The reason why housing is expensive is the same as what the article said about nitrogen emissions, new housing construction is limited to try and not exceed emissions even more. Regarding the rest, it looks like a fake problem because they still have schemes like the reduced tax for several years to attract foreigners. Can't be both ways, politians can't say there's too many people while keeping the incentives. The practicality of the tax law speaks more than speeches.<p>As for schiphol airport lines, I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist but having informed myself a bit on the subject and having been on those queues many times this year, I think it's again a self inflicted problem, as the government wants to have less flights overall, and I believe they found a reasonable escape goat for it with the "staff shortages". One only has to see that they've paid over $100m in compensation for missed flights to airlines yet at the end of August rolled back an extra €5 / per hour that they added to fight the problem. Result? Everyone quit again. Now they rolled out an extra €2.5/hour per security guard. Only if you are blind you don't see there's more at play here than simple "staff shortages". People haven't died, they just don't want your shitty job when they can do remote customer support for some startup for more money and not deal with rude tourists all day.
Seems very questionable to me to call out Netherlands as having reached some hard limit that a country like Singapore has blown right by. Singapore has a 40% greater GDP per capita, 16 times (!) the population density, and would starve in a matter of weeks without food imports, or grind to a halt almost overnight, without energy imports. 3/4 of its GDP is services based. All of which is to say, a small nation with the right niche economic model can blow by the supposed limits Netherlands is encountering, albeit at the cost of any semblance of having a balanced or remotely self-sufficient economy.
Even if the whole country was turned into one big urban area, 507 people per square km is no where near the population densities of many large cities in the world.
Sometimes I wonder if I'm not depressed because of all those economic choices that makes no sense to me. I have known about climate change for 20 years now, since I was a teenager, which is why I never really wanted to have a car or get money.<p>I guess one person can become depressed because the world doesn't make sense.
It will only limit growth in sectors where productivity is more or less fixed, like cafes and care homes. No problem about sectors where it can actually grow. It's not a "limit of growth". And labor shortage is a natural situation during actual economic growth: if you have too many people and not enough jobs, economy is in crisis. Now we have the opposite.
They could always build down, or up, or just reclaim more land from the sea.<p>I'd be more worried about completely land-locked countries, or ones who (unlike the Netherlands) don't have experience reclaiming land from the sea.
The whole idea of limits of growth is just bullshit. It would require a limit not only to population and resources, but also hard limits (that happen to all occur in the 2020s) to innovation, marketing, creative industries, social and demographic change, efficiency increase, changes in management and government action.<p>The only way to stop economic growth is to stop all change at every level in society, including all individuals' preferences and fashions.
> while liveable land is shrinking due to climate change<p>Why? The article doesn't go into detail about this.
Is it because the climate is getting hotter and people are migrating to colder places? Instead of you know <i>using air conditioning</i>.<p>Then this just feels a country that doesn't want to grow, not that it hit any actual limits.
Isn't this also similar to what's happening in Japan?
Is this a real problem or a fake problem?<p>Every airport is struggling for the most part because they lost all staff over the past few years and have to hire them all back at once. Besides I was at Schiphol recently and it was fantastic -- no queues. I didn't notice any issue with restaurants in Amsterdam. Housing costs in AMS are also relatively acceptable in my opinion.<p>Have a few statistics and a lot of anecdata been stretched to their breaking point in this article? Is there even a problem?
> Fantastically productive Dutch farms have made this tiny country the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter.<p>In 2021 30% of total agricultural export is re-export. [1]<p>Also interesting: “Re-exports to the UK down by 35 percent due to Brexit”<p>[1] <a href="https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/03/agricultural-exports-exceeded-100-billion-euros-in-2021" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2022/03/agricultural-exports-e...</a>
I recall reading Iceland could roughly sustain 50k people before the industrial era. It took them a long time to sustain the hundreds of thousands that live there today.