In my home country, Portugal, with a per-capita GDP (PPP) which is a bit more than half that of the US (though less unequal, so the median isn’t quite as bad) which is a safe and very touristic EU country, there is a huge house prices bubble a large component of which is foreign “investors” so prices have been pulled totally out of reach for most locals.
The impact on birth rates was huge since people are leaving their parent’s homes much later (average was at 34 last I checked), getting married later, having children later, having fewer children (as they can’t afford a bigger house and kids are expensive) and, worse, young people have been leaving in droves (for example, half of University graduates just leave the country, especially since by being in the EU they have freedom to live and work anywhere in it).
Worse, the country already had the or one of the most aged populations in Europe, so this is going to fuck the country up big time, as even if the country imports immigrants to make up for the population shortfall, they’re not going to have the same average qualifications as the ones leaving (plus the country spending almost €100k per university graduate in their Education to get them there only to lose half of them is ridiculously bad political management), especially considering that the kind of immigrants with higher education in in-demand areas can generally get work visas to pretty much anywhere and won’t be coming here.
All of that shit was incentivised by politicians in several ways, most notably Golden Visas in exchange for €500k housing “investments” and a refusal to properly regulate AirBnBs (so for example in Lisbon 10% of residential units became AirBnBs), so this kind of bullshit we see in this meme is exactly what we’ve been getting, the latest measure being giving tax benefits for young people to buy houses, which does nothing to address excessive house prices (in fact Economically such incentives tend to hold up and even pump up prices) and hilariously given their average salaries a Portuguese youth would be far better off moving to next door Spain paying full taxes there than staying here even with those tax benefits (and if they went further away their salary could treble or even quadruple).
It’s interesting to see that in this Portugal was just ahead of the trend and the same kind of problem is starting to happen in wealthier nation which for example are unlikelly to suffer from a braindrain.
In my home country, Portugal, with a per-capita GDP (PPP) which is a bit more than half that of the US (though less unequal, so the median isn’t quite as bad) which is a safe and very touristic EU country, there is a huge house prices bubble a large component of which is foreign “investors” so prices have been pulled totally out of reach for most locals.
The impact on birth rates was huge since people are leaving their parent’s homes much later (average was at 34 last I checked), getting married later, having children later, having fewer children (as they can’t afford a bigger house and kids are expensive) and, worse, young people have been leaving in droves (for example, half of University graduates just leave the country, especially since by being in the EU they have freedom to live and work anywhere in it).
Worse, the country already had the or one of the most aged populations in Europe, so this is going to fuck the country up big time, as even if the country imports immigrants to make up for the population shortfall, they’re not going to have the same average qualifications as the ones leaving (plus the country spending almost €100k per university graduate in their Education to get them there only to lose half of them is ridiculously bad political management), especially considering that the kind of immigrants with higher education in in-demand areas can generally get work visas to pretty much anywhere and won’t be coming here.
All of that shit was incentivised by politicians in several ways, most notably Golden Visas in exchange for €500k housing “investments” and a refusal to properly regulate AirBnBs (so for example in Lisbon 10% of residential units became AirBnBs), so this kind of bullshit we see in this meme is exactly what we’ve been getting, the latest measure being giving tax benefits for young people to buy houses, which does nothing to address excessive house prices (in fact Economically such incentives tend to hold up and even pump up prices) and hilariously given their average salaries a Portuguese youth would be far better off moving to next door Spain paying full taxes there than staying here even with those tax benefits (and if they went further away their salary could treble or even quadruple).
It’s interesting to see that in this Portugal was just ahead of the trend and the same kind of problem is starting to happen in wealthier nation which for example are unlikelly to suffer from a braindrain.