if it is all about the "travel and lifestyle", then why would I want to end up in a rural village in Spain.
Because going abroad at a different place than your regular country, and staying at a place for months or even a year or so, is also travelling. Travelling as in "I'm abroad, experiencing a different place and culture", not as in "I actively move from country to country every second week". And a "rural village in Spain" is quite compelling, both as a work base and as a lifestyle to many.
In which case, why would it matter if it's "hours from any airport" or not? Who said you'll be just using it as a jump base for airport travel? It can just be a place to work from and soak the local environment and surrounding areas. Not to mention in Spain you can't be a few hours from the nearest airport anywhere anyway. It's not some vast wasteland.
That's true. Though living for a while in some small village is probably the best way to do experience the different place and culture, over regular touristy travelling or being a nomad in some Thai beach town.
That's definitely very apparent, even places like Indonesia - which is practically as different from the "western world" as it can be, is now turned into someone's fantasy/caricature of an exotic place.
I was glad I travelled in the 80s and even the 90s. I got to see different places. Now mamy of them feel like variants of the same place. Even the rebellious subcultures are the same. I use to run into bores obsessed with Jim Morrison and reiki in various parts of the world.
I started travelling in December 1989 and still find different places. Touristy places tend to get samey and cities tend to get samey. Vietnam has got much more like a developed country since my first visit and that's a fantastic thing.
If you're running into those new age types all the time it's because you keep going to the places they congregate. There's usually only a few in each country.
True, I never got why so many real estate ads mention distance from an airport. How often do you need to travel for that to be a deciding factor where to live?
Country towns feel much more varied around the world than big cities do. Rural areas in Australia are nothing like ones in Japan, which are nothing like ones in Thailand, which are nothing like ones in Romania.
When I miss city life I move to a city again. Often the most memorable times on my travels were in rural areas.
> 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.
When I did this, working outside of business hours was seen as an advantage in case we had issues overnight.
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.
yes this works for a while till it grows and locals start to compete with the nomads and get priced out and have to move to the outskirts of their town. I’ve seen it happen in Spain, Costa Rica, Mexico, Bali etc.
I guess this place is just too small; this is more the type of place the article talks about ; this was dead a little while ago, but there are no outskirts and the locals own most nice builds and do airbnbs in them. It's too small to get this type of 'push out the locals' to be happening unless the locals just sell everything, but they are here with their kids etc as well. I can see that it would and does happen in bigger towns. You cannot build here either; nature reserve... You can only restore.
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.
But I don't get it. When push comes to shove, wealth is debt. Concentration of wealth is directly related, indirectly caused, by debt. Debt is what investors are willing to put in. The bigger the economic union they live in, the more debt investors will be willing to put up with. This leads to wealth concentrating over time, and the more concentrated wealth will be, the poorer these rural villages will be, and everybody runs.
They chose policies to go deeper into debt, to join a bigger union to go deeper into debt.
Because without the union, you would still take at least 6 hours drive from Porto to Evora, using national roads, preferably during the night unless you wanted to cook between 30 and 40 degrees celsius as I did so many times during may childhood in late 70's, early 80's, instead of the cosy 4h something from taking the motorway.
That debt is what allowed many of the infrastructure that is now in place.
However it is also the consequence of that debt, that only the middle to low level classes get to experience, that now puts all right wing parties on leading votes, even thought most Boomers and Gen Xers across Europe, should know better how living under dictatorships feels like.
> Because without the union, you would still take at least 6 hours drive from Porto to Evora, using national roads, preferably during the night unless you wanted to cook between 30 and 40 degrees celsius as I did so many times during may childhood in late 70's, early 80's, instead of the cosy 4h something from taking the motorway.
Is this supposed to be an argument? Yes it's fun to buy nice things. I'm aware of that. Especially with other people's money and work.
> That debt is what allowed many of the infrastructure that is now in place.
And Gen X is the major part of the people paying for it about now.
> even thought most Boomers and Gen Xers across Europe, should know better how living under dictatorships feels like.
Obviously they think it feels better than having the government spend less, which is of course the deal you handed them with: you got to have the government spend more on you and your generation, by promising it would spend less on them and their generation, while taxing them more. Your generation promised that, on their behalf.
They weren't born yet, or at least not politically active, to complain about it.
So why should they, why would they, accept less than you got? Your generation promised their work, and then spent all the money.
Can they do the same to your generation perhaps? Take a similar amount of money back, which would roughly equate to cutting elderly pensions to zero for 30 years or so, well, until the debt is paid off. That would make it be more like if your generation spent it's own money.
> 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.
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?
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.
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, 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.
And any immigration from LatAm (excluding Venezuela) is fleeting as much of LatAm has developmentally caught up with Eastern and parts of Southern Europe
> they never fully recovered from the Eurozone collapse
Fertility seems independent from anything economy related: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/esp/spa... , it happened well before 2008, and today it is only oscillating around the same 1.2 number. The same as many other rich countries.
> It's still not attractive for much of LatAm. Much of the current LatAm wave in Spain and Italy is from Venezuela or Colombia
Spain has Latam inmigration for each an every spanish speaking country in America: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmigraci%C3%B3n_en_Espa%C3%B1... . There is no clear skew towards Venezuela or Colombia, other than being the biggest countries. Once normalized per population (i.e. a small country like Uruguay with 3 million people won't send 1 million to Spain), you find that Cuba, Paraguay, Ecuador or Uruguay are above Venezuela in inmigration rate to Spain, and Honduras and Dominican Republic are above Colombia. Only Mexico (they probably migrate to the US) and Peru (I don't know why) have very low inmigration to Spain.
> Spain doesn't have the same pull factor for LatAm that Canada
10% of current Spain population come from Latam. In Canada, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_immigration_statistics, the first Latam source of inmigration country is Mexico (0.25% of Canada population), Colombia 0.22%, El Salvador 0.14%, Chile 0.08%, Venezuela 0.08%... Overall, probably less than 2% Canada population comes from Latam. I find it very difficult to believe that Canada has more pull than Spain.
You seem to forget also that entering Spain means entering Schengen area: anyone coming from Latam that manages to come to Spain can "jump" to almost any other country in Europe except the UK without having to use a passport (including Norway, Iceland or Switzerland, that are not UE).
> You seem to forget also that entering Spain means entering Schengen area: anyone coming from Latam that manages to come to Spain can "jump" to almost any other country in Europe except the UK without having to use a passport (including Norway, Iceland or Switzerland, that are not UE).
Eh, not quite: once you become a Spanish national, yes, but just because there aren't internal border controls doesn't actually entitle you to turn entry or residence in Spain into entry or residence in another Schengen country.
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.
>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.
That attitude isn't compatible with paying decent pensions to an ever-growing retired fraction of the population. Someone has to work hard to fund them.
> We need to get protectionism back up and running.
We have known since Bastiat that this makes both sides poorer, because it also clobbers your export industry due to retaliation. And, unless you're willing to forgo iPhones and petrol, you're dependent on imports anyway.
> And, unless you're willing to forgo iPhones and petrol, you're dependent on imports anyway.
I think many people who argue for "protectionism" and the like would find that an acceptable price to pay. See the other comment about "relative status". I think many would like to have less in an absolute sense if that meant they were relatively less poor than "the rich".
Now I, personally, think that's just rose-tinted glasses. For example, nowadays, farmers in France have it rough. But I doubt that some peasant from 2-300 years ago actually had a better life and had less wealth difference compared to the upper-class of their time.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
It wouldn't be a problem if the tax burden was on property owners.
If someone purchasing 500k EUR apartment had to pay even 2% of real value of it every year to local community they would be welcome with open arms.
Unfortunately right now it's not the locals nor the local infrastructure that capture the benefits.
If Spain (and most of the EU) had saner regulations then who knows, maybe they would even allow for building more in places people want to spend time in.
The issue with this approach is that long-time locals will see the market price of their homes rise with the newcomers'. So if you base the tax on that market value, the locals have it very rough.
You can lower taxes on labor or structure land/property value tax in a way that it offsets your income tax. This way people who live and work in the area pay once. Someone who pays their other taxes somewhere else but buys property pays twice.
You just need to align incentives and make it so people who benefits the most pay the most taxes. Preferably proportionally to how much they benefit from the whole arrangement.
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.
Historically this is a spot on. From Highland Clearances to modern accumulation of land and real estate ownership. Those who have plenty, they want it all. The rest should live in a city on 30 sqmt, ideally rent, fully surveilled at all times.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 44.7 ms ] threadThe 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).
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...
Most of the investment was in major metropolitan cities, leading to a statistically significant percentage of residential housing stock being bought up with foreign(imported) capital. Many of these units were subsequently used as store of investment (left empty)
Since policies did not support building at the pace that met increased demand(mainly immigration), and many foreign buyers were comfortable bidding up housing: this was a significant contributor to housing prices inflating to mutiples that were much higher than previous trends (i.e. upto 20 times median salary vs 5/7 times previously)
And the foreign buyer ban did lead to a measureable decline in prices
Anyway,
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_washing
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.
My experience is from 2015-2024. I did the digital nomad thing for 9 years and lived in Medellin 4 separate times over that period for 6 months to a year each time.
I saw rents for normal folks, not furnished and not Airbnbs, do a 4x in that time period. Laureles was a middle class suburb for locals in 2015 and was just overrun by nomads by 2024. Poblado, Laureles, even as far as La Estrella saw a really noticeable impact.
Clearly I contributed to the issue and nomads did inject money into the economy but it also had a really visible effect on housing. I don’t have any ideas on how to do it right but it is something that should be approached carefully or locals get priced out.
EDIT: I believe they started more tightly regulating things in 2024 with required registration for <1 year rentals. Not sure how that has played out. Also added the specific neighborhoods that I saw things shoot up.
Poblado was already one of the richest neighborhoods in the whole country in 2015. One of my neighbors was an Emmy winning pianist. So, gentrification isn’t going to be a thing in neighborhood like that.
It is a single data point of my lived experience in that part of the world. I am not presenting it as a peer reviewed study. But, there are also examples like Portugal which has had more recent studies done on this.
The point GP was making is that digital nomads are generally in a particular place only temporarily not permanently. So, feelings towards nomads is not the same as feelings towards immigrants. The latter are building community. The former simply feeds off of it.
Is it sustainable? No. Not for the governments receiving these people. Not for the immigrants.
And yes, everybody makes financial projections as if that's not the case. Why? Doing it like that means more money to spend ... and for now creditors (ie. the central bank) accepts the reasoning.
It doesn't work like that for Europeans, your work years accumulate across European countries, we are free to collect the related portion to the paid taxes, when leaving the country, or leave everything to retirement age, at which point the social security of the official residency country will take care of collecting from across Europe, provided the necessary paperwork.
Well, I suppose the relevant question is if you're willing to be your future they won't do this, because that's what you're doing.
Also people have to stop conflating EU with Europe,even if most of them are part of EU, it isn't the same.
I thought It's a conflict between English speaking America and Spanish speaking America.
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.
I did contract work so I could stay traveling and lived on money I made in previous full time jobs. It was a very nice way to live compared to the 9 to 5 even though I made less money.
Having enough money to live the way you want is all you need. Hostels are fun.
But in the free time I had, I did end up making a SaaS that set me up very comfortably for the rest of my life.
Cynicism will keep you in your 9 to 5.
Also: found the guy who had wealthy parents to fall back on so he was always safe to take this sort of risk.
Hostels are not fun, unless you are in your early 20s.
If you don't, even 5 star hotels can be miserable.
I find quieter hostels much better. When I was over in Ireland, the ones in Belfast and Dublin were awful, and in county Galway. I found wonderful ones in Co. Donegal, Armagh and Limerick.
I've had noise issues in hotels and I've had quiet hostels. Totally orthogonal.
There were examples like this of people in the groups hitting on something and making enough money to retire (if they managed their money right)
It was the rare case. The end result for most of them was moving back home and taking a normal job when hopping between hostels and digital nomad group homes stopped being fun and none of their business ideas got traction.
The thing is, having a Western passport and earning $10k-20k a year (untaxed) in countries where the median household incomes (ie. 2 working adults) are at best comparable to that is living like a king comparatively speaking.
There's a reason western expats are looked down on derisively by locals across ASEAN and the only ASEAN state with a semi-functional democracy (Malaysia) is also one of the least budget tourist friendly - the middle class and above look at tay ba lo with disgust as losers, and the lower class only look up to them for the opportunity to get a more powerful visa. The high rate of "passport bros" also doesn't help.
The reality is, most kinds of tourism only lead to the development of extractive economic institutions at the expense of human capital development and higher value economic sectors that would benefit from that.
Those are dying towns. Tourism/digital nomads are their lifeline. There is no "human capital development" to speak of. Young people there do everything they can do migrate to bigger cities. Have you ever been to the region? Many of those towns look like ghost towns.
Realistically I’ll take 4 to 8 weeks off while looking for work back in the US.
I had a revelation a few years back.
Taking real vacations is absolutely necessary.
If I can work 12 months at 70 to 80$ an hour I generally can afford 8 to 12 weeks off as long as I as I’m not in the US or Europe.
When I think out of the box, I do imagine working on my own ideas during my travels. Met a brilliant 23 year old last year who speaks 3 languages, and programs in Python and Java
I could probably hire him at 10$ an hour.
Vs some 23 year old American who will demand 45$ an hour and tell me Python sucks.
But then I wake up, back to looking for my next contract.
Honestly I’d rather train up a smart but humble rookie over someone who’s going to lecture me on how Rust is the best language over and over again.
It's about the travelling and lifestyle, not the earnings over some regular stationary job.
But even $50K/year is still bad from the perspective the parent notes, if the locals making $10K or $30K/year have to compete for rent and services with those nomads in their own area.
Not saying it can't be fun, but you can live in a country town almost anywhere, if I just want a permanent base hours from any airport, and they all tend to be a lot cheaper than living in the "big smoke".
I think folks from the US tend to underestimate the difference in proximity and services available in rural Spain vs rural US.
I emigrated to a tiny rural village in a far-flung corner of Spain, and I have an excellent highway 10 minutes away, the airport is 45 minutes (basically the same amount of time it took me from downtown Seattle to the airport), a decent city is also 45 minutes away. There are less than 1,000 folks in the entire district, but we have gigabit fibre to every house, a healthcare centre covered by national healthcare, dental clinic, two supermarkets, 6 cafes...
Because going abroad at a different place than your regular country, and staying at a place for months or even a year or so, is also travelling. Travelling as in "I'm abroad, experiencing a different place and culture", not as in "I actively move from country to country every second week". And a "rural village in Spain" is quite compelling, both as a work base and as a lifestyle to many.
In which case, why would it matter if it's "hours from any airport" or not? Who said you'll be just using it as a jump base for airport travel? It can just be a place to work from and soak the local environment and surrounding areas. Not to mention in Spain you can't be a few hours from the nearest airport anywhere anyway. It's not some vast wasteland.
If you're running into those new age types all the time it's because you keep going to the places they congregate. There's usually only a few in each country.
When I miss city life I move to a city again. Often the most memorable times on my travels were in rural areas.
When I did this, working outside of business hours was seen as an advantage in case we had issues overnight.
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.
They chose policies to go deeper into debt, to join a bigger union to go deeper into debt.
I mean, how is this not what they wanted?
That debt is what allowed many of the infrastructure that is now in place.
However it is also the consequence of that debt, that only the middle to low level classes get to experience, that now puts all right wing parties on leading votes, even thought most Boomers and Gen Xers across Europe, should know better how living under dictatorships feels like.
Is this supposed to be an argument? Yes it's fun to buy nice things. I'm aware of that. Especially with other people's money and work.
> That debt is what allowed many of the infrastructure that is now in place.
And Gen X is the major part of the people paying for it about now.
> even thought most Boomers and Gen Xers across Europe, should know better how living under dictatorships feels like.
Obviously they think it feels better than having the government spend less, which is of course the deal you handed them with: you got to have the government spend more on you and your generation, by promising it would spend less on them and their generation, while taxing them more. Your generation promised that, on their behalf.
They weren't born yet, or at least not politically active, to complain about it.
So why should they, why would they, accept less than you got? Your generation promised their work, and then spent all the money.
Can they do the same to your generation perhaps? Take a similar amount of money back, which would roughly equate to cutting elderly pensions to zero for 30 years or so, well, until the debt is paid off. That would make it be more like if your generation spent it's own money.
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.
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?
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.
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, 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.
And any immigration from LatAm (excluding Venezuela) is fleeting as much of LatAm has developmentally caught up with Eastern and parts of Southern Europe
Fertility seems independent from anything economy related: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/esp/spa... , it happened well before 2008, and today it is only oscillating around the same 1.2 number. The same as many other rich countries.
> It's still not attractive for much of LatAm. Much of the current LatAm wave in Spain and Italy is from Venezuela or Colombia
Spain has Latam inmigration for each an every spanish speaking country in America: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inmigraci%C3%B3n_en_Espa%C3%B1... . There is no clear skew towards Venezuela or Colombia, other than being the biggest countries. Once normalized per population (i.e. a small country like Uruguay with 3 million people won't send 1 million to Spain), you find that Cuba, Paraguay, Ecuador or Uruguay are above Venezuela in inmigration rate to Spain, and Honduras and Dominican Republic are above Colombia. Only Mexico (they probably migrate to the US) and Peru (I don't know why) have very low inmigration to Spain.
> Spain doesn't have the same pull factor for LatAm that Canada
10% of current Spain population come from Latam. In Canada, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_immigration_statistics, the first Latam source of inmigration country is Mexico (0.25% of Canada population), Colombia 0.22%, El Salvador 0.14%, Chile 0.08%, Venezuela 0.08%... Overall, probably less than 2% Canada population comes from Latam. I find it very difficult to believe that Canada has more pull than Spain.
You seem to forget also that entering Spain means entering Schengen area: anyone coming from Latam that manages to come to Spain can "jump" to almost any other country in Europe except the UK without having to use a passport (including Norway, Iceland or Switzerland, that are not UE).
Eh, not quite: once you become a Spanish national, yes, but just because there aren't internal border controls doesn't actually entitle you to turn entry or residence in Spain into entry or residence in another Schengen country.
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.
That attitude isn't compatible with paying decent pensions to an ever-growing retired fraction of the population. Someone has to work hard to fund them.
We have known since Bastiat that this makes both sides poorer, because it also clobbers your export industry due to retaliation. And, unless you're willing to forgo iPhones and petrol, you're dependent on imports anyway.
I think many people who argue for "protectionism" and the like would find that an acceptable price to pay. See the other comment about "relative status". I think many would like to have less in an absolute sense if that meant they were relatively less poor than "the rich".
Now I, personally, think that's just rose-tinted glasses. For example, nowadays, farmers in France have it rough. But I doubt that some peasant from 2-300 years ago actually had a better life and had less wealth difference compared to the upper-class of their time.
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.
This is an economic signal that there are too many people relative to available jobs. Get demand for people up and the rest will follow.
This would necessarily mean wage inflation outpacing asset price inflation, which the asset-owning public will hate.
But this is better than nothing I suppose, at least it prevents ghost towns
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.
If Spain (and most of the EU) had saner regulations then who knows, maybe they would even allow for building more in places people want to spend time in.
You just need to align incentives and make it so people who benefits the most pay the most taxes. Preferably proportionally to how much they benefit from the whole arrangement.
However, I do not think this digital nomad stuff
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.