Britain's economic trajectory will soon see it overtaken by Poland | Hacker News Reader

Britain's economic trajectory will soon see it overtaken by Poland

news.sky.com

36 pointsParksNet25 comments

Does it matter if Poland overtakes Britain, if both our populations are able to survive and prosper? The phrasing has a racist and geopolitical element to it, which superceeds the issues around UK government's lack of investment in R&D and destruction of the welfare state. This is not a zero sum game.

Poles used to come to England to do lower level jobs, pick fruit, clean houses. Definitely racism and resentment here. Old school European racism sees Eastern Europeans as a lower level white, a concept I don’t think a lot of Americans are familiar with. There were white slaves back in the day too. It’s where the word comes from; the Slavic people.

No that is not where the word comes from. Slav is an English-ization of “slowanie” (what slavs call their group) which means “people of the word “ or people who can talk or something along those lines.

That’s what it means to the Slavic people themselves. To foreigners Slav was synonymous with slavery.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/slave

I believe the claim is that the word “slave” is derived from the word “slav”, not the other way around.

Yeah. In Polish Slav means a speaker, or person of our word. In Latin, it meant person who we can take to do work for free, but the Polish came up with the term first.

Our old word for foreigner is the same as non speaker or mute, Niemcy, which now specifically refers to the Germans. I guess they were our first foreigners.

Well, it would be quite noteworthy from a historical perspective. Has Poland ever been ahead of Britain economically in the past 1000 years? Poland periodically gets chopped up by its neighbors, WW2 was the 4th time the same thing happened and also I believe Poland was significantly more destroyed than Britain during WW2. They are fairly disadvantaged geographically, no moat to speak of. Their economy suffered under communism until around 30 years ago. I don’t think any racism is required to be surprised at the prospect of Poland overtaking Britain economically.

Labour campaigned and voted against Brexit shouting this would happen. "Project Fear" as it was called. But now they pretend like Brexit has nothing to do with it... it's just the torries fault apparently.

The Labour leader at the time of the referendum was luke warm about remaining at best. So much so I doubt he voted to remain despite what he said. He had a long history of criticism of the EU.

Actually, Jeremy Corbyn was pro Brexit as far as I can remember. Theresa May was a pro remain for example.

Gina Miller was the only one fighting against Brexit she even decided to vote in favour of libdem for the first time instead of labour…

So yeah… sorry but labour position was pro Brexit

The stated position of the labour party, and what they campaigned for, was Remain. At the time, there were many people like you saying one thing about Corbyn while he said another. Nobody liked Corbyn, so he surely must have been a Brexiteer! Despite him not having made Eurosceptic comments for many years.

Oh no - what if the line doesn't go up? The line. It has to go up. It has to. We'll do anything - any-thing. Please. Oh please. Just let the line go up!

The line of Per Capita Economic Output is unironically one of the most important lines in existence. One could argue that every single line that's better than it is also harder to measure.

We have traded away everything that once made Britain a unique and wonderful place all in a desperate bid to make the line go up.

The line is as high as it has ever been and yet the future of the British people has never looked more bleak.

What have we traded away?

The Empire of course

Well take a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA4u17XAF_A

Look at the way these people lived. The way the dressed. The way the carried themselves. The culture. The customs. The traditions.

It was a thriving high-trust society.

The line has gone up orders of magnitude in the past 100 years, but are the people thriving? Is their nation something to be proud of? Do they have any herritage left to pass on to their children? Is there any optimism in the future we have chosen?

I don't think so.

Can we ever return to the past? - no, but the future we have chosen is a bad one.

It always saddens me to see videos like that.

By contrast, the Britain (or the cities and towns around where I live) of today simply looks like everybody has just given up.

The video is mostly of the upper classes and military. Looks nice but I'm pretty certain I'd prefer to live now. I'm actually from n Ireland but live in the Scotland. The class system is definitely a lot more noticeable here than home. I suspect it was way worse back then.

I have some sympathy for your point of view. I'm very much pro union but when I go to England I think I'm glad I don't live there. So crowded. Most of the countryside fenced off. Unlike Scotland were it's possible to escape to the wilderness. Compared to Ireland I think people in England seem depressed.

On the high trust thing, I think part of it may be partly the mass immigration of the 1950s. As an outside observer I think that may have divided the country a bit. To me there doesn't seem to be much integration.

All I'm hoping is that the UK gets over brexit and doesn't stay in terminal decline. The current Tory leadership only seem interested in managing that decline. At least Boris was optimistic and believed Britain was a great place to be.

> The video is mostly of the upper classes and military. Looks nice but I'm pretty certain I'd prefer to live now.

There are plenty of other videos from the 1900s era.

And sure, we are more comfortable now, and it would be hard to go back to those times, but I'm not really focused on their material comforts.

My point is that the English - as a people - were thriving in those days, and most of their thriving has since been destroyed by modernity.

I want to attack the Whig Historiography concept that a bright future will just spontaneously emerge, when all the indicators are that England is in a state of steep decline in comparison to where it was 100 years ago - even though the GDP has never been higher!

It’s kind of funny, we today regard the world wars as being in our somewhat distant past, but if this same trajectory continues I think that in 1000 years we may simply say that the war permanently destroyed Europe. The effects just took several generations to play out. And would it be surprising for such an unprecedentedly massive war to permanently destroy a place?

The numbers the article quotes are not the current US dollar GDP, but PPP (i.e. GDP adjusted to local prices) per capita. The 2021 current US dollar GDP numbers are rather far appart:

  UK         $47,334.36 
  Poland     $17,840.92
  Romania    $14,861.91 
  Hungary    $18,772.67

Source:

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/GDP_per_capita_cur...

https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/GDP_per_capita_PPP...

PPP isnt static either. Youd expect as a country becomes more developed the purchasing power gets less as less as coet of living goes up.

As a Pole I must say it’s entertaining. They obviously have no idea about our government preferences and aging population. And so much more.

> Poland - should it maintain its 3.6% average annual growth

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