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Comment by penchant | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the hype around nominal GDP at all – looks great, but tells you little to none about the actual living conditions. Living in Poland, I don't feel richer than an average Belgian person (and I've had contact with many of them across the years).

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Polish living standard in major metro areas are significantly above Belgian standards. I lived in Poland and Belgium, among a few other places, and I'd choose Poland over Belgium for a number of reasons. Its a great country, good infra, excellent engineers, high education standards, you can talk to anyone in English, the government usually does work, and if you want an appointment with a specialist doctor, it takes a few days tops (on a private insurance, which is cheap by most countries' standards).

Did your change of choice happenned right when the GDP of Poland went above the GDP Belgium ?

>Polish living standard in major metro areas are significantly above Belgian standards.

I presume there is no Polish equivalent to Midi train station and its "corridor of evil". <https://newsinfrance.com/in-belgium-the-brussels-midi-statio...>

Been to Poland a few times and it's pretty decent, everything as you say and unlike their immediate western neighbour their trains work too. It's a pretty nice place.

Now if only they didn't have a language that's made up mostly of WiFi passwords...

If you're in the bottom 70% of the working class anywhere in western Europe you'll live pretty much the same way: you will never be able to afford a new car, you'll never be able to retire early, you most likely will never own your own place. Nobody feels rich because the entire system is built by parasites exploiting the bottom 2/3rd. The only meaningful difference is how often and how far you can go in vacation and how much a good little consumer bitch you can be, and if that's how you measure your quality of life you already lost the game

You are not European, are you? I know plenty of working class people working ordinary skilled labor jobs who own their homes and drive decent cars. Some people choose to keep renting because we have strong laws guaranteeing renter's rights. Contracts are often unlimited duration with reasonable prices.

Also retiring early is not about the money in your bank account around here. You retire early by using certain government schemes where you might qualify for early retirement by working a physical job, or by reducing your hours to 10 hours are week while getting a full subsidized salary.

Nobody buys new though, these are for companies and posh people

That's shifting a bit with electric cars I feel, because people are worried about used batteries. But yes, generally new cars are often just a bad deal.

I'm a software engineer in the capital of the supposed #1 EU economy and at best I'd be able to afford a 50sqm flat in a ghetto tier neighborhood. I'm actually moving to Eastern Europe because of this bs

Germany?

I happen to know a few software Engineers living there.

Berlin is pretty expensive, and some had to live in more outskirt areas (Potsdam for example). But none were living in gettho tier neighborhoods.

Poland isn't any better in that matter; we're still facing huge property development and housing "abnormalities", or as is being said here - pathologies.

87% of Poles own a house in comparison to 67% in US.

you got a source for that?

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/home-owne...

Also my bad, it's 65.7% for US and 87.3% for Poland

A website does not a source make.

It's citing a wikipedia article, which itself has been flagged for needing a better source [0]. The wikipedia in turn cites Statista [1], which claims this is "original data" that cannot be verified without a paid account.

Additionally, the number itself seems to actually be taken from Eurostat (an actual source) [2], which helpfully defines what they mean as the 87% for Poland. Surprise, surprise, it's not actually "87% of Poles own a house". It's "87% of Poles live in households owning or renting their home". That's also conveniently missing from another headline-grabbing numbers like "16% share of housing costs to total disposable income", which refers to the total income of the entire household.

And if you want to delve deeper as for why these numbers might be what they are, you have to consider the following too:

Poland has Europe's 2nd highest share (>50%) of adults living with in their parents' home [3], with 3rd lowest average number of rooms per person [2], 2nd highest household size (number of people) [2], with one third of people living in overcrowded homes (3rd highest in Europe, vs the EU average of 16%)[2].

All this being said, I don't doubt for a second that US is much worse in this regard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owner-occupancy#International_...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/246355/home-ownership-ra...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/interactive-publications/h...

[3] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ilc_lvps09/de...

All this effort to disprove OP's figures and source, without providing your supposedly accurate figures. What's the point?

what? i literally include the (actually sourced) eurostat figures in the comment. they just don't measure what OP was saying they do.

do you want me to run my own study of personal home ownership or something? lol

due to large percentage of younger people not being able to afford to move away from their parents

This is about country's total GDP. Per capita graph in TFA shows Poland is still behind Belgium [1].

[1] https://images.euronews.com/articles/stories/09/86/71/11/108...

Doesn't matter which kind of GDP you use - it won't tell you how wealthy a country or its people are.

That's because GDP measures how much you did in one year, and wealth is accumulated over centuries.

Using GDP to measure wealth is like using speedometer to measure distance. You can be the fastest on the road at the moment, but if you just started driving and people drove faster than you for 100 years it doesn't mean much.

You need to integrate it over time.

It tells you little about living conditions but it tells you a lot about importance of a country as a whole. GDP per capita of China might be far from US but due to its size it still makes China very important actor.

Look at household income adjusted for PPP, that gives a more accurate global ranking in that respect (20s-30s). I expect this has improved as well.

It doesn't matter for quality of life but it matters politically. Larger GDP in nominal terms = more influence in the world.

Its absolutely meaningless. Wealth cannot be measured. But nails and hammer blabla

Can you share more? What makes you feel less rich in comparison?

This may also be affected my the conditions I've grown up with (lower middle class, borderline poverty at times) but I find myself to be much frugal by default when compared to my friends from Western Europe. For example: I barely every get coffee from a coffee shop because in Poland the prices are ridiculous (≈$4.5/€3.7 for a flat white cup is standard). If I'm desperate for coffee when out (and didn't bring my own) I look for the nearest vending machine or, at worst, a Żabka (a 7-Eleven equivalent). The people I know from Belgium but also Germany or France just go to a Starbucks or Costa without hesitation. Just little habits like this are what makes me feel the difference in both mentality and income. PS Sorry for the late response.

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