>I'm not sure I'm morally okay with economies driven primarily by tourism. //

Is that just in places where the tourists are far richer than the indigenous population or is that as a general rule?

That is a large part of it, but it's not all of it. While it's a legitimate service to provide food and lodging to travelers–even if those travelers happen to be there primarily to see your cultural offerings–it bothers me that there are services directed towards showing them off pseudo-educationally.

It's... you learn enough to think you've learned something, when all you've really learned is a superficial, well-packaged veneer. If the point is to have something to do while being on vacation, that's fine... but why pretend? It doesn't really help that things are often designed to be entertainment. Is it really a good thing to put your culture on as a show? Sure, there's satire, but satire isn't satire when the audience doesn't actually know what you're satirizing.

(Also, isn't the income differential a fundamental part of a tourism economy? I mean, in Seattle's Pioneer Square, we've got random little gold mining shops and see-the-underground tours, which I'm also uneasy with... but that's not a tourism economy. I'd estimate a good 50% of people who work in this neighborhood are in tech; others are nightclub stuff; and a noted above-average complement of food people; etc. There's a tourism industry here, yes, but it's not a tourism economy.)

Like I said, it's more feeling than reasoning.

Thanks for expanded on your feelings.

A lot of cities rely on tourism because it is so cheap to invest verses the amount of money it brings in. If you have good weather and beaches it might be the only natural resource you can exploit.

Well, if the theories that some very poor economies just require a "push start" to get out of the poverty trap are right, then maybe tourism can do the job.

Whilst cruising the Caribbean, I noticed that local economies may have been severely harmed by tourism. Dependent on highly concentrated tourist areas, the "push start" amounts more to a "push over": cash flow is so concentrated it can't get thru most of the local economy, like trying to satiate the thirsty with a firehose.

I have the same feeling of unease, but what about when the alternative is poverty, which I think is often the case?

Yeah, I'm not exactly going to Take A Stand against it or anything. I understand that The World Is Not Perfect and Someone Has To Do The Dirty Jobs and all of that. But I'm very uncomfortable with seeing a tourism economy promoted or justified.

Policy band-aids aren't inherently bad. But if it's still the same band-aid a hundred years later... that's not the "push start" icebraining is talking about. (And we're not a hundred years later yet, so I'm not saying there's definitely a problem or anything.)