Can you be productive in a museum?
To preserve city centers historical, our air clean, our energy green and our pensions high, we are suffocating our economy, taxing our young people and business away, and becoming the most beautiful retirement suburb in the world.
Sure, from Tromsø to Lampedusa you'll be overwhelmed with beauty. It might be art, history, culture, architecture, or just natural beauty.
But our economy has been stagnating in such an appalling, generation defining way, that we risk becoming an amusement park. It is already happening in small pockets: Venice, Karlovy Vary, parts of London. Too expensive for locals to live in the beautiful part of town, bought out by foreign oligarchs, or Airbnb, or investment firms.
Our population ages and shrinks, our economic relevance dwindles, our consumer market is essentially owned by US firms (although that might now be changing). Our young people are faced with the prospect of having to pay increasingly high contributions to a pension system of which they probably won't get to see the benefits.
I can see how some would think they are better off moving away.
Asia is functional
Traveling through Asia, I miss European beauty and culture very much. I miss the way we care about people and things in a way that I have not seen anywhere else. But I can also see how people here have an economy to build, and if it causes pollution, if it produces some ugliness, so be it. I don't like it, but I understand it.
I also see the positive effects of this tradeoff. Traveling through Vietnam at the moment, and you can see the difference between streetview pictures taken in 2020 and how reality looks right now. New construction is everywhere, business is booming.
Welfare and beauty are also friction
Most of all, it makes me reflect on our situation. We are well known for suffocating our own economy with regulations. I believe it is too much right now, but I would not give it all up to become the same of the US, or other emerging economies. I like our old towns, our care for people's wellbeing above the bottomline, our mandatory vacations, our clean air and drinkable tap water. I do not want to give that up, but can we really be competitive and keep all of our values?