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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> Moreover, I’m not sure Germany, France, etc., voted to join the EU under the promise to sacrifice their own growth—they have significantly underperformed the U.S. over this time frame—to facilitate the development of eastern europe.

Can you provide evidence that Germany, France, sacrificed their own growth? Unless you know something that I don't, what I see is that you're imagining a zero sum situation which is well known doesn't apply to things like markets. That they underperformed the US isn't not evidence of that. Germany and France underperformed the US in the time period, and in the last 100 years too.

That's how I understood your thesis: "This was planned (called EU convergence), and is a victory of bureaucratic planning."

If you don't think Germany and France sacrificed their own growth, what exactly do you think "EU convergence" means?

> If you don't think Germany and France sacrificed their own growth, what exactly do you think "EU convergence" means?

Convergence doesn't refer to growth rates approaching, but incomes (per capita) appproaching.

It doesn't mean that the richer countries grow slower than otherwise. They might grow the same, or faster.

The claim is something along the lines of:

Without planned convergence: country G grows 2% per year starting from income of 30k/capita and country P grows %1 per year starting from income to 10k/capita. Country P will never approach country G in income/capita.

With planned convergence: country G grows 2% per year starting from income of 30k/capita and country P grows %4 per year starting from income to 10k/capita. The two countries's income per capita will converge.

Economics and counterfactuals are devilishily complicated subjects, but claim isn't complicated.

But what does any of that have to do with the EU or bureaucratic planning? It seems to me like Poland was poised to grow quickly as it transitioned from communism to capitalism with or without the EU.

Why should I only grow 1.8% while you grow 2%, when it would be much fairer if we both grew 0%?

It's clear that you have no clue economics, as hinted by the comical numbers that you chose to pick for your disengenious example.

Soviet-aligned countries that didn't join the EU did much worse than those that did.

If you take a look at the payments across the EU from richer to poorer countries, its quite clear why this happened: The EU invested everything to pamper them to make the "EU favorable for them".

This is not a zero sum game. Germany should have benefited tremendously from Poland getting much richer.

Yes, in fact I've heard people argue the opposite point, that EU benefits Germany more than the rest of the EU countries. The argument starts from Germany being more competitive than most EU countries. Protection from external trade is usually needed so that an industry can home brew and reach competitive or almost-competitive state, and trade barriers are then removed to keep improving against competition. But with competition in place you can't go from zero to one in established industries. The result, the argument goes, is that Germany ends up owning entire industries within the EU.

But some people cannot conceive that some arrangements can be win-win.

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