Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
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It is a story of a country that made a lot of the right decisions along the way. Managed to keep consistent high growth, not a pony trick or boom/bust mode.
Poland should be a role model for many other countries.
Recommend a book: https://www.amazon.com/Europes-Growth-Champion-Insights-Econ...
And Noah's blog post: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-polandmalaysia-model
In what sense? Czechia is richer per capita. Almost all of the former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe have had largely peaceful (since 1991) sustained economic growth. The exceptions are exactly those countries which continue to have Russian troops occupying portions, namely Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.
The protests in Czechoslovakia came later, called the Velvet Revolution, from 17 to 28 November 1989. In June 1990, Czechoslovakia held its first democratic elections, a year after Poland.
Poland paved the way for the whole of central and eastern Europe. The Round Table produced the negotiated-exit template that Hungary built on in its own talks that summer, and that Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and the Baltics drew on as their regimes fell within months.
And it did so from the deepest macroeconomic crisis of any of the satellite states: hyperinflation running into the hundreds of percent by late 1989, an unresolved sovereign default from 1981, and chronic shortages.
Since then Poland has converged fastest of any of them. From a low base it has climbed to the upper-middle of central and eastern Europe by GDP per capita PPP, overtaken Hungary, and is now closing on Czechia and Slovenia.
GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times. For instance Ireland has one of the highest GDP/capitas in the world -- around 50% higher than the US. But that's because of economic games with their working as a tax haven to enable corporations to avoid paying taxes to their home countries. It doesn't translate to anything for the average Irishman.
"Often" is the wrong modifier. GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person. If you look at the GDP/capita growth in India and China since 1990, or South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, since 1950, that reflects very real increases in material standards for ordinary people.
There's two, relatively well-understood situations where GDP/capita isn't reflective:
1) Countries where the economy is dominated by resource extraction or tourism 2) Tax havens
But it's pretty easy to tell whether one of these exceptions applies. It doesn't in the case of Poland, which has a broad, diversified economy with a high level of industrial production.
GDP is an average, not a median, so it might align with the average person, not the median. The average/mean can hide many things (see Anscombe s quartet) which is one of the problems with GDP IMO.
Being off by 30% might not matter for some usages, but it is not a small amount. It seems the median is more accurate to report and we agree.
If you have reported median incomes that are calculated the same way across countries and over time, that would be better. But many countries don’t reliably track that data, and the ones that do calculate it in completely different ways.
> GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person
GDP per capita is an average. This means it does not align with the _median_ person, but with the average. I believe this is factual and undeniable. No doubt it is interesting too to try to find other metrics for different usages as well.
> For purposes of comparing countries to each other and the same country over time, it’s not 30% off
You said the ratio for the same country between gdp mediand and average is 1.30. That means it is 30% off. Again, we can keep moving the goalposts and I could agree, but for the quoted statements i believe the above is true.
That’s why I used the word “align” instead of the word “is.” If the ratio of mean to median is 1.3, if the mean doubles, the median also will double—the movement of the two values will be “aligned” even if one is offset from the other.
That means when you’re talking about the economic growth of a country, Poland in this case, the mean is a reasonable proxy for the median unless there has been a massive change in the ratio of the median to the mean.
> align: to be the same or similar, or to agree with each other; to make two things do this
But I get it, you are using it as correlation.
Still, if gdp per capita average is 130 and median is 100 (ratio is 1.3) there is a 30% difference. This is exactly why, even if they correlate they are not very similar aka they "do not agree with each other" as per the definition above. With your definition they "align".good enough for me. It aligns even better (more closely) to the median.
For everyone else a roulette wheel is a better measurement.
It's economy geared for the rich. Where poor only exist to give rich a confidence boost.
Reality: "The vast majority of US income (78%) is earned by people outside the top 1%."
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-househo...
But Rich also account for majority of consumed goods purchased.
Also why did Travel, Entertainment and Food services suffered during post COVID recovery?
Why are McDonald's and other fast food joints that upped their price enjoyed a surge in value, when supply and demand tells otherwise.
And those values are even more detached than the inequity there makes clear, because for about 90% of that time wages were completely flat (and even declining) while GDP/capita kept booming up up and away. So the connection between the two has become very weak while in the past it was quite strongly connected. And that's just one random example - pick most of all those desirable metrics and it's a similar story. GDP just doesn't track with them so well anymore at all.
And when you try to compare between countries GDP becomes completely farcical as the ability to produce a zillion dollars of services doesn't translate, or even have much to do with, the ability to produce a zillion dollars of things.
We visit western European countries and it's like WTF it's cheaper here?
The multi-generational spread is wild - my boss remembers being raised in 80's scarcity culture verging on 2-3rd world hunger. But our entry level employees are running around demanding everyone to be up to date with everything they see and hear in these little glowing rectangles. It's like two separate progressions have been superimposed on top of each other.
People over 60 are poor, 40..60 are a mixed bag, 20..40 are struggling to keep up.
Mind you since we'd started from Russia both of them looked pretty good in comparison, that place was dire.
Warsaw is the only place in Europe where a casual search out of curiosity brought 15-20K euro/month developer positions.
There are more people in single 2nd tier city metro areas in other European countries than in the whole of Ireland.
Poland had a mass solidarity movement rise up in 1980. The USSR didn't decide to send in the military then; they were lucky.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_reaction_to_the_Polish_...
There was a lot of unrest in Poland, and general strikes. Martial law was imposed.
If you were an immigrant from Czechslovakia in a refugee camp in Austria at around that time, you'd be learning to speak Polish.
Here in Germany they very often talk about the importance of what happened in Poland for the reunification
Stephen Kotkin says this much better than I ever could. https://youtu.be/0tXvLJXkFFg?t=295&si=26yINqxrcSdOUxCv
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
Round Table agreement, which paved the way to the partially free elections in 1989 won by the opposition, preceded similar events in other countries by several months including Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia and the Fall of Berlin Wall.
And btw, Romania is not occupied by Russia stop spreading such nonsense.
(My external barely informed understanding is that proponents of unification are largely right wing nationalist, pro-Russians call for a unification with Bessarabia while ceding Transsinistria to Russia; Moldovans are largely against union in polls.)
Do you seriously believe Russians would leave Crimea if Ukrainians didn’t renew the lease?
"It's much like Russia but with no oil or gas" was the better explanation for why it wasn't doing well. It's also why Belarus isn't topping the development indexes.
Are you sure about that? I'm Czech but have lived in Poland for 8 years and visit regularly. Poland used to be way poorer than Czechia, but these days it looks the other way around. I think the stats are either lagging behind or computed wrong. Note I regularly visit both the cities and the countryside in both Czechia and Poland.
Btw, the article has a "GDP per capita growth in post-communist countries" table, with Poland at the top and Czechia at the bottom.
This is a very bad measure of anything, especially wealth.
The story is told in much more detail in the OP. What do you feel is missing from it?
Maybe all of those hardworking people could have done even better with a different macro strategy?
What made it a success was also the social capital in Poland, a lot of people worked extremely hard to pull it off, but still high unemployment was alleviated only by joining EU and people leaving to find employment elsewhere
I wonder how far Poland would be without the years of PiS corruption.
Over the last 20 years, the SLD govt used to literally sell new legislation for bribes, PO (currently in charge of Poland) literally has right now a guy in their ranks who has likely stolen 100s of millions PLN from a public company, but is the prime minister’s BFF so the prosecutor canceled the investigation. The stuff PiS has done is nothing compared to those.
I actually think that the Anti- Corruption Bureau that PiS founded is one of the core reasons Poland was able to mostly weed out the post-Russian corruption (corruption is unfortunately the main export of Russian culture, every country they invaded ended up extremely corrupt).
Did we forget about pushing for illegal mail elections? Using state-owned companies filled with PIS politicians to finance bribes and promoting PIS? $25 billion pumped out straight to PIS coffers.
Part of Orlen was sold to the Saudis to merge Orlen and Lotos (the exchange of gas stations with MOL was done for similar reasons) and to get better access to Saudi oil.
"Covid bribes" etc are probably mostly fake stories from Onet as well.
It is true of course that they were the most persistent and brave. I don't think it would have been possible in East Germany for example, which ran a tighter regime until Poland managed the peaceful revolution.
Today's politicians look like angry toddlers in a sandbox in comparison.
There ware other great people of course, but these two paid the price.
There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're looking at a mid-tier economy running on EU structural funds.
It's a great place to live, genuinely. But calling this "Poland's economy" is like calling a McDonald's franchise "your restaurant"
I have family in Poland, they are from smaller villages and they ALWAYS complain about EU and the economy. I wonder if things are similar in large cities.
Must be the proximity to Germany...
That is western Europe for you, not just Poland. Same in the Netherlands, same in Sweden, same in Belgium, same in Denmark, same in Norway, same in France, same in Germany, etcetera. Descartes claimed that he thought, therefore he was. A more realistic and equally erudite quote would be Queror, ergo sum which translates to I complain, therefore I am.
(also, q.e.d. because I'm complaining about people complaining)
Sorry, no, you are missing the point.
The specific anti-EU complaining among the less-educated, older and rural population which benefits a lot from Poland being an EU state is not the same in Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, Norway.
It is the same in Hungary and Slovakia though, for a reason.
Today's news brings us the following headline:
"Fugitive former Polish Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro is now in the United States courtesy of a visa from President Donald Trump after fleeing Hungary, local media report."[1]
In case it is not apparent to you, Ziobro was running on the PiS party ticket — the very same party running on the anti-EU sentiment that the people we're discussing have, in all certainty, voted for.
That's in the wake of another PiS-aligned fugitive judge, Tomasz Szmydt, fleeing investigation for espionage to find refuge in... Belarus[2].
Naturally, he condemned Poland for being too "pro-Western".
Swedish judges don't do that, while hiding in Belarus.
You don't have PiS in Sweden.
And Trump isn't welcoming fugitive Justice Ministers from Sweden into the US because they can't hide in Hungary anymore..
...because the Hungarian MAGA lost the elections there (in spite of JD Vance flying over to campaign for Orban, Orban giving speeches at CPAC, and Trump explicitly praising him).
Do you realize how off mark your objection to applying "the MAGA moniker" to PiS supporters is?
It's not even metaphorical; they're directly collaborating on a political level.
Have a good one, hope you learned something.
Skol.
[1] https://www.politico.eu/article/ex-poland-justice-minister-z...
[2] https://visegradinsight.eu/judge-hater-penitent-spy-the-stor...
That's funny because Poland became dramatically richer after joining the EU, it allowed them access to one of the richest markets on Earth.
I understand that if you're from a smaller village you might also have missed the enormous infrastructure investments (highways, airports, sewage systems, etc.) that have only been possible because of EU money.
Then there's all the foreign companies that you mentioned whose investments have provided jobs directly and indirectly - as a EU member, Poland has become a lot more attractive for foreign investors.
And arguable, Poland carries a much bigger weight in international policies then it used to.
These points are not to say that there's nothing to criticize about the EU. As a matter of fact, there's not shortage of things to criticize. But it's unfair not to see the enormous gains Poland got since joining.
I would go so far as to argue that Poland is one of the biggest success stories of post-1989 Europe.
That's the key. There wasn't enough done to ensure that everyone can enjoy the benefits. That why at some point populists won the vote and ruled the country for 8 years. They are still kicking. Recently elected president of Poland is from the populist camp. They still have support even though they didn't really hide their kleptocratic tendencies. Fortunately somehow they didn't manage to do significant macroeconomic harm. But they stalled development of renewables for a decade.
For anyone new to Polish politics, here's an easy mnemonic: PiS = piss.
>Fortunately somehow they didn't manage to do significant macroeconomic harm.
Yay for parliamentary systems with proportional representation.
That's how.
Ah, the Polish MAGA.
Probably Russian-influenced as well.
Also, people like to complain.
Typical, yes, though it's possible to earn way more than that. Not that 20-30k PLN per month is bad, the average Polish salary is perhaps around 9k and the median around 7k.
20-30k PLN goes a long way in Poland. Some seven years ago, I was spending around 7k PLN a month, living in the beautiful Warsaw old town, 50 metres from Kolumna Zygmunta, eating out all the time, and generally felt I was living like a king. Good times!
https://bulldogjob.com/it-report/salaries/java
30k PLN per month on employment contract would be 71k usd per year after taxes
A simple bank transfer into the country does not count as domestic Product.
But I only know of them because they bought some successful small companies in my country and shut them down to reduce competition, for which they are universally hated around here.
Examples of significant shareholders include:
* Permira Advisers LLP (UK) * Cinven Group Ltd. (UK) * BlackRock (US) * Vanguard (US)
CD Projekt is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Is that an American/German/Singaporean/etc company?
are you one of those anti-trade people where the only real ""growth"" doesn't involve foreigners
Yes, for the benefit of their stock markets and at the expense of their own populations.
A rising tide lifts all luxury yachts.
Same issue in all southern and eastern European countries.
And not everyone needs to succeed in industrial household names, that e.g. much of southern European economies come from tourism is not a bad thing.
And as demand of those cheap engineers go up, salaries rise. It's not just Poland: Go see what happens to engineering salaries in, say, Spain vs Berlin. You find Capgemini opening offices, because the labor is that cheap. New grads making as little as 20k in some regions.
So compared to that, having big tech moving over and paying over local market rates, and expanding enough so salaries end up rising is much better than the alternative: They don't come, there's no money, the engineers emigrate, and the country becomes poorer.
It's basically importing expensive R&D for "free" while helping establish a heavy industrial base (which has also proven very fruitful for South Koreans). I'm sure there are other examples like this. You also get a better trained workforce, and then the import of the technical knowledge later where it is slower to digest but with the ability now to turn that knowledge into working production.
Cursory search shows 1% companies in Poland are foreign enterprises which drive ~40% of output, ~30% of workforce and ~70% of exports. These are companies that will dip if Poland gets too expensive or geopolitics, in the meantime what is Samsung or Hyundai or Huawei of Poland. At end of day, countries need national champions committed to their own midstream industries who end up capturing the rents.
On paper countries can build giants without FDI, but can't build giants without industrial policy Poland can't adopt due to EU trap (which basically designed to keep west euro industrial incumbents on top) and (IMO) if Poland ever tries, FDI tap going to stop. Structurally Poland is periphery not core, allowed to prosper but not overtake, which puts ceiling. Exception being defense, but even then stepping on west euro toes.
Keyword being Strategic, i.e. industrial pillar industries that sustains entire local industrial chains / ecosystem.
It's like comparing a 6-year-old soccer player to Lionel Messi - you're looking at early signs of development, and the progress to getting there, not saying Poland is already there, but there are positive signs it is on that path.
Singapore isn't a "fake rich" country because most of the companies that have settled down there are international businesses, the money is as real as anywhere else, so are the jobs. Always strikes me as a bit atavistic when people talk about companies as if they're owned by a country despite the fact that the value creation and supply chains run through two hundred countries.
Didnt USA benefit from mostly not being bombed during ww2? Didnt Germany benefit from cheap Russian gas and educated immigrants after 2008 crisis in EU? In the end, we can keep going back looking for pthers to thank but the country did it, and it is fair to say so.
P.S. I also live in Poland, not Polish. I also lived in Berlin, and I dont think the salaries are always so different.
Anecdotally this is also my experience. Several countries in eastern Europe have vastly lower taxes, and as a result international companies can pay salaries that are on par with western Europe but still cheaper than an equivalent worker in Germany or France because the cost to the employer is much lower.
I don't think that's the case for us.
No it’s one way but there are many other ways. Look at the US, stating that they grew because China and the EU exported their industries there is simply false. But through technology advancements, market size, market leadership, etc… is closer to how they achieved their economic growth.
This is one way of having "A" that isn't "massive internal natural resources" like USA, China, Russia, Colonialism, or Oil States (I'm sure I missed other kickstarters here).
there ought to be, but EU capital is taking bad bets. it would be the easiest early stage play in the world
Economically? Yes, if you ignore the fact that we're one of the most overworked populations in the first world and pretty much all low-level jobs(restaurant/call office/etc) have abysmally poor working conditions.
Culturally? Developed cities in Western/Northern Poland and Warsaw, sure. But everywhere else is shades of shitty and if you're LGBT+ a third of the country has legislation against your very existence.
Poland has made a lot of progress but calling it a great place to live is - while not altogether untrue - a statement of privilege more than universal reality.
Source?
Second: You can't just pick Berlin for comparison.
Third: Take away foreign owend companies from Berlin, you get a cheap, dirty poor capital.
Later I bought even nicer motors, meant to provide exceptional control and feedback for tactile/haptic behaviours, and they were from Poland too.
Then I got to work on a robotic arm which contained a bunch of components from Poland. At this point it was clear to me that it wasn’t coincidence.
Finally, I built a drone with my kids and again, the motors are Polish. And they’re excellent.
They went from being a place I would only expect to encounter cultural food items from to a place that entered a high tech supply chain which seems to produce high enough quality components that I see them without seeking them out.
As a Canadian it made me very envious. We should be able to do this. I’ve seen a handful of Canadian motors in my life, and they were all blower motors a long time ago. Our ability to build cutting edge technology seems to be so limited as to be virtually irrelevant in most cases.
It's been a while and I can't recall the other big one. I know some engineers from one of them went on to work for Clone Robotics, which seems to be doing interesting stuff with other types of actuators.
(PS. Finnish suicide rate has fallen through the 2000’s from 1200 per year to about 750)
Yup. Thanks Russia.
Well we had a choice between 2 governments... Who are basically the same. Even if a radical government is elected in a couple of years, the deep state will essentially stop them from stepping outside the line which has already been chosen for us.
What I'm saying is that we, the British people, do not live in a democracy. So don't blame me :)
If your banking system is conservative and you don’t have a venture capital backed risk taking infrastructure - it’s systemic issue. It is the same problem with Europe.
The problem with Canadian innovation is that our best and brightest tend to complete their education in Canada, then emigrate to the US. The brain drain is a real issue for us.
One of the "positives" of Trump's hostilities towards Canada is that perhaps this would slow the brain drain for the current generation.
But Stanford grads all take moonshots.
Which would I rather have? Waterloo, they're great workers. Not sure they've been crushing it long enough to be in charge everywhere, time will tell.
I earned ~2–3x more than I do now working for a Canadian company, doing the best work of my career. I'm so unimportant here, they would readily discard me and laugh if I asked for a raise. This is Canada. But, I like this place, the people, and the work. I think it's important work. I'm at a stage where I prefer that over cash.
I don't think many of my peers feel the same. There's a sense that there's no point in working for Canadian companies if you don't have to. On balance they perform worse, pay less, have less interesting opportunities, and work you as hard as any American counterpart would.
So, the reason you can buy motors and robotics components from Poland and not Canada is because Poland has lower costs (i.e. people make less money because the economy is less developed), not because Canada doesn't know how to make them.
Again, I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, and I think we've certainly started to see problems as the manufacturing know-how of advanced countries deteriorates as they outsource much of their manufacturing to lower cost locales. But having an economy with a lower percentage of economic activity from manufacturing isn't some sort of failure, as it just means that economy has moved into more profitable activities.
Folks seem to be trying like heck to minimize the services jobs though with AI, etc. Maybe countries should retain a healthy mix of these jobs.
I hear you, and I partially agree. What I worry is that this made more sense ten or twenty years ago, though.
Living in Canada for 40 years, I'm no longer confident that we can continue using economic levers to allow ourselves to output less and buy more from poorer countries. We're stagnating, and the numbers are clear and directional.
We are not a very productive country compared to a younger version of ourselves, and our productivity only falls. Our most recent GDP increases belie population increases that outstripped wealth creation, leading to decreases in GDP per capita. We're growing and yet doing less.
At this rate we will need to be more resourceful, and our relative wages will continue to fall. We should be prepared and capable in all manners of wealth creation, industrial and otherwise.
Our government has stated it will do things like focus on tax competitiveness, internal trade barriers, and AI investment. To me this is depressing as hell. It's nowhere near the fighting spirit we need to make real progress. And frankly, what is AI investment? What the hell is Canada going to do with AI? We have some decent schools and interesting companies, but our government has no business speaking about the matter as an economic opportunity. We may lead the G7 in terms of research outputs here, but our spending plans on AI-related infrastructure and policy are a rounding error on singular US tech firms' balance sheets. We need to be serious. The gap between rhetoric and realistic outcomes is so absurd as to seem irresponsible.
Canadians are getting poorer quickly and at this rate we will eventually have those lower costs, but no trajectory leading us to developing better industrial and high tech manufacturing. We should have been finding ways to leverage our higher cost labour force for advanced manufacturing 20–30 years ago. Now we will have to leverage our middle-cost labour for barely-competitive products in industries with far more competition.
So I agree completely 15–25 years ago, but today I believe Canada's not doing so well, those costs will collapse, and we're going to wish we got ahead of this.
What part of the economic food chain are government employees?
> Most Canadian employment growth is now reliant on the public sector. Public sector employment climbed 0.9% (+41k jobs) to 4.45 million in July. Annual growth shows 4.8% (+205k) jobs added, a rate 8x greater than private sector growth. Canada’s now so dependent on public sector growth that government workers represent 1 in 4 employed workers.[1]
[1] https://betterdwelling.com/a-quarter-of-employed-canadians-n...
That would require work. Canadians just want to buy real estate, watch it go up 10x, then sell and retire in Mexico.
The point is that capital holders decided doing risky things isn't worth it, so they invested in unproductive low-risk assets, then the government juiced the immigration rate, said assets rose, capital holders are making off like bandits leaving Canadians behind in a stagnant economy holding the proverbial bag...
(more so terrible policy-making, which we're still very good at doing poorly today)
Fact is, only ~25% of Canadians are net tax payers. The rest work for a government, are unemployed, disabled, retired, or receive more funding from the government than they put in. So yeah, it's the boomers, the government workers, unemployed, disabled, etc...
The status quo is what Canadians want. It's why anyone with ambition (ie. wants to work and/or be an entrepreneur) leaves.
The industrial heritage is strong.
Btw great furniture, it’s still in my living room many years after, pretty much still pristine.
„Poland is the largest beneficiary of EU funds 2014-2020, with one in four euro going to Poland“
https://www.gov.pl/web/funds-regional-policy/poland-at-the-f...
Update: The comments below this are strange.
I ment: „Poland gets money, Poland transforms it into more money”.
Is Poland more efficient in it than other countries? I do not know. Would Poland have generated less money without it ? Probably? Is an annual investment of the 2-3%of the GDP into a country a lot? I think so?
This is not a "present" given to Poland. This is ensuring a better life for all Europeans.
But the result is inarguably positive. Those countries had only recently become democracies after decades of military dictatorships or otherwise unstable third-world style governments. Today they're the most dynamic economies in the EU in many respects, and their democracies are well established and functioning.
The EU doesn't get nearly enough credit for how it transformed the continent. People have forgotten how nearly all European countries were in a very bad shape after WWII. Fascists had remained in power in Spain and Portugal. Soviets were orchestrating communist takeovers in countries like Italy. It's a small miracle that the liberal democratic economic order won so quickly and decisively.
(The techbros hate it for a different, if related, reason - they aren't nearly as successful at capturing regulators, astroturfing and controlling discourse, and otherwise taking charge of that second entity as they are with the hapless US federal government).
Ofcourse Christ conservatives hate it.
I'd propose a different reason - the techbros disassociate with the EU because if someone want to work in tech that means getting fairly intimate with US culture, companies and markets. There is a reason this conversation is happening on a message board backed by a US company (moderated to US standards, I might add) - the Europeans don't have the ecosystem to sustain something similar.
If Europe were capable of building the ecosystems needed to fielding a large number of competent tech companies then techbros would start turning up there too.
>American alt-right/far-right/MAGA/techbro
Bucketing these all together doesn’t even make sense. A “techbro” has completely different reasons to dislike the EU (regulatory regime unfriendly to tech startups) than some MAGA focused on US competitors.
As someone from the tech industry, I’m disappointed in the EU as it falls further and further behind on innovation. I love the EU though and frequently visit it (which is not something a MAGA would do).
In what sense are they "dynamic economies"? Their GDP per capita has barely increased at all over the past two decades, they're mired in debt, and haven't produced a single new company that's significant on the global stage.
It was after that US/Russia sponsored this communist takeover of our country that the new puppet governments have thrown the natives into extreme misery until someone from the EU decided to reduce the levels of corruption and misery. We simply swapped one master for another and hasn't been good for our land.
So please don't compare our country to whatever "solutions" brought by the same entities who caused our problems in the first place. We needed almost 50 years to remove socialism from this country and reduce the venezuelan/cuban style poverty forced upon us.
Of course this rate of growth proved unsustainable: in 2008 the (Spanish) real estate bubble burst and this caused bank bail outs, massive unemployment (rates around 25%), and put an end to GDP growth for many years, exacerbated by the fact that Spain did no longer have its own currency to devalue in order to regain international competitiveness.
At the time the bubble burst, government debt in Spain was at a bit more than 40% GDP, with a budget surplus, far lower than for example the "responsible" Germany at more than 60%.
Now what does any of that have to do with "socialists"? If anything, it's a cautionary tale about badly designed currency zones and financial markets misallocating capital.
I rather have workers get the money than more corporate welfare.
Some capitalists create enormous value, some destroy it, some are essentially passive recipients of returns generated by others.
Capitalists provide real productive functions like capital allocation, risk-bearing, founding, governance, monitoring, etc.
Capitalists are completely useless when they have no workers, so I don't understand your points outside of "wow capitalists require a lot of workers to exist."
Hence the rush towards LLM systems, the dream of perpetual labor machine is too enticing.
There is also no risks for capitalists, do we live on the same planet where the stated US economic policy isn't to socialize the risks and privatize the gains?
So you argue no capitalists ever lost money? It happens all the time, the risk is real.
Consider the risks of VC backed initiatives, which far more often than not, return less than market salary to entrepreneurs, and less than the S&P 500 to capitalists.
For a shot at the jackpot, entrepreneurs are risking substandard salaries, and capitalists substandard returns.
You could argue that the capitalist’s risk is more significant than the entrepreneur’s. Even in failure, a VC initiative can afford the entrepreneur greater networking and professional experience than other roles, which increases their future earning potential and offsets their risk of substandard salary.
Hard to say the same for the capitalist, who is also, of course, risking a far greater amount of currency than anyone else.
But a risk’s significance is not determined by the amount wagered; it is determined by the consequences of losing the wager. As well as the consequences of participation, or lack thereof.
Median American lifetime earnings are somewhere between one and two million dollars; let’s say an entire life costs two million. A capitalist capable of investing a billion dollars could risk an entire lifetime’s money on a venture every other month, for eighty years, cradle to grave, and if they suffered complete losses every time, they’d still die with enough money for 1600 years of life in a wealthy nation.
The sum risked is immense. But the consequences of losing it are null.
It is, of course, more nuanced than that. Many businesses are funded by people with far less than a billion dollars, and many of them fail. There's also 3,000 billionaires, and an overwhelming majority of human lives that cost far less than American's.
once people get honest about this - that VC losses tend to be tax write-offs
& that prior to the VC model - you investors with skin in the game via equity | debt.
then maybe people will stop hyping up VCs and start doing things in a sustainable manner.
but to the gilet wearing hierarchy on the coasts - I'm being a heretic.
They are still getting half of what Belgium is getting and unlike the overwhelming majority of bureaucrats in Brussels Polish farmers actually produce something useful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_material_losses_during_...
And don’t forget the Partitions and The Deluge, too.
Crazy how people just like to pretend that wealth acquired before 1950 somehow just appeared there naturally.
Think of it as defense spending
Meh, idk what magic maths they pull, but any other sources I find do not corroborate their graph.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352708343/figure/fi...
https://dimiter.eu/Visualizations_files/cee/gdppc_country.pn...
Slovakia and Hungary have trailed % growth compared to Poland, but they are far richer countries now that they were 20 years ago, and the GDP per capita for Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia is quite close to each other[0].
I'm not trying to say Poland didn't do well, it did! I'm just saying the advantages of being in the EU outweigh any national merit by a lot, which should be quite self evident.
[0] GDP, nominal, per capita: 31,336 / 28,430 / 31,242 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
Ukraine saw similar rise of PPP per capita as Slovakia and Slovakia wasn't even invaded in 2014.
Switzerland's GDP per capita PPP growth is same as Slovakia and Switzerland is not in EU.
https://georank.org/assets/img/charts/economy/poland/slovaki...
Some moron always show up with the "but it was all the EU subsidies" talking point, which is quite frankly part of racist tropes of eastern Europeans being dumb and worse than westerners. Could you imagine them accomplishing anything on their own? That's ridiculous. It's us, the western saviors, who did this with our penny subsidies!
Ireland were in a similar position for instance (received €40bn in EU subsidies in the first 45 years of membership; now a net contributor).
EDIT: Net contributions seem to be $3bn/year (total, independent of tech) while loss for other EU countries due to corporate tax evasion is $6bn/year.
Of course these countries have 5-10m inhabitants so in term of raw GDP and industrial power they can't compete
https://georank.org/economy/bulgaria/hungary
And yes, my own take why this does happen is that there was certain order to the region in the past centuries - the West was modern and wealthy, the East was backwards and poor and all was in its natural place. This new situation is unfamiliar and needs a sort of explanation that would preserve the balance somehow. In short, they cope.
Another argument: Poland's GDP had already been growing at a similar pace before it joined the EU (but after it got rid of communism).
Also, the reason you've given doesn't explain why it worked so much better for Poland than for Czechia, Slovakia and a few others.
It's hard to see the other paths they could be on tho. One person's failure is another's raging success. It might be a bit like the way we take a peace for granted, because we can't internalize the cost of all the ways it could have been worse.
There are also crowds of young anti-woke Poles claiming that Poland should leave EU because we would be better without it and claiming that EU is puppet of Germany. I've also seen opinions that Israel is a puppet of Poland, aimed at Israelis. If you want to, you will see all opinions you could imagine.
But sure, sock puppets also follow the crowd. Good money in it: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj38m11218xo
The "logic" of xenophobic nationalism is that narratives are selected for how well they (1) cast "us" as victims, (2) cast some convenient "others" as villains, and (3) fire up "our" feelings of hatred. Neither logic nor truth are particularly desirable - and narratives which are particularly defiant of logic and truth may be a way of virtue signaling within xenophobic national social circles.
On the contrary. Since the EU has no meaningful penalty mechanism other than withholding funds, and enormous capacity for shared damage absorption, once a country passes a certain threshold of development membership in the EU actually encourages government misbehavior including democratic backsliding, because it insulates the government from many potential adverse consequences.
For example, governments around the world have to fear violent revolution. But in the EU, the shared desire for law and order is so strong that the rest of the members are likely to support a member state in repressing such a revolution with essentially any degree of brutality, regardless of the condition of that state’s democracy, because the alternative (a successful coup in an EU member state) is impossible to contemplate.
There is no lesson of "democracy" to give. At best it is a guided democracy, and this is very generous.
For example, VPNs are going to be forbidden, and the free speech compared to the US is a little toy.
Elections are often a facade in many EU countries.
In France for example, it's always the "right" (btw you can be socially or jailed if you support them by using the wrong words) against the existing party, and communists are begging it's better to vote for the existing party, than support the newcomers.
It's a loop, this is why there is this joke that voters are "beavers", because at every elections they are asked "build a dam" against competition.
There is the same beaver thing, over and over again for 30 years.
Even people that are actually elected you have nowhere your word near their decisions (and even less near Von der Leyen and similar people).
Poland understood long time ago that it needs a safe country, and that they need to make sure that the people in their country are fine and safe before helping the whole planet.
Hungary and Poland are a little bit in the same boat, their relative independence saves them (e.g. refusing the EUR currency, refusing some policies) that allows them to have more leeway to support the local people, while benefiting of the funds from the EU and Schengen.
The EU prevents your money from being stolen, except when the EU itself decides to withhold or deduct it. Hungary has lost over a billion euros in ECJ daily fines...
If you push it even further, this is forgetting about the hundreds of billions that are centrally distributed to third-parties (and this is just Ukraine!). So, your money, our decision.
US printed so much that basically entire global economy had to pay for it in huge inflation in the years that followed. And all that freshly printed money ended up in pockets of US billionaires.
Tight global integration is not a bad thing. Even if we took at face value your argument that a strong domestic market protected Poland in that case, you can't cherry pick the one instance in which lower-than-expected integration was beneficial without also considering all the other times in which it was harmful.
You could get the money but you had to get bureaucracy to be right and transparent to cut down on fraud, and that helped the rest of the govt to have less fraud.
Furthermore, as the GP hints, EU funds earmarked for Poland don't necessarily remain in Poland as investment. Much of that money circulates back into the pockets of contributing countries. You have to look at the entire paper trail to understand where money is actually ending up.
Also worth noting: Poland didn't receive a dime of reparations after the War. Germany (and with later contribution by the Soviets) had unleashed such mind-boggling destruction on Polish cities, towns, cultural inheritance, industry, etc. that only the so-called Swedish Deluge matches or exceeds this devastation.
The EU presents certain clear economic benefits for member countries. Nobody disputes that. But the patronizing and paternalistic narrative of some countries - reminiscent of their goofy rationalizations for their occupation of that region during the 19th century - need to go away.
Poland received virtually all of the lands that were considered Prussia though.
Probably worth more than the EUR 1 trillion fantasy figure that Polish right wingers demand.
The fucking krauts (both the German/Prussian and the Austrian/Hapsburg varieties) can and should toss them a few złoty for economic development as recompense for the horrific treatment they've dealt Poland over the centuries. It would be nice if the Russians would too, but that's not the reality we currently live in.
Times were much better.
It is a tax haven, with one of the highest GDP / person in the world, why is it, by magnitudes, the biggest recipient of EU largesse / person??!
Additionally a lot of the EU's institutions are based there or have offices there, some of which might count as investments as well.
Lastly, everything there is really expensive. So you need to invest a larger amount to achieve the same thing as elsewhere.
I have been to Luxembourg and to Hungary, Bulgaria & Greece - the otherwise obvious contenders for "poorest" in the EU and Luxembourg should not be in the picture.
Next time, please check how many Poles left Poland for western EU since they joined.
[1] https://www.pap.pl/en/news/poland-largest-recipient-eu-funds...
I'm old enough to remember internal borders with passport checks in Europe, before the wall fell and Poland was still on the other side of that. Nice to see them moving on from that.
Thanks to the EU free movement of people, I've now studied, worked and lived in four different countries. I know people all over Europe. I currently live in Germany. Germany benefits a lot from the EU. Yes it costs money. But there's trade, access to skilled labour, etc. as well. And if you look at Poland, it's what sits between Germany and Belarus & Ukraine. So, there's a strategic relevance as well. Poland doing fine is good for everyone else in the EU.
The question is whether growth is objective and fair or whether it is not.
For comparison of wealth in Poland, ALL net-subsidies would have to be deducted, because this is essentially wealth taken from other countries, and distributed to poorer areas in the EU. I am not disputing that this leads to more growth; I am disputing the "country xyz is now rich" while not even mentioning the subsidies. And that reuters article does not mention that at all.
It also has to be mentioned because the crazy bureaucrats in Brussels want to aggressively expand eastwards. They think that the richer areas in the EU need to pay for that expansion. I simply fail to agree with that "logic" at all and I also consider it hugely unfair to richer areas. The richer areas made good decisions; now this is being negated by bureaucrats in Brussels. That is unfair. (This is not meant against Poland, but against the constant expansionistic agenda from Brussels.)
People believe this because every single member state is using EU institutions as a punching bag whenever they have issues locally. The people have no idea how the EU work, they only hear about it when used as a bogeyman
It also ignores the fact that absent the EU, countries would still have a lot of subsidies.
Edit: I just now got the part "If the increase in cake size is bigger than the subsidies" – that's a ridiculous assumption. EU total growth in 2025 was 1.5% or 295 billion USD. From 2021-2027, the EU budget committed roughly 370bn € each for Agriculture subsidies and for Cohesion Policies, totaling 720bn € over 7 years; 2025 has seen ~130bn USD from those two buckets alone. Germany alone has paid another 60bn in subsidies the same year. Oh, and there has been a total of 417bn USD in energy subsidies in europe in 2023 (most recent data available). Even if we could attribute all total growth to subsidies alone, we'd have a factor below 0.5 – and that doesn't include any growth through private investmen, PPP, or any kind of increase of regular public spending.
Futhermore, what matter is the amount of tax collected by the EU. Energy subsidy is not money collected by the EU and distributed.
From a purely economic viewpoint Holocaust and 2nd world war were very very stupid decisions.
Did you recently crossed borders? On many the checks are there again, because of fear of immigration terrorism or something, so the people could see, politicians were doing something to make them feel safe (but what I could see when passing borders, especially between poland and germany, were looong lines of trucks, so much for free flowing goods).
Not sure of the current situation, though, but last summer and autumn was horrible with checks (probably still better than what was before, but having experienced the real open border situation, having them restricted again is frustrating).
Quick ID check happened once - when I was traveling with bus across border.
Back in a days it was a lot, lot slower and more detailed.
Oh for sure, I have childhood memories of the really dark time, but it is way worse now, than it was back in 2015. I missed flixbus connections because of intense checks and changed vacation plans avoiding long waiting times at borders within EU (my recommendation, cross at night).
Is it only certain countries?
Every country can choose independently, and for each border. From a cursory search, it appears e.g. Poland currently only checks the borders with Germany and Lithuania. You'd have missed any checks on your specific trio, if this list was true at the time:
https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/schengen/schengen...
I'm surprised how quickly people have forgotten that North America was a giant open border zone until very recently. You only needed a passport to travel overseas. In hindsight that was actually a pretty unique arrangement.
Pretty different from having a chance to be stopped by a random check while crossing.
This is something I tell people I am generally politically/socially align with (liberals/progressives) when they start talking about “handouts for red states.” California and other areas were not developed on their own, they required years of sustained federal investment and interest in the area.
It obviously goes without saying that conservatives in the US need to stop demonizing taxes so much for the same reason/they need to recognize that as the some of the largest beneficiaries of federal tax dollars they are cutting their nose to spite their face (I believe Kentucky is still the most subsidized state in the US).
All of us should want our states cooperation with the federal government so we can all rise together, and we need to view investing in our neighbors as a collective good.
If they were to ask where you think this "federal investment" funding came from, what would you reply?
Upwards spiral versus downwards. Money pours in for both cases, but only one is really an investment.
If you look at a map of the American South Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia will just move on. Actually it’s already happening and has been happening for the last 30 years. Other parts of the American South are however, stuck more firmly in the past and getting further behind and that also applies to some of the Midwestern states.
Louisiana has another ongoing long-term problem the gulf of Mexico is eating away at the bottom half of the state lands end is moving further north that involves scientific observations oh boy thems fighting words.
In a similar way, Western Europe benefited from a lot of investment after WW2, while Eastern Europe didn't receive the same investment then.
So the recent investment OP mentioned is just balancing the scales.
Building useful infrastructure, in the can do America of the past worked, the parasitic AI data centers currently, however, appear to be a financial dead end.
That era of America appears to be gone at the Federal level, infrastructure, schools, science, medicine, college, vaccines, voting etc. etc. don’t appear to be on the current menu.
Two of the three are intrinsically tied to the locale. You can't move the National Forests to Manhattan. They closed the military bases in the most expensive areas like California decades ago to save money so they are mostly located in flyover country now.
Social Security actually is a welfare handout but retirees are choosing to move to red states. Unless one is arguing to forcibly prevent retirees from moving to the sunbelt, Social Security dollars will disproportionately flow into those states.
There is no red state "handout".
You can give all the caveats you want but my point is it doesn’t matter what the reason is, these states rail against taxes and the federal government despite leaning heavily on their investment and “donor states” need to see it as a positive for all of us.
Why does it matter if it’s national parks or military bases or whatever? Do you think these states would gladly give it up so they can “liberate themselves from federal intervention” or whatever? Fat chance.
> Digging deeper into the component parts of federal contribution, red and blue states received similar dollar amounts in direct payments on a nominal ($6.9 trillion) and per capita ($42,900) basis, much of which come in the form of payments from Social Security, Medicare, and public assistance programs, such as the earned income and child tax credits. The red and blue states also receive similar amounts for military and non-military wages (excluding the U.S. Post Office, which is self-funded) on a nominal ($650 billion) and per capita ($4,900) basis.
Tax receipts were listed as the most significant difference, and after that other things like military bases, block grants, federal contracts and highways, some going one way, and some the other.
The numbers were interesting. They added it up to $1 trillion going from blue to red states.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/119/meeting/house/118494/documents/...
I don't know. I want to agree with you, but a large part of the economic growth in Poland is off-shoring and cheap tax (~12% on contract) for tech workers. The average tech wage there now is pretty similar to the UK, and I don't really see many startups there - probably in part because of how bureaucratic their business system can be. I don't know if this influx of foreign money from off-shoring and surge in real estate pricing is sustainable or good in the long run.
Other than a massive influx of overdevelopment of flats in the cities (sometimes too rushed, I've seen reports of flat blocks subsiding because of cutting corners), I'm not sure where else the increase it.
Because that seems extremely implausible, and actually very insulting to the incredible success of Eastern Europe, before and after joining the EU, in closing the gap to Western Europe over the last 3 decades.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...
Whether or not it's offshoring is a little less obvious, but I can't think of more than 2 or 3 successful Polish tech companies.
https://emerging-europe.com/it-sector-in-focus-poland/
The IT sector is 4.4% of GDP. Poland has seen 3% of GDP growth year on year.
It is absolutely a huge offshoring target at least for the US.
Anecdotes from your bubble inside one particular industry, that represents a small fraction of the economy of a nation, do not adequately explain the post soviet transformation of economies containing hundreds of millions of people. That's all.
Specifically I asked for evidence that current GDP growth is significantly driven by this specific type of foreign investment, as claimed. None has been forthcoming.
Also some companies are moving their offices from Poland to India now.
Sure, its not ideally distributed, but nowhete is. Such economic success will drag many parts of the country up. Yes, jobs not paid the best will have to commute from further. But compared to where Poland was 2 decades ago (been there many times), its great growth and success.
Plus you guys have correct mentality to by far the biggest threat to Europe - russia. Not so common in eastern Europe, russian-paid politicians are quite successful in some places. But of course Poland has a history with russia to remember so thats luckily not an option.
It is for as long, as the EU exists in its current form. The rise of anti-EU parties in both Poland and Germany makes it a risky investment.
Surveys here have been showing a trend towards greater public support for the EU. Its advocates have been pushing for closer integration and even talking of a referendum on rejoining. Although of course this also has to be viewed cautiously because the polls before the Brexit referendum had also pointed towards remaining and one of the biggest fans of the EU recently has been that unpopular PM who might not be in office for much longer.
People in the UK, like the US, seem addicted to voting for morons then being surprised when they do the things morons do.
Also, for Germany, and I assume, other EU countries, cohesion and economic strength of the EU is the most important value that exists.
* It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented badly by national govt * It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented okay but communicated badly * Outright lie about the problem and the scope of it.
One example: The people complained that "EU will force them to pay to scrap solar panels"
The truth: Some countries added price of recycling into price of the solar panels, some didn't. Those that did had free recycling, those that didn't needed owner to pay a fee when scrapping it. So, naturally, buying solar panel from country with no fee was cheaper and scrapping it in country with fee was free. EU noticed that loophole and forced countries into including the fee in panel cost:
The truth: Poland applied it by just applying fee to panels bought before the rule unification
The lie number 1: EU forced that implementation on Poland. Nothing was forced, that way of "fixing it" (vs eating the cost was what Polish govt chose
The lie number 2: (and I have no idea where it came from) "You will have to scrap your panels made before this date AND pay for it".
Sometimes I suspect most of that is just russian propaganda using anything to undermine EU
One of my favorites was “EU is banning juice”, when the definition of juice was being standardized and local producers of fruit-flavored sugar water couldn’t keep selling their beverages as “juice” anymore.
In reality it was a way to harmonise banana grading, no one was forbidden to sell abnormally shaped bananas, it would just be classed lower than the "Extra" class.
Or is it also Russia propaganda that it wants to force VPNs to collect data on their users or force everyone to use their real identities online so that it makes it easy to prosecute anyone for wrong speech?
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/the-eu-pr...
Nah, you are right the EU is good for us. No issues there at all.
An economic investment as well as one of solidarity. People forget that the EU is a peace project that ensures peace via economic cooperation. This nuance seems trivial but is actually massively important. I can see trust degrading in the US but being fortified across the EU.
Look at Hungary recently, they did a 180 not because of Brussels or Berlin saying they should. Hungarians are sceptical of both. However they do trust the Polish people who they see as genuine peers who are very pro-EU.
While what you’re saying may be true, and this prosperity may be good for all of Europe, I think there is a lot of resentment about who the beneficiaries of the EU structure are.
And it's a good thing, but I wish Eastern European countries would recognize this and become more of a team player instead of shitting on EU.
Poland waited for Trump 2nd term, threatening the take some of the EU territory by force to finally transition from buying US weapons to buying from other European countries.
In the early 20th century Texas for instance was a poor state, a recipient of federal funds, but now it's an economic powerhouse. (To be precise I still think it's a recipient of federal funding but it holds its own now.)
Europe is the outlier here. The rest of the world checks your passport when you come in their country because they like to know who comes and who goes for a lot of reasons including public safety, biosecurity and so on.
The fact that Europe has basically given up on trying to filter who comes in is not necessarily a model that is desirable for the rest of the world.
> Thanks to the EU free movement of people, I've now studied, worked and lived in four different countries.
You can do that without Europe as well. Do you think people did not move to another country or studied in another country before the European countries decided to remove borders? What about now with all the students moving to the US/UK/Australia/Canada?
When Western countries got money via the Marshal Plan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan
Poland had... "friendly" Soviets "supporting" their country for almost 44 years...
As someone who has lived in both countries its such a hilarious anxiety.
What's hilarious about it? It seems pretty well-rooted given the actual history of the two areas.
- 1939: Germany invaded in 1939, officially starting World War II.
- 1941: Germany occupied the rest of Poland after attacking the Soviet Union, which had previously occupied Eastern Poland.
- Teutonic Order/Prussia: Throughout the 13th–16th centuries, the Teutonic Order fought numerous wars against Poland.
- Medieval Period: Records show invasions by Margrave Gero (963), Margrave Odo I (972), Emperor Otto II (979), and multiple campaigns by King Heinrich II between 1003 and 1017.
But Germans making huge mistakes out of misguided idealism is still a problem. And given the size and influence of Germany, the rest of the continent has always to process those mistakes as well.
Intergenerational trauma is a real psychological phenomenon.
A „hilarious anxiety” is an incredibly naive world view.
It's unfortunate that 0th order thinking jumps to this framing, it's one reason I always laugh when people talk about SpaceX taking 'government handouts' without these folks realizing the 100x ROI the government got out of their investment. All investments are 'hand outs' but not all 'hand outs' are investments.
Clear thinking at a large enough scale will prevent a populace from self destructing due to stupidity about this topic.
The EU gets huge benefits for that investment, the CEO of GM gets a multi-milion dollar pay packet.
At least Poland does it legally.
The lion share of this budget has been defrauded, fraud is only slightly less widespread than in Hungary. Piles of (only) documentation are produced by professionals then funds are funnelled to the families of local authorities. Honestly I'm confused, maybe that's indeed how EU funds are suppoused to work?
It's not trivial that this works. In Hungary we messed this up big time, hopefully it can get fixed now.
Even without funds distributing EU cash, a common market works as a leveller this way and pulls up the poorer countries, because if you can live work and operate anywhere, people naturally pick the cheapest and easiest places to start a business serving the EU.
Spain and Portugal were the previous beneficiaries and everyone benefits really as jobs are created everywhere.
This is far better than a situation where larger economies dominate all others forever.
Would you say that The US and Mexico should be forced to implement free movement of people, goods, services and industry with a new North American Union capital in Mexico city?
If not, what is the difference?
Mind you that Polish workers are the next in line to be screwed if Ukraine joins the EU.
So when German workers got screwed when Poland joined EU it was fine, but Poland is where you draw the line?
Ever closer union is the official slogan of the EU, this is working as intended.
If it was the EU contributions that were the dominant force here, Germany could… simply do the same and prop up its own struggling economy with money printed by the ECB. Instead, it prefers to see it crumble under an obese welfare state that largely funds inactive third-world fake asylum seekers. So clearly, there’s way more nuance to economic success than simply having funds redirected from one account to another.
If you talk about asylum seekers (which may be a valid point), notice also that German social security institutions are filled to the brim with Eastern European claimants.
Utterly false: nationals of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania account for approximately 4.9% of all SGB-II Leistungsberechtigte (~256,000 of 5.24 million as of December 2025).
> The Marshall plan also did not involve the US having completely free access to Germany economically and move all their companies to Germany for cheaper wages.
This is such a bizarre point. The openness of the common market goes both ways, you do realise that, right? For more than the first decade after the accession of the Central Eastern European countries to the EU, Western European countries saw an influx of workers that were well educated (or skilled in trade professions), which helped fill the gaps in their labour market. So if you were going to try to draw an analogy here, you’d also have to point out that the US didn’t import millions of Germans after the war into its own labour market. Well, barring some rocket scientists who had built weapons of mass destruction and death for Hitler.
Anyway, yes, that’s how the common market works: companies can move operations to countries where labour is cheaper (in Poland), but other companies have encouraged labour to move where they already operate (in Germany). And what’s forgotten in this discussion is that the cohesion subsidies are in fact a form of compensation for the inherent imbalance that a pure common market would exhibit. That’s why it took years in negotiations for those poorer countries to decide under what terms they’re actually willing to open up their markets, and in many cases it’s been a very controversial issue.
You are by the way underestimating the credit that the Marshall Plan gets in Germany. It is taught in schools and not commonly denied.
The comments are questioning what you wrote, which implies without evidence, that a small amount of EU money relative to Poland's own GDP, in just 6 years, is somehow entirely responsible for Poland's growth.
> I ment: „Poland gets money, Poland transforms it into more money”.
I have noticed that absolutely every time Poland's success is mentioned, someone from EU steps in to downplay it. A self-serving bias. Seriously, that type of comment is absolutely everywhere. Any YouTube video. Any Reddit post. In last couple days I have seen it about dozen times, last time today here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/comments/1t6k7...
And each time it's some unsubstantiated remark, not once do those people actually bother to check what the actual amount of subsidies did Poland receive over the past 22 years, or how does Poland fare against other EU members. They always imply that ALL THIS SUCCESS is thanks to EU.
For the record: Poland received in total about as much as its yearly budget is in 2026. Other recent EU members also received more-less the same or, per-capita, much more! Did you bother to see how other EU countries developed in that time?
Growth-wise, since 1990, Poland's economy grew substantially each year (even before joining the EU in 2004) and is only behind China: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5Z8u1mWMAAHtUU?format=png&name=...
Seriously, look at that damn map. Find other EU members on that list.
Ergo, Poland must be doing something EXCEPTIONAL if its combined growth FAR SURPASSES not only any other recent EU members but ALL BUT ONE country worldwide? It can't just be that relatively small amount of the EU money, or the EU membership itself, can it?
So, for f*ks say, how about western EU shuts up and acknowledges IT'S NOT ALL THANKS TO THE EU, will it?
I am personally a big fan of the EU, but those downplaying comments are so annoying I can't but think it's some sort of jealousy. Credit where credit is due to POLES themselves.
You could just as well claim the growth is thanks to NATO membership because, if you look at Ukraine and Belaraus, it's quite plausible as well.
If anything the decades of communist occupation destroyed the work ethic.
We have a famous saying "whether you stand or lay down, you deserve 1000zł".
Eh, as an American I've spent many hours reading Europeans railing against the United States here on HN.
Not once has a European ever given the US credit for the Marshall Plan.
I actually look forward to seeing the EU become the global hegemon so they can learn about how much "fun" it is. The US can sit in the stands eating popcorn just like Switzerland.
How can you honestly say that though. A blatant overgeneralization of a large group of people, but this has been a recurring theme on HN lately.
So I would agree that people spouting anti-US sentiment have been conveniently downplaying, leaving out, or haven't been educating themselves on, this important part of US-European history, but what's new.
In the meantime, streets have been named after Marshall, plaques and statues have been erected (including recent times) at least in the more Western parts of continential Europe where much of the Marshall Plan funds ended up, and its extreme importance is quite an ingrained part of WW2 school history education. Just as one example, Arnhem was largely rebuilt using these funds and has historically paid homage and still does today with such tributes and memorials.
Perhaps there is a miscommunication. What I meant to say is, I have not seen it mentioned a single time over many hours of arguing on HN about the US/Europe relationship. It's not an 'overgeneralization', simply an observation.
>In the meantime, streets have been named after Marshall, plaques and statues have been erected (including recent times) at least in the more Western parts of continential Europe where much of the Marshall Plan funds ended up, and its extreme importance is quite an ingrained part of WW2 school history education. Just as one example, Arnhem was largely rebuilt using these funds and has historically paid homage and still does today with such tributes and memorials.
That is nice to hear. But it doesn't seem to stop US-bashing from being the continent's trendiest hobby. I never saw a European say to another: "Hey now, they did do the Marshall Plan for us. Maybe the Yanks aren't always bad."
The problem is that US establishment politicians have traditionally sold US foreign policy to voters as "a responsibility to uphold freedom and democracy" and so forth. Then Americans hear directly from the supposed beneficiaries of this "responsibility", and the sentiment is overwhelmingly negative. The American voter feels betrayed, and wants out of the arrangement. It contributes to (1) anti-establishment sentiment, and (2) isolationist sentiment.
The condescending attitude of Europeans ("NATO is mainly to benefit US interests, you American fool", without being very specific about those interests aside from vague handwaving towards the Middle East, where most of us want less involvement anyhow) is not helping matters.
Europe has benefitted from the USA in some ways, but the USA doesn't always have to bear the consequences.
How does that change things? You could just as easily argue that Poland's economy was ruined by the USSR, therefore EU help is "complex".
Europe was an unfortunate spot, due to a war which started in Europe, and the US helped Europe defend against tyranny and rebuild. If the US hadn't helped Europe rebuild and defend itself, perhaps the USSR would've expanded all the way to the Atlantic.
Europeans have an annoying habit of taking US help for granted, and complaining about us endlessly. I'm tired of it. We should've taken the Swiss approach and allowed Europe to suffer the full consequences of European folly. That's what we do about poverty in Africa and South America. We don't regard that as our problem. Europe should not be our problem either.
Lord knows Europe wouldn't help the US rebuild if we suffered a devastating war. There was no European Marshall Plan after the US Civil War.
I never see Europeans complain about Swiss neutrality. The US should take the Swiss approach.
"Europe was an unfortunate spot, due to a war which started in Europe"
That is arguable. Some Asians say the war started in the Far East with Japanese attacks on China and the USSR which occurred before 1939, let alone 1941.
"I never see Europeans complain about Swiss neutrality. The US should take the Swiss approach."
Switzerland is not a militaristic power, but an economic one. It is not expansionist. It is currently the host country of the World Economic Forum though, and the WEF's legacy is controversial to say the least.
"Lord knows Europe wouldn't help the US rebuild if we suffered a devastating war. There was no European Marshall Plan after the US Civil War."
The US Civil War had nothing like the scale of WW2. The tank battle at Kursk alone dwarves the US Civil War. Large parts of the USA were unaffected by the civil war and both sides had the same language and a similar culture.
"That's what we do about poverty in Africa and South America. We don't regard that as our problem. Europe should not be our problem either."
North America and Europe have interfered heavily in both Africa and South America. Not just militarily but economically, propping up and training various dictators. The USA just bailed out Millei in Argentina and intervened in Venezuela.
Europe is a lot friendlier to the USA than most parts of the world and is a major part of its trade. Elsewhere it becomes more complicated.
So the notion that Poland should be grateful to Europe is rather farcical.
>That is arguable. Some Asians say the war started in the Far East with Japanese attacks on China and the USSR which occurred before 1939, let alone 1941.
The European war started in Europe.
>Switzerland is not a militaristic power, but an economic one. It is not expansionist.
Exactly, I'm saying the US should take that route. Our military posture should be armed neutrality like Switzerland rather than propping up European regimes.
>The US Civil War had nothing like the scale of WW2.
On a population-adjusted basis they were similar. Wikipedia states:
"Based on 1860 census figures, 8 percent of all white men aged 13–43 died in the war, including 6 percent in the North and 18 percent in the South."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War#Casualties
You can see WW2 figures for "total deaths as % of 1939 population" here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/World_Wa...
>The tank battle at Kursk alone dwarves the US Civil War.
Based on a quick glance at Wikipedia this appears to be false.
But the population-adjusted figures are the ones that matter. The US Civil War was about as devastating to the US as it existed in the 1860s as WW2 was to Europe as it existed in the 1940s. Europe did not do much to help with rebuilding.
>Large parts of the USA were unaffected by the civil war
Sure--and Sweden, Spain, Portugal, etc. were not heavily affected in Europe.
>both sides had the same language and a similar culture.
Not relevant for my point.
>North America and Europe have interfered heavily in both Africa and South America. Not just militarily but economically, propping up and training various dictators. The USA just bailed out Millei in Argentina and intervened in Venezuela.
>Europe is a lot friendlier to the USA than most parts of the world and is a major part of its trade. Elsewhere it becomes more complicated.
When it comes to authoritarians, I notice the US always does the wrong thing. If we cooperate with authoritarians, we are "propping them up". If we help resist them, we are "destabilizing". If we sit by and do nothing, we are "complicit". Whatever the US does, there is always a term you can use to explain why the US is the villain, without having to learn any details of the situation. It's a sealed system of knowledge akin to a religion.
In any case, it sounds like you're with me that the US should be more isolationist then. I don't know why you're trying to argue with me, when you agree with my conclusion. Between "propping up", "destabilizing", and "complicit", I say "complicit" is the best answer. That's why I advocate complicity towards Europe. European problems should stay European. We shouldn't be "propping up" repressive European regimes: https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/the-situation-for-free-sp...
Poland has always been in Europe, and so was Germany. The USSR was partly in Europe as well. Maybe you mean the European Union? In which case, it may be a temporary fix, because as Poland becomes wealthier, the cheapness of labour no longer applies.
"The European war started in Europe."
It was never purely a European conflict. Several major
"Sure--and Sweden, Spain, Portugal, etc. were not heavily affected in Europe."
Spain stayed out of the main conflict because it had just been in a war in which the USSR, Germany and Italy were all involved. Gernika/Guernica was famously bombed from the air by the Germans. Franco may not have even won without external help. Like Japanese aggression before 1939, it can be argued that the Spanish Civil War was the beginnings of WW2.
Portugal's shipping was at heavy risk, especially to and from the Azores and Madeira. Macau ended up under informal occupation by Japan, with "advisors" installed there. Portugal was in no position to take on Japan.
Sweden was in no position to negotiate and traded with Germany, Finland and Nazi-occupied Denmark & Norway. It was effectively a satellite state.
"Based on a quick glance at Wikipedia this appears to be false."
You shouldn't have to look at Wikipedia. Kursk was the biggest tank battle in history with thousands of units taking part. That should be common knowledge. It dwarves anything in the US civil war.
"When it comes to authoritarians, I notice the US always does the wrong thing. If we cooperate with authoritarians, we are "propping them up". If we help resist them, we are "destabilizing". If we sit by and do nothing, we are "complicit". Whatever the US does, there is always a term you can use to explain why the US is the villain, without having to learn any details of the situation. It's a sealed system of knowledge akin to a religion."
It was put succinctly by one American, if I can mind rightly... Someone was told that some dictator was a bastard, and the reply was "But he's our bastard." Something like that. Al Haig made similar statements. Kissinger asked about East Timor said something like, "that was an island, you should see what I can do with continents". Again quoting from memory.
I think the "our bastard" mentality applies to Saudi Arabia and the Ukraine, which is an utterly corrupt country but in which there have been concerted attempts to orientate it away from Russia, even to the point of adopting the western date of Christmas. (I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Zelensky tries to advocate for the Roman alphabet in future as well.)
The USA has helped create some positive changes across the world, but often does so with an iron fist and an end to help itself. This is my main worry with Cuba... It may throw off its Communist dictatorship, but just end up a corrupt US satellite as it was under Batista.
It is not true for the entire EU budget: the 2014–2020 MFF allowed up to €959.99bn in commitments, so Poland’s €77.6bn cohesion allocation was about 8.1% of the whole EU long-term budget.
For context this is like 0.7% of yearly German overall public expenditure go to Poland. And this money per year is also like 5% of state budget spending.
a big share of this money goes back to foreign companies in form of sales and contracts.
All the polish I know that work in IT enjoy handwork as well. They are hard workers.
Going by your history, you clearly have a strong bias for China but adding spyware or putting countries into debt isn't virtuous.
China does behave in a very methodical way, but that does not mean it is not a hostile nation.
Most than century after Poland gained independence age WW1, you can still see the economical differences from being occupied by Germans and Russians.
Again, that economic difference from last round was due specially to the failure of communism. And don’t forget that the US poured money into west Germany intentionally to show off their system. Look, I get some people don’t like Russia right now, but you can’t judge history through a modern lens; only through the zeitgeist of the time it occurred in.
So to counter my argument about Russian occupation from up to 1914 being irrelevant you bring Polish Kingdom from the times of The Holy Roman Empire?
And I assume that polish literature from 18 hundreds was already deeply prescient anti-soviet? Because the russian occupant in 18 hundreds had exactly same flavours as those during the communism.
Also the German occupation was in many regards as bad as Russian one but they had absolutely different face. But that is not part of the discussion really.
And the fact that russian communist occupation of Poland had been absolutely awful was fully clear in Poland as soon as late 1940s (according to my old family members). In parcitular - some part of my family was ended war in some prisoner / working camps in western europe and had a choice of staying in the west or going back to Poland. How terrible idea to go back it was - became clear in the first few years after stayed so until the end in 1989.
I remember vividly an interview one of the russian soldiers was giving in polish television on the day when Soviet Army was leaving Poland.
"You don't even understand what you're losing. You will soon realize how big of a mistake it is and regret it deeply."
Guess what? We don't.
Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady, 1823 "Nie dziw, że nas tu przeklinają, Wszak to już mija wiek, Jak z Moskwy w Polskę nasyłają Samych łajdaków stek."
Also have you noticed how and why the trade stopped?
Unless Moscow is not part of russia you can't say they weren't occupied by russia.
The Soviets really valued STEM. They also quite valued emancipating women.
Just for context, in the 60s, around 5% of chemistry PhDs in the US were women. In the Soviet Union, it was 40%! [0]
Of course, that doesn't excuse all the other things they did, but the amount of badass female engineers from Eastern Europe I had the honor of working with is a direct result of the pipeline the Soviets built.
[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/soviet-russia-had-...
In addition to the points of sibling comments, their respective starting posititions were drastically different: West Germany got the marshal plan, which benefitted their economy, the East had to pay reparations to the USSR, which meant whole factories, trains, even railroad tracks, all in all amounting to about a third of industrial capacity, were transferred to the USSR.
The most popular way to own a company is also inheritance, instead of studying an engineering subject.
This comment was also an answer in the context of the peaceful revolution, where a lot of companies where bought by larger companies from the west, both to destroy their better competitor and get funds from the EU. Such actions are seldomly done by engineers.
An East German state (Saxony) also consistently has the best education system among German states.
https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/201453/umfrag...
In general, East Germany (economically) mostly only does poorly when compared to West Germany, but not to the rest of Europe ;)
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01475...
Try telling this to my mother, I'm sure she'll be excited to hear how emancipated she was.
And the transformation to market economy involved at least two periods of suicidal decisions in name of ideology that regressed the economy (by the same person, even)
Anyway the trick to explosive growth as a country is who you trade with and how you count things. We now sell things to Germany instead of USSR, of course there’s “growth.” There’s also some very real growth, quite a bit of it - but I wouldn’t put one bit of care in a “top 20 biggest economies” ranking. NL is one of the biggest food exporters in the world because it sells mediocre tomatoes to Germany instead of selling rice to Brazil and food exports are counted in euros, not calories.
But I don't think our example has an effect on morale and spirit of resistance.
One of the examples:
[0] https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kultur...
I feel like one uberhard worker has an unhealthy return. But a group of uberhard workers have a healthy return - they compound each others hard work and build a prosperous _environment_.
My wife and I work very hard, as do our colleagues. But together we've built a pretty healthy routine, home, and (for now at least) financial situation. This has enabled us to have kids more easily than most, travel, etc.
The hardest workers /busiest folks I know are farmfolk relatives, and they also have a level of social connection and family connection that I envy all the time. It's mostly from them showing up to help with _everything_.
Behind Germans, or Scandinavians, but ahead of most Mediteraneans.
But yeah, some of the most skilled and passionate engineers I’ve worked with have been from Poland and the surrounding countries like Czechia.
The pension fund is usually not considered a tax formally, but most people I know assume with our demographics and pension system we are just paying for current retirees (and our 'savings' will be impacted by inflation when it becomes impossible to maintain), so practically it's a tax.
Than there is 23% VAT (ofc much less than 23% because both the IT company and the contractor pass it to client and subtract some cost; so only a piece of it affects the contractor; it's a convoluted thing and I don't really know if I should treat it as ~22.9% or 2.3% tax on a contractor and it's client).
1. Hard working people
2. Biggest recipient of EU subsidies used for projects which generates more profit. Infrastructure, internet, etc. To compare, Czechia used it for stupid things like bicycle lanes, child playgrounds etc.
3. Building permit is very easy to get for basically anything. Yes, this way you can sometimes get chaotic new buildings, but this can be solved later. In comparison, in Czechia, obtaining a building permit is difficult and depends on the whim of the official. Also we have basically non-existent property taxes, so new homes are unaffordable for everybody and only used as an investment.
4. Not allowing imigration from countries where people don't want to work and with hugely different religions and customs. This worked for Czechia too though, our biggest immigrants are Ukranians which are also slavs and very hard working. Official statistics is, that they paid in taxes more than they got from social support.
Without the full picture, these don’t seem like stupid things at all. What makes it stupid for them to invest in these things?
Sort-of like the guy who lost his keys in a bush, but is looking for them under a streetlamp b/c there is more light there.
And btw those same countries who make it super hard for, for example Syrians, to gain employment, then made a whole bunch of exceptions for Ukrainians. For example in Germany, Syrians without full command of German were told to attend language schools, but when the Ukrainians arrived they suddenly made exceptions and suddenly in our department we had Ukrainian cleaning crew who spoke neither German nor English.
As far as immigrants though, approximately 100% of them wish to be productive members of society, I agree. You dont go through the effort of emigrating without an entrepreneurial spirit.
Source for that statement? Because I see the opposite.
https://landgeist.com/2023/09/02/annual-working-hours-in-eur...
>approximately 100% of them wish to be productive members of society
Oh honey.
Yet again this nonsene. Per Capita, which is where this matters, Poland is nowhere near the top of that list.
But also you start to notice that definitely a lot of people who left Poland are coming back, and with that skills and new economic opportunities.
The drones bit hurts the most. There's a war an hour from our border eating FPVs by the millions, and Poland - sitting on batteries, motors, chips, a generation of engineers - has not stood up a real domestic drone industry. Money is there. Will is there. We just... haven't shipped. That should keep ministers awake.
EVs are worse. Izera is a punchline at this point. Noah literally called the play in 2024 - "don't bet on one champion, run a bunch and let them fight" - and the state did the exact opposite. We picked one horse and it never left the stable.
The Korea idea, on the other hand, Noah might have undersold. Framework agreement is for ~1,000 K2 tanks. By 2030 Poland will field more main battle tanks than Germany, France, the UK and Italy combined.
Rest holds up. "Try all the things" is right - we're just very uneven at the trying. Defense procurement: shipping. Civilian industrial policy: not so much. Software still works the way it always has: quietly, in apartments, mostly without the state in the loop. Which honestly might be a feature.
Why was other comment flagged and dead???
But it's fallacy to think that lots of wealth hasn't further concentrated in cities over the last 50 years. A lot of my family is from upstate NY, and I remember visiting them as a kid and feeling like they were nice places. They have all deteriorated greatly since I was a child. E.g. people always complain about how expensive housing is in the US. Well, there are plenty of cheap places to live in upstate NY - housing costs in a lot of those places have lagged inflation for decades. The problem is nobody really wants to move to Cortland, NY.
The issue looks especially clear when you compare small towns in close proximity to big cities compared to further out. There are lots of vibrant, quaint small towns on Long Island, for example, because they get a ton of money from their proximity to NYC. I often think a lot of the upstate NY towns would look just like the "cute" Long Island towns (e.g. similar architecture and history) if they had an influx of money.
In my experience, these places tend to be where rich people from cities own vacation property or can commute to a city for work. An example in Minnesota is the Brainerd Lakes area, which subsists almost entirely on people from the Twin Cities visiting their lake cabins from May to September. There are some nice small towns and plenty of beautiful homes, but it’s a result of outsiders bringing money in. Next door you have Aitkin County which is poor as hell because it’s basically a swamp/peat bog that has been partially drained for agriculture, 65% of the county is wetlands: https://www.mngeo.state.mn.us/maps/LandUse/lu_aitk.pdf
Most of rural America has been hollowed out to the point where local hospitals are closing. I’m not making any judgements about rural poor people, just that rural areas tend to be poor due to a lack of local economic opportunity.
The hospitals are closing because there arent enough medical schools in the US so there is a doctor shortage and since doctors are highly educated the vast majority of them prefer urban living. Most rural hospitals have to pay around double to convince doctors to work there compared to urban hospitals.
You’re right about limited economic opportunity, which comes with its own problems. That doesn’t preclude towns from responsible use of their natural resources or using the tax base to reinvest in the town. Not all do, but some do, to varying degrees of success. This idea that the majority of the US outside of urban areas is in a state of rotting collapse simply isn’t true.
Poverty rates in urbanized vs nonmetro areas are only a few percentage points apart: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/rur...
But it is an economically devastated state. Many families there, are in terrible shape.
I've heard similar about the tourist islands in the Caribbean. Paradise, with no money.
I learned on arrival that the city was not in fact color-graded and filled with beautiful slow motion video opportunities. Since then, every time I mention to any Pole that I've been to Bydgoszcz, the question is always "Why?"
All my memories of two fairly long trips around Poland are now ten years out of date, and I've heard only good things about its development since then.
My wife's grandma, now in her 90's, lives in a >100 year old farmhouse that's crumbling and only 1/3 of the home is even heated. Hell installing the electric heaters and indoor toilet involved a ton of arm-twisting. She's been insisting she'll die any day for the last decade and refuses to move or renovate. Meanwhile my wife's cousin lives in the same town (is a remote worker) and lives in a super-modern new home that's built to a much higher standard than the average new home in Canada. Old people are just stubborn...
Anyhow the point is that things only get renovated when the owner wants to renovate it, it has nothing to do with wealth. In the city, land is worth $$$ so inevitably it gets bought and improved. In small towns, meh...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Info...
But yeah, it’s just cause they’re cheap and subservient right.
Your point is these countries don’t? What point exactly are you trying to make.
And the point is, you should expect best results from China and US just by population alone. South Korea at 3rd place is a testament to their grueling education. But Poland and Romania (and Bulgaria) are something else. Those are not technologically advanced countries. They don't have particular stress on education.
Given how strong Poland used to be in mathematical logic, I can see an alternate history line where WWII does not happen and first computers are developed in Krakow and Lwow.
But computer programming with Polish keywords would indeed be a bit of a hell ;)
That's right. The Lwów-Warsaw School, the Warsaw Schools, the Kraków School, and so on were big during the interbellum. There was a good deal of activity in the space of mathematics, logic, and philosophy within that scope (art, theater, film, literature, etc. had their respective flowerings).
However, what I had in mind was that education has always been important, with formal education beginning in the Middle Ages with the first cathedral/collegiate schools. And because Poland became increasingly republican in nature, demanding skillful articulation, argument, and diplomacy as a matter of statecraft, Latin culture was of such a high standard that, during the Renaissance and early modern period, foreigners would comment that they felt as though they were visting ancient Rome given the high level of Latin proficiency. I should also mention that the world's first ministry of education was founded in Poland in the 18th century during the reign of Stanislaus II Augustus, creating, among other things, the first comprehensive, state-mandated natural science curricula.
During the subsequent partitions and foreign occupations when germanization and russification campaigns were inflicted on the populace and severe restrictions on the Polish language were put in place, clandestine home schooling, underground education networks, and "floating universities" allowed the culture to survive. So it has a deeply-ingrained and special importance across a range of concerns, from Scholastic libertas to senatorial virtus to cultural survival to so-called "positivist" industry.
> Given how strong Poland used to be in mathematical logic, I can see an alternate history line where WWII does not happen and first computers are developed in Krakow and Lwow.
Indeed. Further evidence of this is that even under the restrictive and crippling policies of the communist state and Soviet influence, you still had a surprising amount of innovation in this space.
> But computer programming with Polish keywords would indeed be a bit of a hell ;)
What would really be delicious is an inflected, synthetic programming language. ;)
This is an ahistorical view lacking nuance. Stanislaus found himself in an impossible situation. He was not the Russian pawn you uncharitably make him out to be. Rather, he often used his position to strengthen the Commonwealth in ways that were at odds with Russian interest. Recall that he inherited the throne of a state that was already on its last legs. Russia held a knife at the Commonwealth's throat. He was walking a very thin tightrope with Russia. His efforts, at the very least, contributed to giving Poles a greater cultural ability to survive the subsequent partition, giving it focus.
> nobody ever felt in Poland like in ancient Rome.
I suspect you (uncharitably) suppose I mean everyone in the streets was walking around speaking Latin. That's obviously not what I meant. I am referring specifically to the educated class - sons of the nobility, magnates, clergy, statesmen, diplomats, senators, scholars, the royal court, even country squires. The szlachta's Sarmatian culture saw itself as a spiritual successor to the Roman Republic, and it showed.
> The few scientific achievements from the interwar period are gone forever without heritage or even continuity [...etc, etc, blah, blah, blah...]
This is such a fantastically amusing few lines.
The szlachta's "culture" under leadership of a Russian tool led directly to three partitions which quickly ended their sophisticated "culture".
I suspect good public education is a symptom, not the cause.
The cause likely is valuing a good education. Culture always wins. You can give people who don't value it a good education and they'll barely benefit.
1. Lack of oligarchy - which in fact was not obvious outcome and little bit of luck on our part and little bit of cultural zeitgeist of 90ties and 00ths. 2. No east-west dithering - PL knew right away to which economic and cultural sphere wanted to belong
I wonder how much the Catholic vs. Orthodox background affected things there
I don't think it's a matter of propaganda. We're talking about totalitarian dictatorships on both sides of the barricades, where such communication with relatives on the other side have very real risks of decades in prison or even death.
Signed, Dutchman.
Our greenhouses, factories, trades works, all favorite destinations amongst Polish (season) workers.
The same has been happening in Slovakia; GDP growth per annum very comparable to Poland since 1995.
As a typical example my very German car has many components with "made in <Poland/Slovakia/Hungary>" on the side.
Strange, that if you are from Norway or Switzerland, you cannot be a migrant anywhere, instead you are always a welcome citizen born afar who did not know it yet.
Racisms and other -isms seem to be a problem, let's hope it gets better, not worse, in Poland and on earth.
There is a while set of jobs in Pharma that got moved to Warsaw and no longer available in NL/DE.
But Poland did well capturing them and then growing new businesses locally, so now there's local brands and such that are expanding abroad on their own.
Poland is an underrated European destination (and I assume most Eastern European former USSR-aligned countries are too). If you haven't been you should definitely visit. I've been to both Paris and Warsaw recently and tbh I prefer Warsaw over Paris. Warsaw is clean (little graffiti, little trash on streets), safe, no homeless, etc and is a relatively high-trust society (another comment in this thread also mentioned that). Police actually enforce laws. The worst I saw was a drunk man on the street (although not violent or anything), and within minutes 4 police officers came to him. Few tourists. Everyone knows English.
Paris: I won't go into the negatives here (like the Africans/gypsies trying to scam you, sell you useless stuff, etc), it was nice overall, a little dirty, but I actually liked Warsaw better.
I've been building software here for almost 20 years. Started a software house, grew it to ~50 people, sold it, now back to bootstrapping from scratch. The fact that this is a normal sentence to type from a Polish city is, honestly, kind of the whole story.
That "institutional framework" line in the article is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having run companies through Polish bureaucracy — it's fine. It works. A generation ago that bar was on the floor. Boring is a feature.
Politics aside, the 35-year arc has been quietly extraordinary. European to the bone, with old roots and a real appetite for what's next.
Contrary to immigration wave from Ukraine (war refugees), immigrants from Belarus were mostly political refugees. They we mostly composed of politically and economically active people (as non-active people had no reason to emigrate). So even with less total number, immigrants from Belarus have higher contribution to Polish GDP per immigrant capita.
A lot of people either forget, or never learned, that Poland was once one of the largest and most influential states in Europe.Yes it was long time ago, but the potential was always there. The real challenge was surviving the consequences of being caught between neighbors whose ideologies gave rise to two of the deadliest systems of the 20th century.
Then it seems our politicians stopped being pragmatic and started bringing up ideological issues more often, which divided the population, while IMO not doing nearly enough to promote further development of the economy.
So now we have a population split on ideological issues, while Poland and Croatia are overtaking us economy-wise. We have had every advantage (geographically at the crossroads of multiple trade routes, sea access, EU funds, hard-working population, didn't turn into a Russia-style oligarchy...) but mostly slept on it.
The EU is based on greedy West European corporations maximizing shareholder value at the expense of their own populations.
The EU is too big and should be reduced to the Western core countries. I wonder how Poland would fare then.
Also I am of not very popular anymore opinions that not distorted trade help both sides of the trade and immigrants really help economy of country that they immigrate into. Including workers.
However had, it also is still a net EU subsidized country:
https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
In fact, Poland gets the most money. So, before we can evaluate the net worth, this number would have to be deducted, which would instantly make Poland drop more than 5 ranks in that chart if you look at it. Just compare the numbers for yourself, the calculation is trivial to do.
Here is total GDP per country:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
(You have to compare the same year of course; my calculation above is for the year 2024. Poland is now ranked higher than in 2024, but the net subsidies still are given in. Those "Poland is now rich" never take that into account.)
after Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK
As a founder, it's a different story though - London is hard to beat from an entrepreneurship and capital access standpoint aside from parts of the CEE with strong ties to to American VC due to diaspora ties.
Edit: can't reply
> dzonga
Completely agree. I've O-1'ed plenty of European and British founders. But London is better than the rest of Europe from a raising perspective, which shows how bad the situation is in the rest of the continent.
[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...
[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy
[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania
Founder visas are generally suffering from a chicken-and-egg problem, where only a successful company can sponsor anyone
It's easier to raise rounds with better terms in London versus mainland Europe, aside from CEE where diaspora VCs in the US tend to step in to build the ecosystem.
But even then the entire ecosystem pales in comparison to the US.
Sorry, but this is wrong. Cheaper labor is pretty much the only reason for nearshoring from more expensive European countries to places like Spain or Eastern Europe.
A German SWE wants a 9-5. A Czech or Romanian SWE wants to build the next JetBrains or UIPath.
I don't want to hire the former - they're useless and a headache. I want to hire the latter.
It might help to discuss actual ranges instead of "intimate experience" so we can tell if your experience matches reality.
Edit: But as mentioned, the near-shoring resources also were quite substantially less expensive. So you could say we bought cheap and we got cheap.
Edit: can't reply
> Having 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate
At the employer end, if we offer enough FDI Western European governments do try to match support and subsidies that we could get in CEE.
Additionally, when investing in USD and used to American prices, it's a rounding error.
The drive to the CEE was partially government driven, but is now entirely due to the domestic ecosystem - you aren't going to find talent with the right attitude (business minded and independent) in Western Europe anymore.
having had my run around with London VCs - poor terms, slow moving (btw this is at seed stage) - it's better to bootstrap unless you're in deep tech (which London VCs can help out)
bootstrap and either deal with US VCs once you have numbers to back you up - if you wanna redo & do the VC route.
My last team had two Poles and two Scandinavians (Swedish and Norwegian).
It's been a _very_ long time since I've had a team that didn't have significant Eastern Europeans representation on it.
> [1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy
> [2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania
Both Italy and Romania are at the lower end of salaries though.
Compare to say
Finland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/finland (almost twice)
Denmark https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/denmark (more than twice)
Germany https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/germany (around twice)
Switzerland https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/switzer... (more than three times, although this is an outlier)
I'd travelled to Warsaw a few times maybe 20 or so years ago, and you could feel the vibrancy and energy in the air.
The comedian Omid Djalili (a Brit of Iranian descent) had a number of "Polish plumber" skits:
British tradespeople in my experience are duplicitous, lazy, unmotivated, low quality, cocky and expensive.
By the looks of it, Conservative party will never recover from this betrayal and soon followed by Labour who decided to maintain the status quo.
I think the bigger factor is that Polish immigration has effectively ended. We're seeing more Poles returning from abroad than leaving. With the prosperity and stability of Poland, coupled by living in your home culture, immigration is simply not that attractive.
(Traditionally, much of Polish immigration was meant to be temporary. A good number of Poles stayed abroad and assimilated, because immigration tends to be "sticky".)
After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably.
This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
The UK used to be “the dream” when i was a teenager, now it’s the empty shell of what it used to be.
The one thing that is a insurmontable barrier to go and live there (I considered that) is the healthcare sstem. It is completely broken.
You have free healthcare where people behave like beggars in front of the demi-god MD. They do not pay him for hs work, officially, but there is money slipped under he table to make things work. It is unbereable.
Then you have provate health care whichis not not bad, until you have a serious problem and you are back to the public system.
Finally the medicines/drugs are not refunded. You have to pay for them. This is wild for someone coming from France.
I think that if Poland upgraded that part of its politics it would be a country bringing in lots and lots of people useful for the country.
Corruption like this is almost non-existent anymore. Was very much the case 10 years ago and earlier. Docs make serious money now, they don't need to risk it with bribery.
> Finally the medicines/drugs are not refunded. You have to pay for them. This is wild for someone coming from France.
Sorry, WHAT? This was never the case, where are you getting this from?
Go to a hospital where you need to be operated. Look at the queues to see the ordynator and how people behave and talk among each other how much to give.
have you been to a hospital recently? I have, I visited the parents of a freind and actually witnessed this, not from a theoretical parespective but in real life. Ask around.
>> Finally the medicines/drugs are not refunded. You have to pay for them. This is wild for someone coming from France.
> Sorry, WHAT? This was never the case, where are you getting this from?
Do you actually live in Poland?? OK, let's try this. When you are sick and you get a recept for medicaments, do you pay for them, or are they free? You have to pay. Do you get a reimbursement? Maybe 50% if you hit the right drug.
You have to buy diapers for adults for a person who is handicapped. Are they free? No they are not. You pay for them, a part is subsudised. To 80% of a limit set (not the actual price) except if you apply fro special extra stiff such a PFRON.
You have MS. Do you have access to modern medicamentation by default? No you don't - after 40 yo you get into a less efficient track.
Please do your homework before discussing. There are people who actually know this becaise they were actually direcly involved.
As a constrast, and something which is a baseline for civilized medicine -- my wife has MS and it costs us a few EUR per month (you pay 1 € per visit to the doctor and about 0.5 € per pack of medicine, up to 50 € per year total). This includes all the doctor visits, tomography, rehabilitation, ... I would say that my whole family pays 20 € a year total for everything medical.
Like I said, I have a particular fondness for Poland which is a marvellous country. This does not mean that one should not point out the things that should change.
Again, that's bullshit: https://www.gov.pl/web/zdrowie/od-czego-zalezy-cena-leku-ref...
There's over 2800 free drugs right now. Over 3800 for seniors.
> Please do your homework before discussing.
The fucking irony of this.
EOT here. I am not gonna exercise your anecdotal stereotypes. For the record, I did hear about bribes even recently. It's still a very uncommon thing.
I am genuinely curious how much time over the last year you spent in a hospital in Poland, in hours. I travelled to Poland several times to help my friends there and spent weeks out of my time off, so if you fucking have no idea -- please do not bring it to the table, ok?
At some point there is some decency you need to have when you "have heard about things", as oppoed to have actually lived though it.
I will leave you with this - if you can read in Polish: https://direct.money.pl/artykuly/porady/smutna-rzeczywistosc...
Have a nice day.
Of course being sandwiched between two extremely powerful regional hegemons did not serve Poland well. It's wonderful that it is now able to pick up the pieces. The poles no more than anyone the terrible realities that we must continue to be willing to fight for
Would they probably be doing better or worse if those people had stayed in power? Was that a significant factor in this?
It’s hard to believe those type of people actually wanted to replace it with non European immigration, though (which is what happened). Of course cause and effect is a complex concept to wrap ones head around..
The right to vote on fundamental societal issues should come with some sort of mental means testing. I'm only half-kidding. I think.
Not for any particular dislike, I wish that the actual brits actually take back the power from the scum government and fix it, just a sight of relief that their mess could be whole EU mess if Brexit didn't happen
I don't think quantum computing currently is able to help in the AI industry, I don't think this is having any impact.
WIG20 is essentially 5 banks, 3 energy providers, clothing, small shops + Allegro + CD Projekt Red. I don't think any of this has major world impact.
They have all the fundamental human-capital strengths of economies like Germany. It's really no surprise they're doing so well.
Sensible smart people working hard will get a lot done over time.
For what it's worth Poland is the only place I've ever visited where felt I could easily see myself living there. It doesn't surprise me that a lot of Poles are moving back.
A significant percentage of the polish population participated in what is labled today economic migration.
They went Germany, Ireland, UK experienced an influx of migrants taking up all the low pay jobs.
But that was before the Russian bots took over the news on the internet and Russia-sponsored extreme right parties entered the parliaments. So the political effect from the migrants was roughly equivalent to their impact on pop
While many in US say "liberal economics" means not interfering with businesses with regulations or anti-trust.
I suppose people have different definitions of "classical liberal", "neo-liberal", etc.
I think they're doing everything right and for their people
Have yet to visit. but even by just 2018 or 2019 I only would have jokes and a confused face if someone was telling me they had chosen a job or life in Warsaw as opposed to a bustling city in a Western European country. Now, I think I get it. Modern and cosmopolitan veneer, safety, opportunity, educated population, nationalist pride that isn't delusional, a sensical immigration policy being enforced before enforcing it becomes a human rights problem. I like it.
- Access to the EU market
- Cheap labour
- 250 billion in EU subsidies
PS. Ever since the full scale war started I finally learned Cyrillic, and I must say - there is something nice about this alphabet (if you speak a Slavic language, of course). Sadly we don't have an official Cyrillic version of Polish, though, my compatriots would have their brains explode if someone promoted one.
But yes, transliterated Russian doesn’t look quite right- rather cumbersome- and I assume the same would hold true for a Polish Cyrillic.
What the US and most other western countries do are: Let infrastructure rot, defund education, reroute money to large corporations. This is how you end up with failed state.
I’ve never seen it, I travel a lot.
Instituations haven't been renewed, education hasn't been brought up to reflect the latest reality of life and digitalization of state workflows? Hah, no.
But if a fraudulent bank requires saving? Sure, 500 billions or more can be paid upfront. Multiple times if necessary.
(Yes, exceptions for Iceland, Ireland, Cyprus, and a few others)
Start with education spending per capita.
If you think spending per capita is a measure of quality, I’ve got a great health insure scam to sell you!
Inflation-adjusted funding per student rose from $14,969 to $20,322 over the past two decades.
K-12 funding rose $1,610 per student in real terms between 2020 and 2023 alone.
"Schools in the United States spend an average of $20,387 per pupil, which is the 3rd highest amount per pupil (after adjusting to local currency values) among the 40 other developed nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)."
Because it suits their prejudice.
People have already addressed this falsehood.
As I hinted at in another comment, more money for education doesn't help if the culture doesn't value it. And largely, US culture does not value a good education.[2] Or more precisely, not possessing what many other countries consider "basic skills" is quite acceptable here.
Case in point: I've spent time in a poor country with terrible education. Over there, if you were slow doing arithmetic on paper (multiplication, division, etc), everyone considered you to be an idiot. Because of that, even mediocre students who merely graduated high school and didn't go to college have those skills.
Over here, you have Verizon Math.[1] After that crazy episode, I've seen this problem. And it's not just that interchanging dollars and cents is a custom, a lot of people genuinely don't understand the issue. I've been to yard sales where things are advertised as 0.25 cents, and asked them about it. I was expecting a response like "Yeah, yeah, it's sloppy but everyone knows what it means." Instead I got genuine confusion.
Verizon Math isn't an isolated quirk. If you come from any of these countries to the US, much of the US population will appear to be idiots to you (rightly or wrongly).
In one of my jobs, we had a bunch of Russian and other East European coworkers. They were appalled by all of this and started working on after-school tutoring activities for their kids. Because they came from a culture that viewed a lack of certain skills as "being idiots", they were really concerned that their kids would grow up to become idiots like the rest of the Americans.
My point isn't that one should know basic arithmetic. There are plenty of legitimate arguments to say it's OK not to.
What my point is that there is no baseline knowledge level in the US where being below it is socially problematic. Because of that, there is no peer pressure to retain the knowledge they learn in school. It's OK not to know how many days are in a year.
I used to tutor 3-5th grade students, and after I realized this, I gave up. The kids didn't need help understanding the material. They already did. They just didn't see a need to retain it. If their friends don't value the knowledge, and their parents don't value the knowledge, there's little I can do to help them.
[1] https://verizonmath.blogspot.com/
[2] The good education is there for the few who value it. But the rest of the population doesn't benefit from it.
I really enjoyed Warsaw in December, the air seemed fine to me.
It feels like despite overwhelming evidence presented in the own article that communism was bad, they felt they had to say something vaguely nice about communism. But they can’t even keep it going for more than a sentence, because the next sentence says actually education was better after communism.
- it was kind of inevitable once Poland stopped being oppressed by its neighbors. The USSR, Nazi Germany, the German Empire / Prussia, Austria, Imperial Russia, etc. have basically been dividing the country since the 1780s. Without these restrictions, Poland is a natural leader in its region purely on population alone.
- A general lack of ideological “mind viruses” that seem to plague the western world. Most Poles are pretty straightforward, common sense people. They might have opinions you don’t agree with but it’s not a country of extremists in any direction.
- the general openness to American culture and (over)work ethics. I think Poland probably looks more to America than it does any EU country, although this of course isn’t simple, especially lately. But in general it’s a pretty hardworking, business-open culture. My impression is that it’s much easier to operate a business here than say, Germany, Italy, or France.
- Something I need to read more about, but IIRC Poland dealt with its oligarch problems in a different way than Russia or Ukraine did post-USSR and so doesn’t really have this issue.
I want "kultura zapierdolu" t-shirt now.
I want to stray from the politics too much, but we definitely self-sabotage in canada. It's kind of an immature teenage angst to self-loathe to the point of punishing yourself all the time.
The mind virus actually makes you love the host.
Yeah when Poland banned abortion and declared a number of "LGBT free zones" a lot of Poles I know came here to Czech Republic
Uhh, the Law and Justice party was packing the Polish Constitutional Court, filling the government with party loyalists, and placing restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly only a few years ago. I suppose veering close to a constitutional crisis isn’t ideological per se, but that framing doesn’t seem quite right
I wouldn’t describe PiS and its supporters as a dynamic cultural movement in the way MAGA is.
> packing the Polish Constitutional Court
This didn’t start with PiS. PO, just before losing power, tried to elect five Tribunal judges at once, including two seats that weren’t theirs yet. The Tribunal later said: three OK, two not OK.
PiS then did the PiS thing: ignored the three valid ones too, and installed its own people. So yes, PiS behaved badly. But "PiS packed the court" skips the opening move.
American-ish version: lame-duck Senate tries to pre-fill future SCOTUS seats. Incoming side responds by throwing the furniture around.
> filling the government with party loyalists
For normal political jobs, what’s the issue? That’s politics. Republicans appoint Republicans. Democrats appoint Democrats.
> placing restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly
What are you referring to exactly?
You're presumably coming from a US point of view (the US has an unusual system where the entire top level of the civil service, pretty much, are always political appointees), but in Europe this often _would_ be seen as a sign of corruption (and honestly it should be in the US too; it has gotten way worse there since Trump I; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...).
No. Not at all inevitable. Poland might have descended into kleptocracy, e.g. Hungary. That this did not happen is worthy of investigation. I'm not holding my breath however; the findings would probably not be welcome.
"A general lack of ideological 'mind viruses' that seem to plague the western world"
Indeed. Poland frequently disappoints the rest of the EU with its stubborn indifference to obligatory Western moral panics.
Oh boy, are you wrong on that...
I definitely blame my difficulties with respiratory illnesses on living there as a kid...
I'm sure many of those tokens are gone by now. While the Poles I've worked with are on average very capable and driven, there is also the bigger picture: That they have a national ambition.
Can only guess, but it seems they know that Poland must outperform its biggest two neighbours (DE & RUS) in order to retain their freedom. Given the current state of these neighbours this fear may seem to be blown out of propotions, but history is the better guide here.
Given that ambition I would guess the population is less devided on economic and trade issues, specifically with regards to Europe/International. The need to join the Euro is certainly less present there and in hindsight might be another part of Poland's success.
Poland tries to be a serious nation at least. Which can't be said about Germany and its self-inflicted demise on almost every measruable front, ie the woke mind virus.
Fun fact: German IT magazine Heise in light of the sluggish German job market recently published an article about moving abroad for jobs, ie. to Poland https://www.heise.de/ratgeber/Auswandern-nach-Polen-Was-ITle...
I bet a lot of people here criticizing that EU funding went to Poland are typically Right Leaning, and think they are making a some killer point about socialism, when back home they are also taking in the hand out money.
If you have a lot of farmland in a red state and the profits are reported in a blue state, then counting the reported profits on the corporate balance sheet will give a distorted picture of what is happening.
Look at e.g. General Mills, based in a blue state, but a great deal of what they buy are ag inputs from red states.
But wouldn't the farm, selling to the big corp, realize the profits in their own state? Or are you saying the farms are owned by General Mills?
I was under the impression that most of the farms are owned separately and sell to General Mills.
Are the businesses from who they buy ag inputs in the red states not compensated at market rates for the raw materials they provide?
Do the red states also not receive massive taxpayer funded farm subsidies for the corn and wheat they grow from the federal government?
Minnesota's GDP is higher because it has a larger population and a more diverse and greater value-added economy than it's its ag focused neighbors.
It's GDP per capita is actually lower than its very sparsely populated neighbor, North Dakota, but the economic power of a jurisdiction ultimately comes from its population*productivity.
For example, for the US to have a chance in the EU, it would first need to fix its YOLO fiscal policy of sustained 5.5% debt/gdp deficits.
We shall see in a few years as US's debt balloons and the average American becomes pseudo-slaves from a few overlords... to see if the EU is really bad as some Americans believe it to be.
Fun story: the city of Nowy Sącz (80,000 habitants) has a very high percentage of millionaires compared to other cities. One of the reasons was that as the city is in a mountainous region hence not well communicated, the communist authorities were less strict there and allowed for private businesses to grow. As the communism ended, the region basically had a head-start compared to the rest of the country.
My mother (early 50s) still remembers clay houses that had two rooms, one for the people, one for the cows and the chickens. She never lived in one, but her grandmother did and she would visit for summer.
She would help her parents stand in line in the evening, waiting for a shipment of pasta or coffee to arrive in their local grocery store in the morning.
My father (similar age) didn't have an in-house bathroom until he got married.
Both of them had black-and-white TVs, where they'd see wonders like microwaves, answering machines or game consoles. Those were things that rich Americans had in movies, not things normal people had in their homes.
If you were well--off enough to go on vacation, you'd probably go to a seaside town, or maybe a village in the mountains. Certainly not abroad. A passport was an extravagance, not easy to get from the communist government.
People who lived in big cities, as opposed to much smaller villages, which were and still are a big thing in Poland, were a bit better off, but not by much.
In the 90s, My parents' village got wired up for telephone. Around that same time, Vietnamese NES clones (here called Pegasus) started popping up on the market. They may have been 15 years behind what the Americans had, but they were available at a price that almost any family could afford.
Shortly after I was born, they got a computer. At that time, computers were still expensive, not something every single family had, but definitely not something unusual for a working / middle class family to purchase. Satellite digital TV soon followed, and then came ADSL internet; because of no flat-rate calls, dial-up never really took off here.
As kids and young teenagers, we looked on iPods and iPhones with envy, those were for the rich, but knock-off mp3 players and cheap Nokia phones were things that many kids had.
Our train company, PKP, was famous for delayed trains and poor service. We used to expand the abbreviation as "Just wait, it'll arrive eventually."
None of this is true any more. Go to any Polish city now, and it's no different from any other European country, maybe except for being a good bit safer. You will see people with iPhones; we're still majority Android, but now that's mostly choice and habit rather than financial necessity. You will see people order food on Uber Eats using their gigabit fiber internet, and then Uber back from a night out. They may not even need to do that; both men and women feel pretty safe on the streets here, even at night. You will see kids playing their favorite games, on their PS5. You will see college students, working on weekends and after classes to make some money, take their boyfriends and girlfriends on trips to Greece, Italy or Spain. By airplane, of course.
That train company? In theory, the reputation is still there, but in practice, the statistics say what they say, we've far surpassed Deutsche Bahn in terms of punctuality.
You have no clue what you are talking about. I wonder why this sort of obnoxious reasoning always comes from Poles and never from Czech people for example.
Yes they do.
> And they are still benefiting from slave labor
Not sure whether that really matters now-a-days for the economy.
> stolen precious metals
One of the cores of industrial and mine centers that made the German Empire thrive during the Belle Epoque, are now owned by Poland.
> Not to mention the Marshall Plan.
Half of Germany, didn't got to get it but where instead paying reparations for whole Germany. Sorry, I'm a bit tired of acting like Germany only got the history of being on the west side of the iron curtain. It got both treatments.
Well glass that has half of water is still better that glass fully empty. Poland didn't get any war reparations and after being more destroyed during the war than germany (warsaw burned to the ground) and pretty much occupied for many decades after the war then how polish companies supposed to compete with any western economy including germany?
Shocking.
Well done, UK. You really shat the bed and, by the look of it, still are. Diarrhea, possibly.
In that sense, the Poles have been seduced by consumerism.
It also used to be that having a large family was a source of honor. Today, it makes people uncomfortable. They may even take a condescending view of those with many children. People have formed a strange association between having many children and poverty.
What you find is that the highest fertility in the developed consumerist world tends toward the poor and the rich. It's the middle class that has the fewest children. This makes sense through the lens of consumerism: the consumption of the rich is not constrained by having more children, while the poor can't consume all that much anyway, so having more children doesn't really change their buying power meaningfully where conspicuous consumption is concerned. It is the middle class (especially the upper middle class) that is anxiously keeping up with the Joneses and engaged in aggressive and petty consumerist competition. They have just enough to consume conspicuously, but not enough that they don't need to prioritize their spending. Consumerism simply prioritizes conspicuous consumption to the detriment of fecundity.
Standard and expectation also increased and even thought I grew up with 2 siblings in 2 bedroom apartment in Poland today nobody would want that - or good luck finding a partner that want that. You would expect to have house or at least 3-4 bedroom apartment to raise 3 kids.
Today also probably you need 2 cars instead of 1 family car because your partner also have to work. You probably also need extra money for babysitter or kinder garden because again your partner is working and probably less likely your parents nearby to help since most young people had to move to big cities to get a job.
Inquire into the causes. For example, why do people say they can't afford more children? Materially, we're the wealthiest we've ever been in human history. We are in the best possible position in human history to afford more children. The problem is that we have different priorities. Consumerism shifts our valuations.
Consider also the parabolic distribution of fertility. Who is having the most children and the least in developed consumerist countries? The poor and the rich are having the most. The rich, because within the consumerist calculus, the cost of raising children are minuscule as a fraction of their total wealth, even given their high material standards. The poor, because they can't compete in the consumerist game anyway (social programs that enable the poor to have more children, and perhaps a greater average religiosity, are also contributing factors; the latter shifts valuation).
The people having the fewest number of children are the middle class, because the middle class has just enough money to gain access to the fruits consumerism offers, but not enough to accommodate both the consumerist indulgence of them and large families.
This is where "keeping up with the Joneses" is most prevalent. This is where you find the most careerism; the poor don't have careers, and the rich don't need them. The middle class - perhaps especially the upper middle class - is in the fierce competition for marginal and petty gains of status over their middle class peers, and in a consumerist society, that is tied to spending on things other than what enables a family to have more children (costs whose growth, by the way, is logarithmic, not linear). The upper middle class is also perhaps best equipped to craft elaborate rationalizations for their lack of fecundity.
So you have to look at things systematically and in a systemic way.
Yes, consumerism probably influences expectations and lifestyles. But many of the things I mentioned are not just superficial manifestations of consumerism - they are structural economic and social changes.
When people say they "cannot afford" more children, they usually do not mean literal starvation or inability to keep a child alive. They mean they cannot afford the living standard that modern society effectively requires or expects for a family with multiple children.
I mentioned, in Poland when I was growing up, it was normal for 3 kids to share a small apartment and for grandparents to help raise children. Today, many young adults had to move to larger cities for education and work, far away from their families. That removes a major support system.
Now both parents usually need to work, which creates additional costs: larger housing near jobs, childcare, kindergarten, transportation, often even a second car. These are not just luxury consumerist indulgences but practical requirements of modern urban life.
> Materially, we're the wealthiest we've ever been in human history.
But wealth being higher on average does not mean family formation became easier for the middle class. Housing costs in major cities relative to income are a huge factor, especially for people who are not poor enough to qualify for assistance and not rich enough to comfortably absorb the costs.