Poland is now among the 20 largest economies
apnews.com683 points by surprisetalk 6 hours ago
683 points by surprisetalk 6 hours ago
I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap.
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"
FDI is a legit way of increasing an economy's size and health. The fact that Poland created a safe country for foreign investments is great merit.
It's the first step to building the top companies: You first need enough agglomeration of that labor so that, whenever there's a recession, you can scoop up some of that labor for a startup.
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.
Yeah I think this what most miss. FDI is good, great if eventually lead to domestic brand to capture more % of value, like Asian Tigers. I'm not sure if the case in EU, some GDP accounting can grossly conflate actual FDI contribution, i.e. when PRC captured $6 labour for each iphone assembled but it was counting full device cost $100s towards GDP instead of just value add. Same concept as Ireland GDP & corporate tax laundering.
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.
My understanding is that Poland is also seeking smart win-win arrangements with some of these foreign sources. For example, Poland has initiated several big equipment buys from South Korean military suppliers on the condition that most of the manufacturing is done in Poland and that there is technical sharing for future self-sustainment.
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.
foreign dollars and euros being spent in the country definitely counts as growth no matter how you slice it and regardless whether you like it or not.
Foreign investment isn't fake growth and money being spent in the country is definitely a good thing. It's how Singapore managed to kickstart its economy in the 1960s. Lee Kuan Yew tried very hard, and succeeded, in getting foreign corporations to set up shop in Singapore. The key is to capture value and move up the chain over time rather than getting stuck as a "cheaper back office".
Yep, and today the situation is completely reversed. Through acquisition and business development Singapore is the country which owns the brands and invests in other countries. Poland just needs to stick to the formula. It's citizens are building global-class professional, managerial, and business development experience. Soon if not already those employees will start itching to build their own businesses. Poland just needs to maintain a competitive environment, and not let international companies suppress local startups by lobbying for anti-competitive laws and policies that favor the big guys, foreign or domestic. If it wants to give local companies a leg up, do it indirectly by investing in education and research.
It is local resources extracted, not foreign spent.
This is zero sum thinking. The foreign companies benefit and the local Polish people benefit. Wealth is created in the process and everyone benefits. What if those companies never came and never employed Polish people? Would Poland be any better off?
Those foreign companies still have to pay Polish taxes,and Polish wages. All that money gets spent into the local economy.
if spotify employs an american and they become more experienced over their tenure were american resources extracted? human capital tends to get better with experience, particularly when dealing with high quality foreign management.
> Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. > There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies.
Same issue in all southern and eastern European countries.
saying foreign investment is a bad or invalid growth strategy is wild
are you one of those anti-trade people where the only real ""growth"" doesn't involve foreigners
It's one thing to say they don't want immigrants taking their jobs. But its a whole other thing to discount foreign investment, giving your people jobs, under your rules...
I don't think that's a good way to think about the modern economy. Large companies aren't American, German or Polish just because they're founded in one place. The surplus value that a country like Poland adds or that all the producers in the supply chain of Apple or Tesla add are real and contribute to their national economies.
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.
Providing educated labor is a kind of build.
Yes and we see what happens to countries after doing this, they start developing their own domestic industries and economies. It's not a bad strategy to organically build a robust economy either.
Let’s be honest. If anyone would be building a brand new company in Poland or any other country with the intention of raising capital or IPOing they would still incorporate in the US or a handful of other countries. So any successful Polish company would count as American/ German / Singaporean / etc anyway.
I don't see that it matters where the capital is raised.
CD Projekt is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. Is that an American/German/Singaporean/etc company?
Allegro is Polish, large and successful, no?
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.
What kind of dev salaries are you seeing in Poland?
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.
Joining the EU meant giving up some measure of sovereignty, so they're living under a regulatory regime that's probably more extensive than it would be if Poland were independent.
Also, people like to complain.
> and they ALWAYS complain about EU and the economy
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.
this is Poland for you. everyone complains about everything. perhaps that's the secret to success - there's always something to complain about and one in a hundred (or thousand) people actually does something about it.
> this is Poland for you. everyone complains about everything
Must be the proximity to Germany...
>I have family in Poland, they are from smaller villages and they ALWAYS complain about EU and the economy
Ah, the Polish MAGA.
Probably Russian-influenced as well.
I don’t live in Poland, but this is like comparing a thriving metro area to Silicon Valley. Just because the metro isn’t coming up with the latest ideas doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own economy - it’s just different. From my outsider perspective this is very much a positive step for Poland and should be celebrated.
Reading the article it attributed institutional strength to poland, which is great, but it sounds like this was something the west decided not to sabotage. The oligarchs taking over in e.g. Russia was engineered by the clinton administration and Larry Summers as "shock therapy" when the soviet government fell.
> Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap.
Yes, for the benefit of their stock markets and at the expense of their own populations.
A rising tide lifts all luxury yachts.
The story is longer: Poland was the first country to make a remarkable peaceful transition from a bankrupt, failed Soviet satellite state. The shock therapy, plus NATO and EU aspirations, paved the way.
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
>> Poland was the first country to make a remarkable peaceful transition from a bankrupt, failed Soviet satellite state.
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.
Poland's first partly free election was on 4 June 1989, preceded by the roundtable negotiations.
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.
I'm curious what this means in real terms from the perspective of a Pole.
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.
> GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times.
"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.
As a Polish millenial the perspective is a rollercoaster. In one way the transformation of absolutely everything over and over and over is mind blowing in a positive way. OTOH we're also all paranoid running on what feels like a never ending hamster wheel of inflation, raises and mortgages. And then Gen-Z's feel straight get up locked out of everything.
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.
The protests in Czechoslovakia came earlier, in 1968! The Soviets rolled in the tanks in response.
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.
In chronological sense.
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.
The OP shows the per capita GDP growth of the former Soviet bloc states since 1990. Poland is #1 at 252%, Romania #2 at 148%; Czechia is last at 72%.
Ukraine didn't have Russian troops occupying anything but the leased Crimean bases before the war started (and I do count the start of the war as being immediately after Euromaidan)... Yet in 2013, it was the second poorest country in Europe. (Ahead of Moldova, which has been occupied for decades, but significantly behind Belarus and Bulgaria)
Notably, only five years have passed between last Russian solders leaving Poland and the country joining NATO. Quite a speedrun.
And it was about the only period when Russia was so week it did not meddle internationally. Putin ascended to power in 1999.
Why wouldn't the story be that they succeeded despite the shock therapy? Honestly asking, I am not an expert on Polish economy, but I heard bad things.
Maybe all of those hardworking people could have done even better with a different macro strategy?
> The story is longer: Poland was the first country to make a remarkable peaceful transition from a bankrupt, failed Soviet satellite state. The shock therapy, plus NATO and EU aspirations, paved the way.
The story is told in much more detail in the OP. What do you feel is missing from it?
Years ago I bought some really nice brushless motors and was surprised to see they were made in Poland. I had no idea they were manufacturers of things like that.
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.
I have to admit, I feel the same envy about industry and economic growth. But there also seem to be many explanations of why Canada continually fails to attract large cap business other than resource extraction. The cost of living / skilled worker wages / tax structure / high levels of regulation means that if you have large cap, you could just build your factory somewhere else and make more money. We've got golden handcuffs in many ways. Still, that 'envy' or ambition is what keeps me coming back to HN, I think it is still possible to start something successful and innovative in this country.
There's also a massive and constant brain drain down south
Absolutely. For a lot of my career I worked from west coast Canada for US companies in California. After a few years of earning $80k CAD and working as hard as anyone I'd meet at conferences in the USA, I realized I was being an idiot. It was transformative. I only know a couple people personally in software here who work for Canadian companies apart from where I work.
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.
As A Finn I’d like to see Canada figure out that “oh shit we could be a world superpower with all the smarts and natural resources we have” and start trading culture and goods with Nordic countries. We would rule!
Most of the AI scientists powering the current AI revolution (or apocalypse) are Canadian.
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.
Some anecdata: in the area I'm from in the northeastern US which has a large number of manufacturing/tool & die companies of all sizes, and with a large Polish diaspora, 80% of the most skilled machinists are Polish (or 2nd or 3rd gen descendants), at least that was the case when I was working with these business between 20-30 years ago. Many of the best engineers at these business are Polish as well.
Would you happen to know any of the motor companies by name? I’m often trying to find quality motors and it’s surprisingly difficult.
This was the best one I dealt with https://www.mabrobotics.pl/ma-actuators
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.
Rockwell Automation has a facility in Katowice, Silesia which was/is a major centre of coal mining and locomotive manufacturing since the 1800s when it was part of Prussia, and continuing through the Polish Republic, WW2 era and beyond.
The industrial heritage is strong.
I interviewed there in 2012. Great people and culture, but salary was shite. Kinda regret, though, from all companies I interviewed, they suit my area of interest and experience the most.
I bought furniture, and i was surprised it came from poland actually. The website was something like a polish ikea.
Btw great furniture, it’s still in my living room many years after, pretty much still pristine.
> We should be able to do this.
That would require work. Canadians just want to buy real estate, watch it go up 10x, then sell and retire in Mexico.
You're describing something that some Canadians did (and very few still do), but this is not reflective of the vast majority of us. For most Canadians, especially as our economy declines, our extremely expensive homes are more like death sentences for our financial futures. We're not going to profit off of these things—ever—unless decades-long trends rapidly begin to reverse rather than accelerate.
Not arguing for this one way or another, but as countries become more economically developed, they invariably move off of manufacturing and more into services because it's a higher value part of the economic food chain (wish I could find the research article with all the data - I remember reading it as part of a post arguing that Trump's attempts to "bring back manufacturing jobs to the US" was doomed to fail)
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.
> So, the reason you can buy motors and robotics components from Poland and not Canada is because Poland has lower costs
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.
> they invariably move off of manufacturing and more into services because it's a higher value part of the economic food chain
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 think there's an even more salient issue. Manufacturing is the backbone of any economy. When you outsource it, you end up creating a dependency on a nation that is ostensibly less developed. I say ostensibly because what does "less developed" even mean when the other country can not only do fine without you, but now also has the power to destroy your economy if they wanted to?
> they invariably move off of manufacturing and more into services because it's a higher value part of the economic food chain
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...
I love the polish, but credit where credit is due:
„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?
Think of it as an investment. The rest of the EU also benefits from their hard work, and economic prosperity. Other countries in the EU have also enjoyed economic growth and support over the years.
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 rest of the EU also benefits from their hard work
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.
Do you have any sources for the claim that a large part of growth is off-shoring?
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?...
The reason for the growth over different time frames can differ. Anecdotal, but most of the IT people I know from Poland worked for, as they call it, "big corpo" and generally it's offshoring either directly with companies such as DXC/Luxoft or n-ix, or through local offices (Akamai for example). If you look at the average salary in Poland (in general), and the average tech salary + the number of tech workers there, it's easy to say a large part of the GDP is tech.
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.
There are other countries in the world or even in the EU where salaries are lower than in Poland. Why don't they see the similar growth? I guess this is more nuanced than just lowered salaries can explain it. Surely, that's part of the equation but to develop highly innovative economy, one needs to start with something. That's how China started, how Korea started etc.
What is the average salary, the average tech worker salary, and the number of tech and other workers in Poland?
I’m so confused. At least in tech all the big companies I work with are hiring in Poland because it is about the same as India after losses around fake hiring and the quality averages better.
It is absolutely a huge offshoring target at least for the US.
Everywhere is an offshoring target for US tech. Tons of US tech companies have Canadian offices because Canadian rates are far below US rates.
Large part is due to offshoring, but not the IT. Offshoring the manufacturing.
Also some companies are moving their offices from Poland to India now.
China was the offshore haven and built their own domestic economy off the expertise while still maintaining very low income taxes and 15% corporate tax for tech companies.
You dont have money, you complain. You (as in your country) get the money, yet you still complain.
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.
>Think of it as an investment.
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.
They didn't do a 180 at all. Tusk basically shares Orban's entire platform, particularly vis-à-vis the EU. Orban just got caught in corruption scandals.
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They did a 180 on their relationship with the EU, which was the context GP was discussing. Maybe not 180 but definitely over 90, let's say, unlocking billions in funds. Funny that you picked the one major issue that didn't see a big adjustment, and completely out of context.
I think the comment was still correct. Very little will change in Hungary with the new government. I think it’s only a matter of time for them to pick a fight with the EU on some different matter given how the EU’s values (considering most of Western Europe) are still far from theirs.
>Very little will change in Hungary with the new government.
Things aren't going to improve magically in the next few years but the backsliding has stopped, improving things takes real effort and focus. At the end of Orban's regime Hungary is now officially the poorest country in the EU, even behind Bulgaria and Romania which is why so many Hungarians are upset with Orban.
I expect their economy to slowly tick upward over the next few years. Magyar has also stated his ambitions to join the Euro which is the opposite of Orban who wanted Hungary to leave the EU.
I wonder if that's part of why the US is a superpower: the richer states being forced to invest in the poorer ones.
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.)
> Think of it as an investment. The rest of the EU also benefits from their hard work, and economic prosperity. Other countries in the EU have also enjoyed economic growth and support over the years.
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.
Thankfully most people have learned from the absolute shambles of Brexit and either of these countries leaving is extremely unlikely.
Have they? https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1428pev1n0t
Be careful about reading too much into that. Our elections yesterday were for local and sometimes regional representatives - not our central national government. The result might still prompt a change in our unpopular Prime Minister but the high vote for Reform won't necessarily translate into voting for them at the next general election. We often see protest votes for alternative parties in local politics and everyone was expecting one this time.
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.
There is pretty common trend of people complaining about X being bad coz EU but most of the time it turns into one of
* 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
> Outright lie about the problem and the scope of it.
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.
There's the classic "bendy banana law" which British tabloids pushed a lot to paint the EU as an inefficient bureaucracy.
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.
Thinking about that risk increases said risk.
Also, for Germany, and I assume, other EU countries, cohesion and economic strength of the EU is the most important value that exists.
Yes, this is an important aspect of the EU, and other countries like Spain and Ireland benefited in the same way.
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.
Not to mention a stronger economy means stronger defense against the Russian threat.
I’m not very familiar with deep EU politics. But I’ve heard a lot of complaints from colleagues in countries like Germany and the Netherlands about feeling like their taxes mainly help countries like Poland.
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.
This is how it works. Ireland was a net beneficiary until 2018, and now it is a net contributor (one of only 10 net contributors). These are decades long investments, Poland joined in 2004. Per capita Poland is not the "greatest" beneficiary but I don't think that will help win any arguments for those already resistant to facts or reasoning. https://www.euronews.com/business/2024/12/09/eu-budget-who-p...
> Think of it as an investment. The rest of the EU also benefits from their hard work, and economic prosperity. Other countries in the EU have also enjoyed economic growth and support over the years.
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.
The argument that red states receive handouts is essentially a myth. Almost the entirety of the "handout" is social security/medicare based on where retirees live (notably the sunbelt), where military bases are located (rural areas of less populous states), and where most Federal land management offices and employees are located (the mountain west). Ironically, it counts Federal employment as "welfare" with more steps.
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".
They show their true colors when blue states need FEMA funding for natural disasters and they balk at any one else getting federal aid.
A cursory search indicates an even split of red/blue states put in more than they get, but that 7 of the top 10 receivers of federal aid are red states. But ultimately my point doesn’t hinge on the ratio: everyone should support solid investments in all states.
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.
People need something to resent or hold in disregard. Government and taxes are a good target. The problem only really begin when someone actually tries to reduce or eliminate that target. It's the old "be careful what you ask for, you might just get it".
>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.
If they were to ask where you think this "federal investment" funding came from, what would you reply?
It’s a fair point, but there is a significant difference between investment in infrastructure and education versus just supporting states that are intentionally degrading their infrastructure and education.
Upwards spiral versus downwards. Money pours in for both cases, but only one is really an investment.
Much of it would come from borrowing, which would be paid back using tax revenues in later years from the regions developed using that investment. Just like most investments.
Equating investments in California with the welfare state that is Louisiana is a take
The West Coast of the United States, California, Washington, and Oregon. will just move on like the rest of the world is moving on away from the United States. Turning your back on infrastructure useful infrastructure medicine education, science, schools is not a winning hand long-term.
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.
> California and other areas were not developed on their own, they required years of sustained federal investment and interest in the area.
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.
World War II significantly contributed to the development of the West Coast of the United States mid century. San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle harbors became crucial to the war effort in the pacific, leading to industrial expansion and the establishment of the UC system and the junior colleges in California, which eventually led to Silicon Valley, also the large water projects built 50-60 years earlier and the the transcontinental railroads built 50 years prior also didn’t hurt the expansion and growth of the West Coast of the United States either.
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.
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You've some wrong assumption. One is that you are wrong about Poland / Greece wages. In 2026 Polish worker actually earns more than a Greece worker for the same role. Something like 25% more in Poland
Also Polands power grid is quite old and hasn't kept pace with demand. The grid operator last year had to reject thousands of requests for new connections
> So yeah ... best of luck if you're a car factory worker in France or Germany.
If it makes you feel any better the Polish car factory worker will probably lose their job to a Chinese car factory worker.
> best of luck if you're a car factory worker in France or Germany
You mean the ones who fought tooth and nail for comfy jobs within unions with barely no way to fire anyone? And now are wondering where the jobs and the money went?
Tesla workers rejected IG Metall as the union of choice for their factory because all they want to know is send faxes and keep companies wrapped around in red tape like a mummy
Actually most of the jobs went back to Germany, just ask US car workers. Where the company headquarters are mattered more than those unions. I guess that's why Trump is angry. German management are just not respecting the almighty god of capitalism.
(of course the US has been sabotaging all car sales with the only potential exception of Tesla and Trump has not changed)
That’s the thing, Poland got wealthier because it became an extension of German industry, with some IT stuff thrown in. Czechia would have also been in the world’s top 20 had they had a larger population, as they’re even more dependent on said German industry.
Well, yeah. I get that being the stupid backwater of a huge capitalist union is still better than communism. However, it's not working out so well for (now mostly ex-)factory workers in Germany.
Entire cities are emptying because of this. Leaving the old behind, of course.
> However, it's not working out so well for (now mostly ex-)factory workers in Germany.
I fully agree with this, the whole EU enlargement/post-Cold War thing is insanely complicated from a societal pov, there's no silver bullet, for ever positive you can instantly find a negative just as big etc etc, that's why I find this obsession with EU funds quite besides the point, i.e. because the reality on the ground was, still is, in fact, a lot more complicated.
For example in our (Romania's) case EU accession came with even a larger increase in PPP value compared to Poland, but that also came with a huge, huge depopulation problem (neighbouring Bulgaria suffers from the same thing), which cannot be put into PPP numbers. Like I said, positives and negatives.
So many false claims in one post. Impressive levels of delusion.
Don't know about the other points, but 2 is spot on. Germany now has the most expensive electricity in the EU[1].
[1] https://www.globalelectricity.org/electricity-prices-by-coun...
> Germany leads Europe—and the world among major economies—with residential electricity prices reaching €0.3835 per kWh (approximately $0.41/kWh) in the first half of 2025, according to Eurostat data. This represents a 34% premium above the EU average of €0.2872/kWh.
Since you're citing prices from early 2025: In the second half of 2025, electricity prices for household consumers in the EU (expressed in purchasing power standards (PPS) per 100 kWh) were highest in:
Romania (49.52 PPS per 100 kWh) Czechia (38.65) Poland (37.15)
Lowest in:
Malta (14.09) Hungary (15.10) Finland (18.77)
Residential electricity prices in Poland are 145.01% of the world average electricity price and 98.14% of the average price in Europe.
https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/Poland/electricity_prices...
The biggest problem is that prices are still tied to the price of gas:
https://ieefa.org/resources/europes-electricity-prices-are-s...
The question is not whether it is an investment or whether it is not.
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.)
Economic zones are NOT zero sum.
I agree, but people are very weary of these things because of the (correct) belief that their appropriation is guided by unaccountable bureaucrats. It stands in need of justification that Europeans feel they never got to hear
> but people are very weary of these things because of the (correct) belief that their appropriation is guided by unaccountable bureaucrats.
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
And the EU wants to insulate itself from Russia with friendly, ideologically-compatible countries. Can't put a price tag on safety
That also works the other way around: Eastern European countries wanted to join the EU (ok, more importantly NATO, but also the EU) to make sure they never ever again slid into Russia's "sphere of influence". Notwithstanding certain populist EU-skeptic right wing parties that don't seem to mind that anymore (some would say because they are financed by Russia), that's generally still true...
I agree, but subsidies aren't free as well. Simply making the overall cake bigger doesn't necessarily pay out for everyone - some have to foot the bill.
Why not? If the increase in cake size is bigger than the subsidies then it can be a net win, even for the people paying the subsidies.
It also ignores the fact that absent the EU, countries would still have a lot of subsidies.
Because the total increase of the cake can mostly be transferred to those that receive the subsidies. It's not that hard to understand: if you redistribute 10% of total wealth from the top quartile to the bottom quartile for 1% in additional total growth, then even if that additional growth went completely to the top quartile, it would be a net -9% of total wealth for them. I don't say that's a bad thing per se. But it doesn't help to willfully ignore that fact.
OTOH, the more developed EU countries want the less developed countries to be reasonably well-off, so they can keep buying stuff from them. E.g. 56% of Germany's exports went to other EU countries in 2025. And, while Trump and Xi Jin Ping are around, that's only going to become more important...
"56% of Germany's exports went to other EU countries in 2025" - because those products are no longer competitive in the open market.
Yeah, they're so uncompetitive that Trump had to introduce tariffs to keep them out. China is a different topic, but I wouldn't generally call German products uncompetitive...
Trump introduced tarrifs because of insane economic and political illiteracy and for no other reason.
The Holocaust was a decision taken by one of the two pillars of the EU, Germany, so countries nowadays being rich or poor has nothing to do with past “good” decisions of those countries populaces. And before anyone commenting that the Holocaust and the German economy are two orthogonal subjects, just look at the corporate history of German industry giants VW and Bayer.
> The richer areas made good decisions; now this is being negated by bureaucrats in Brussels
Imperialism and stealing from Jews were also among those "good" decisions. Yes I know it's not all bad, but neither is it all good. It's very reductionist to describe the imbalance like this.
"I'm old enough to remember internal borders with passport checks in Europe"
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).
Not the same extent like it was before… Now most of the times is just slowed down traffic (quick glance who's in car and move on), and more than that I was maybe stopped two times for quick chit-chat (where/why I'm heading). And I crossed, multiple times, borders of DK (they had checks since 2018?), DE, A, IT, CH, CZ…
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.
If you miss the old days, try the bus from Vilnius to Minsk. It’s a full on border control just like in the times of the Soviet Union. Only 35 km away from an European Union capital city.
"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).
Flixbus are a primary target for those inspections...
Is this something new within the last year? I just travelled on Flixbus across Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland and received no checks.
Is it only certain countries?
> 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...
Your current state is how Canada used to be from the US. Early 2000s we just showed drivers licenses. Went camping, up to Nelson. Then it got less friendly (US side) then passports required. To the point we stopped going. It sucks when politicians make our world smaller as in 'we have access to less' instead of smaller as in 'it's a small world after all'.
Not just Canada but all of North America. I used to go into Mexico with my friends as a teenager to find trouble. No passport or adult supervision required.
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.
Try going to Switzerland by car (from France for example), and you'll see what an actual border check is.
Pretty different from having a chance to be stopped by a random check while crossing.
Hm, I went there multiple times from different directions, including france last year and at most had to show ID, but was usually waived on. It really depends I guess.
I was just in Europe this February. I took a bus from France to Germany and customs checked the passports of everyone on board.
Yes, this is how European social welfare works. And it is fantastic! Because the entirety of the EU is benefitting from it. Polish people have larger spending power, interesting and safe places to visit, etc.
This is not a "present" given to Poland. This is ensuring a better life for all Europeans.
In the 1980s, EU money was flowing to Spain, Portugal and Greece. And people complained about that too.
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.
That is incorrect for Portugal. We didn't took part on the WWII and came out with a rich country that kept growing on double-digits. Eventually it was attacked simultaneouly by the US/Russia proxies for 10 years until 1974.
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.
>Today they're the most dynamic economies in the EU in many respects
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.
Spain is currently the fastest growing state in Europe, is the largest source new job creation in Europe, and is currently benefiting from its large scale investments in renewables and grid infrastructure sheltering it from the worst of the Iran war.
> 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.
The EU is very turning major capital cities into complete shitholes. My city of youth, Brussels, is now a 3rd world hellhole where religious extremism (and not a christian one) reigns undisputed king and where drug-dealing cartels are running the show.
I fled that city.
> It's a small miracle that the liberal democratic economic order won so quickly and decisively.
We'll see how well the economic order "won" once there won't be enough money to pay for pensions and once islamists are going to take political power. 25% of Brussels is now bearded men and veiled women (and that number was near to 0% when I was a kid: so in my lifetime my native city turn from 0% to 25% muslims): if you think this shall lead to anything else than the "economic order" we're seeing in islamic country, you're a fool.
France is currently importing about 500 000 people per year, mostly from muslim countries, and it's estimated only 10% of these people are ever going to find work.
I find the EU's stance totally myopic and they're destroying the western culture with totally uncontrolled immigration, while handing the keys to the kingdom to religious extremists.
You mention WWII and fascists and communists: we got rid of those. But only to replace those with islamist extremism, which have already taken several cities, like Brussels.
So, no, the war against deadly ideologies ain't done yet and it's way too early to claim victory.
It's also quite thick to claim amazing "dynamic economies" when in USD the EU hasn't seen any grow since the 2008 financial crisis, at the same time where both the US and China skyrocketed. The EU is barely countering inflation and it's doing that at the cost of massive public debt increase.
I don't have the same reading of you at all as to what's happening in the EU.
I see the EU falling into both irrelevancy and islamism (btw islamism is already a major talking point of the next french elections, where two candidates are critizicing the "entrisme islamique" for the subject becomes very hard to ignore).
No growth since 2008 (in USD and inflation adjusted). Hardly any company in the Top 100.
A failure of a continent.
I’m not interested in debating the anti-Islam diatribe. If your lived experience is that “bearded men and veiled women” have destroyed the halcyon paradise of your childhood, then that’s fundamentally a nostalgia-based emotional argument.
But I’ll clarify that I wrote that Spain, Portugal and Greece specifically have become dynamic economies in the context of the EU. Spain has grown at a consistent 3% for a decade. Of course the far-right argues that it’s the wrong kind of growth because it’s fueled by immigration (backwards-looking political movements prefer zero growth and a shrinking population if it means less people of the color they don’t like).
The bearded men have increased the crime rates in Spain, France, UK, Germany, Sweden etc. This is crystal clear if you look up statistics. Just in the last week there was a Aloha Snack Bar stabbing in Barcelona. Poland has low crime rates specifically because they have strict border controls.
You are free to personally visit Brussels to see what a shit hole it is.
I think this is the hidden reason why the American alt-right/far-right/MAGA/techbro types hate the EU with so much apoplectic rage. For all its problems, big-picture-like it actually works to gradually coalesce a huge rich continent with a bigger population than the US into something increasingly more coherent, and if it continues to work it will mean that the Western world now has two heavyweight leaders, not one. For people who tend to view the world as a giant zero-sum dominance competition, this is of course a big threat. One more big player = one more competitor.
(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).
> (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).
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.
Europe is the birthplace of democracy, socialism, feminism and secularism.
Ofcourse Christ conservatives hate it.
And remember Christianity come from the middle east.
Jesus would have foreseen the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz before launching a war of choice on the Persians.
Good thing we are a Democratic Republic :)
All non-monarchies in Europe are republics too. It’s by far the most common type of democracy. It’s unclear to me why some Americans insist on making a distinction that doesn’t exist.
Don’t make shit up about people you don’t understand.
>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).
So your measure for success is how people get to put a piece of paper in a box every four years whilst their issues get ignored.
What... are you really belittling democracy
That’s not what I said. I said there are more important things to increase the wellbeing of the citizens of a country than democracy. In other words, a country can use democracy as a tool to destroy itself.
Maybe. But I don't think you will find any of those things without strong democracy.
Counterpoint: China from Deng and onwards is an autocracy with rapidly improving material conditions
So you’re taking from others who earned it and give it someone that didn’t? Got it.
As noted in the other comment Poland is not even getting that much money per capita, it’s just a fairly large country.
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.
That's like the entire point of the EU yes, most people agree it's better than what we used to have, considering how it went in 1914 and 1939 for example
This is what capitalists literally do with workers. It's not like capitalists are creating anything valuable, they're just leeches extracting wealth.
I rather have workers get the money than more corporate welfare.
> It's not like capitalists are creating anything valuable,
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.
No capitalists just provide money, something other entities can as well. Often better too.
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?
> There is also no risks for capitalists
So you argue no capitalists ever lost money? It happens all the time, the risk is real.
> I love the polish, but credit where credit is due
> 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.
Based on my limited experience, Polish are incredibly workaholic and work-focused people. It's really no surprise they elevate themselves economically.
They're also the 3rd smallest net recipient of EU funds per capita:
You mean 13? You have to count the net contributors as well or its very misleading...
WTF is up with Luxembourg on that graph?
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??!
Lots of people who work in Luxembourg don't live there so anything "per capita" is a bit misleading.
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.
These are reasons why it might not be the largest provider of funds per capita, not why it would be by orders of magnitude the biggest recipient.
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.
If it gets funds for restoring one railway bridge or something of that sort the fact the population is tiny makes the per capita investment look huge, just usual tiny country effects.
A bunch of foreign companies also incorporate their EU subsidiaries there (presumably due to some tax benefit). I imagine that distorts their GDP quite badly as well.
I presume this is because of the EU institutions there and that expenditure to maintain those institutions counts towards receipts (and this effect is then exaggerated due to Luxembourg's small population). Certainly no one in the EU is under any illusion that Luxembourg is poor, much less vastly poorer than the next poorest EU country.
Exactly. Which proves that people who keep saying that Poland's growth is only due to EU's money should finally stop.
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).
The largest EU benefit is that it makes democratic and rule of law backsliding unlikely. So if you invest money in Poland you can be reasonably sure that it won't get stolen from you. Hungary was a demonstration that this works over the long term.
In the EU, money gets stolen from you in a more subtle way. For example, the COVID situation, with unlimited money-printing was a tax on the people who had savings, and supporting a specific subset of the economy, or, delaying the tax in the essence.
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.
> The largest EU benefit is that it makes democratic and rule of law backsliding unlikely.
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.
Yet you can see crowds of young anti-woke Germans on X claiming that Poland's been growing only because of their (i.e. the Germans') money.
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.
> 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.
> Yet you can see crowds of young anti-woke Germans on X
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.
I wonder how many of those accounts are sock puppets like we have in American social media.
If you look at election outcomes you can see there are a lot of real ones, no need for sock puppets.
> Yet you can see crowds of ...
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.
Yes - main benefit of EU is regulatory stabilization and open market. Ironically also this was working also before joining EU (most of the adjustment happening as requirement to join EU and implemented before joining).
A lot of it also was behind a requirement to basically "fix your shit".
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.
Much of the stabilization was due to the strong domestic market. Recall that Poland was the only country to avoid the 2008/2009 recession. It is tight global integration that causes recessions to spread.
Brazil also famously avoided the 2008-09 recession to a great extent, to name one example.
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.
Indeed. The self-congratulatory narrative around "EU funds" is obnoxious and ignorant. As you say, Poland's economic growth was similar before it had joined the EU. (Many economists then thought Poland's accession in 2004 was premature and should have been postponed.) Causes were cultural (there is a strong, traditional entrepreneurial streak in Polish culture) and related to the economic reforms undertaken during the transition from the centrally-planned economy of the socialist period. People need to remember that Poles did not choose the communist regime after the War. It was thuggishly and violently imposed onto Poland by the occupying Soviets. Poles merely endured a provisional acceptance of the regime, because they had no choice.
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.
Can't agree more. Given its geography and population, one would expect Poland to be a major economy, but it's been occupied or even completely erased from existence for large stretches of industrial modernity. The period since 1989 is the longest stretch of true sovereignty that Poland has had since the 18th century.
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.
Not really, the old smaller European Community should be restored and Poland can become the 51st US state for buffer purposes.
Times were much better.
>Also worth noting: Poland didn't receive a dime of reparations after the War.
Poland received virtually all of the lands that were considered Prussia though.
If you peer into the (un-tendentious) history of much of those lands, you might take a slightly different view of them and their role and importance in Polish history, culture, language, and statehood, beyond just the 20th century... But perhaps more to the point, Poland lost nearly half of its prewar territory, east of the Curzon line. Poland is territorially smaller today than it was before WWII.
Indeed it received Pomerania and the industrial center Silesia. Russia got East Prussia.
Probably worth more than the EUR 1 trillion fantasy figure that Polish right wingers demand.
It also "received" several million of its own people killed, including the highly educated Jewish community. While we are crunching numbers, let us not forget that loss of human capital matters in economy as well.
You greatly overestimate its significance. The benefits are roughly 1% of the GDP. In 2023 Poland netted 8.2 bn€ [1]. The GDP was 751 bn€.
[1] https://www.pap.pl/en/news/poland-largest-recipient-eu-funds...
You are naming a year outside those he named, it might influence significantly the result.
1% of the GDP is a considerable amount of money. The GDP is not a country's profit, not even its revenue. If we stick to 2023, Poland had a budget deficit of 5% of the GDP, which makes 1% a very welcome gift.
The EU is working as intended then.
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.
I don't understand the number of people here who repeat the official EU elites line.
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.
> 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?
Since you seem to be implying causality here, I would assume that the other major beneficiaries have enjoyed a similar period of growth?
> „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.
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.
Finland has been an EU net contributor since 2001. Now it has among the highest unemployment rates in the EU and is going through austerity, while Poland is visibly building and converging. I understand the logic of cohesion funds, but from Finland it increasingly feels like: we cut, Poland builds.
If there was a correlation you would see the same trend in Slovakia, Hungary and such
Well, you do see the same trend in gdp per capita in Slovakia. The problem is that Poland has 30m more people.
https://georank.org/assets/img/charts/economy/poland/slovaki...
Per capita Slovakia and Hungary are getting way more than Poland so its the other way around if anything (of course the Baltics are a good counterpoint)
Slovakia growth wasn't doing too bad, for Hungary we know the reason why it's the poorest EU country, Orban stole everything.
Conservative estimates put the embezzled amount around 60,000,000,000 Euros. The upcoming government says it’s at least the double of this.
Which you do, except they're a lot smaller than Poland.
The article on AP literally has a graph showing outsized growth of Poland compared to these countries (measured in GDP per capita).
"GDP measured in constant 2021 international dollars, adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP) to account for differences in the cost of goods and services across countries"
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...
that is a graph of growth, but they started from different baselines, e.g. Hungary was famously known as "the happiest barrack in the communist camp".
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...
Not surprised to see "German" quotation marks in this petty complaint...
Polish people have such a fear of Germans, thinking Germans are constantly scheming to screw Poland over. Whereas most Germans barely know Poland even exists.
As someone who has lived in both countries its such a hilarious anxiety.
Indeed hilarious considering my grandparent still remember being put into a german nazi concentration camp.
> 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.
It’s been barely two generations since the death camps. My grandma, who is still alive, can tell you stories of seeing trains take half her village away.
Intergenerational trauma is a real psychological phenomenon.
A „hilarious anxiety” is an incredibly naive world view.
Germans probably won't attack anyone anymore, that is true.
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.
There are many countries in the EU that get many more funds per person than Poland and have much worse outcomes.
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!
Perhaps I wouldn't use such harsh words, but it is a noticeable phenomenon when interacting with _some_ Western Europeans that if Poland's success comes up in a conversation, they immediately "offer insight" that it was in fact all outside help that made it possible. (There are also, in fact, some folks further east of Poland, who like to repeat that narrative as well, but it doesn't happen nearly as often as with Westerners.)
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.
> Some moron always show up with the "but it was all the EU subsides" 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).
I'm wondering how much of the net contribution comes from tech companies and how it compares to the loss of taxes due to Ireland acting as a tax haven for tech companies.
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.
idk who's racist but you didn't research this topic even 5 minutes on google apparently, you see the exact same trends everywhere, the GDP per capita rose pretty much in the same manner in Poland vs Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria for example.
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
Poland had a relatively clear idea of what they wanted to do once the Russians were out unlike some of the other countries in the eastern block, and it didn’t hurt that some of their neighbors to the north Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia also had pretty good idea of what they wanted to do once they were out from under the Russians, it’s just too bad that the Ukraine when they had the brief chance, they didn’t take advantage of it hopefully they’ll get a second chance.
And 90 cents of every euro returning to the Old EU. Not to mention tax avoidance schemes, western companies transfer their profits out.
> I ment: „Poland gets money, Poland transforms it into more money”.
It's not trivial that this works. In Hungary we messed this up big time, hopefully it can get fixed now.
The Baltics and the Balkan states probably get just as many handouts as Poland, and still show lesser rate of economic growth.
Definitely not the largest per capita though. There's a lot of people in Poland.
Since one of the major donors is Germany, I also like to consider this as reparations for WWII. I wish people in Poland would realize more how generous the EU has been to them.
Migrant donations with fake / fabricated Biedronka receipts and all! TYTY
But be fair: Poland had to rebuild after WWII and 40+ years of communism.
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...
Per capita tho it isn't the largest beneficiary. The funds were just well spent.
In 2023 they got a measly 10% (8.2Billion) of the GM and Chrysler bailout that will never be repaid ($85Billion)
The EU gets huge benefits for that investment, the CEO of GM gets a multi-milion dollar pay packet.
>credit where credit is due
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.
It’s a factor that’s not any more significant than the Marshall Plan was in your Wirtschaftswunder in the 1970s, which, oddly enough, a lot of Germans have no issue attributing to a domestic merit alone. Funny how that works!
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.
Britain received more from the Marshall plan and did a little worse. 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.
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.
> 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 arguing from the point of capital and the industry. West Germany was fine without an influx of educated Poles. The capital and the industry benefit, not the employees.
You are by the way underestimating the credit that the Marshall Plan gets in Germany. It is taught in schools and not commonly denied.
Countries don't mechanically convert inputs into development. There are many examples of countries with large capital inflows and/or strong capabilities that still fail to become strong economies. Corruption is one of the major frictions that prevents those resources from translating into broad economic success.
This is such a bad take. I'm impressed how often this gets parroted online.
Next time, please check how many Poles left Poland for western EU since they joined.
Well, Germany had their own EU funds when they raided other countries. Today, noone bats an eye?
At least Poland does it legally.
It seems to be almost universally agreed across the former Soviet Bloc that Poland indeed used the EU funds more wisely than anyone else.
No one can deny EU funds have helped, but putting credits only there is pure misinformation. Take a look at what part of GDP are EU funds and what is the size per capita. Hard work and open market were actually the biggest contributors to the development of Poland.
> „Poland is the largest beneficiary of EU funds 2014-2020, with one in four euro going to Poland“
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 important to understand the difference between handouts and investments with an expected ROI.
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.
Honestly, it’s not why their economy has grown. That money is just wasted on government projects? Has it hurt? No, but it is a small amount when it comes to the entire Polish economy.
Cue the butthurt Germans, decimating their own bread and butter industries by ridiculous policies like diesel and nuclear bans, immigration straight into the welfare state, then complaining that others - who did not commit economic suicide - fare better. Note that Germany vastly profits from the EU as well, as it allows Germany to push e.g. their established supermarkets into Eastern Europe, undercutting any competition. This is never mentioned when talking about "largest beneficiaries of EU funds"
We have to distinguish between the German industry and corporations and the German people. The German people do not benefit from Aldi expanding into Poland.
Government investment works. That's why America's billionaires are mostly just people stealing as much of it as they can.
It's a first line buffer state against Putin.
Think of it as defense spending
Buffer implies it's void of meaningful content. An unfair word to describe an industrialized nation and member of the top 20 largest economies.
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> Polish economy grows despite EU membership, not because of it.
LOL. Seriously, LOL. You think GDP growth would be HIGHER if not for the access to the common market? What the hell are you talking about?
As a Pole, I see such statements as absolutely ridiculous, brain-dead.
Now compare that number to this number:
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.
Educated AND motivated workforce will do the trick.
All the polish I know that work in IT enjoy handwork as well. They are hard workers.
As a Polish IT worker I feel that we enjoy hardwork too much. I'm talking here about "kultura zapierdolu" [0] which is what we call the specific Polish version of culture of unhealthy work/life balance.
[0] https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kultur...
I always take minor issue with this.
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_.
They have a strong reputation as hard-working. After the liberation of Eastern Europe, Polish crews were all over Eastern Europe doing everything from restoring historic town centers to quickly and reliably putting a fresh coat of paint on apartments.
I guess it's anecdata. Polish engineers I've worked with weren't that good at technical stuff nor communication (in English). They're overprotective with "their" code and in general we've had more luck with western/southern Europeans.
I'm Polish, working for globally remote companies. I second the communication issue. Most Polish devs are so ashamed of their english(even if it's perfectly communicative) that it makes it hard to discuss technical ideas with them. As for technical knowledge, I guess that's cognitive bias, most Polish devs I met were far better at tech stuff than most f.e. Germans I worked with.
I'm from Poland, but I worked in multinational place in Europe and I would rank polish people on average in the middle of pack in terms of working ethic.
Behind Germans, or Scandinavians, but ahead of most Mediteraneans.
They also enjoy 15% tax, through some arrangement I’m still not convinced is legal for IT contractors…
But yeah, some of the most skilled and passionate engineers I’ve worked with have been from Poland and the surrounding countries like Czechia.
12% for software development, 8.5% for design/management. The caveat being, you can't deduct anything from tax, only VAT(under some assumptions). If you have actual expenses it's 12/32% progressive or 19% linear tax. Of course all of those are assuming you own a one man company and work B2B. Most devs here do. Otherwise regular contract of employment is progressive 12/32% tax, plus Healthcare and employer payments. Much less beneficial to both sides hence why it's not preferred by most.
This misses the obligatory health tax and pension fund contributions.
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).
15%? With some legal footwork you can get to 10 or 5%, depending if you count general medical I surance as a tax or not.
So called 'IP BOX', but it's very rare, as most people consider it risky and it requires a lot of paperwork. It's also frowned upon a lot.
Were they not educated and motivated before?
Poland was sort of occupied until 1989
Which, to be fair, laid the foundation for the well-educated part.
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-...
> The Soviets really valued STEM. They also quite valued emancipating women.
Try telling this to my mother, I'm sure she'll be excited to hear how emancipated she was.
With all that Chemistry talent, they could have built and dominated battery industry.
How come eastern germany does so poorly?
They don't if you mean STEM and emancipation, quite the opposite, actually (compared to West Germany).
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.
Without having firm data, I can see a few factors that are different. After the collapse of the GDR, it was easier for eastern Germans to move to west Germany than for Polish to move to a different country in the west. Mostly younger and educated people would have made that move, hampering future generations. With the Reunification also came the whole Treuhand issue which essentially sold off a good chunk of eastern Germany for pennies to western investors, because eastern investors had no capital. That meant the east lost out on the profits from its economy as they would accumulate in the west instead. Even today a large part of east German rentals are owned by western landlords or corporations. Then the industrial base of west Germany was setup far more for competing on the open world market with automotive companies in the NW (VW), SW (Daimler) and SE (BMW) plus the big industrial area Ruhrgebiet. So you naturally got an economic focus even after Reunification on the old BRD with the previous GDR requiring decades to hopefully catch up to the rest of the new country.
Quite a few educated East Germans have become West Germans as soon as they had the opportunity (or moved elsewhere in the world), but East Germany actually has a couple of high-tech 'hotspots' and good universities.
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 ;)
The headline figure of the article is purchase power (PPP) adjusted. I couldn't find any numbers for east German states where the purchase power adjustment happens per state. Since housing is the largest component and housing costs differ between east and west Germany using a nation wide PPP adjustment factor gives wrong results for individual states.
Incomes in the former GDR are comparable to those of Poland. They still lag behind West Germany, however (as does Poland).
I think mostly due to the bungled reunification that was basically an asset-stripping followed by enormous brain drain.
MBAs and company owners do not come from stem education.
Are you saying engineers and scientists don’t own companies? That’s an odd thing to say on a forum that’s basically dedicated to exactly that outcome.
Most educated and motivated Polish people were slaughtered by Germans and Russians in WW II then ones still alive working for or heavily oppressed by puppet soviet state.
One of the examples:
We were. And “hard workers” is code for “easily exploited.”
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.
Do you think the example of Poland is helping Ukraine resist and move towards the west?
I know that Ukraine takes Polish experiences into account and consults with Poles on what went well and what not during our post-communist transformation and later the EU membership. They are keen on not repeating our mistakes. There were many Ukrainians working in Poland long before the full scale work so naturally many Ukrainians were looking at Poland hoping that their country could eventually replicate polish success.
But I don't think our example has an effect on morale and spirit of resistance.
Honestly, a lot of issues was that we needed to build up the necessary infrastructure in the first place.
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)
Yes, but being occupied by Russia has not traditionally been a motor for growth
They weren’t occupied by Russia, but the USSR which was an authoritarian communist state. That entire economic system failed for a reason, and the Chinese were wise to pivot (and not try spreading its ideology by force).
Yeah, I really don't think this is why China doesn't try to spread its ideology by force. I don't think a passive authoritarian state exists, just ones that don't have the military power or background / weak enough targets to achieve this. The US very much keeps them in check from invading not "wisdom".
I get it, we are being gaslit and pyoped at a massive scale across all channels about China and their supposed intentions. But proof is in the pudding, China is cutting deals all over the world, building infrastructure - all without forced regime changes or ideological prerequisites nor bombs.
"cutting deals" lol this was just yesterday: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m2wjlkzplo
Going by your history, you clearly have a strong bias for China but adding spyware or putting countries into debt isn't virtuous.
Big parts of Poland have been occupied by a regime in Moscow for much longer than soviet empire existed, with roughly same outcomes.
Most than century after Poland gained independence age WW1, you can still see the economical differences from being occupied by Germans and Russians.
Oh let’s just ignore the times Poland/ Lithuanian empire occupied east Slavic lands and force converted a large number of Orthodox in the West to Catholicism. And the kingdom/regime before soviets was quite different than Soviets or modern Russian setup in terms of ideology.
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.
What has one to do with another?
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."
I’m not arguing that occupation was a good thing, clearly not. Anyways, look at modern Russia - they have many issues but now operate a mixed market oriented economy and have achieved #4 GDP by PPP and that’s under sanctions from hell, getting cut off from Swift and no German investment. There’s actually more in common with Russias rebound and Poland amazing growth vs the economic situation in much of the rest of the EU, they really could/should be trading partners but the EU won’t allow it.
Yes, that is cool. it doesn't change the fact how the Russians treated us for centuries, and not just during the Soviet Era and what were the outcomes compared to as some like say "EU or USA occupation". So we will thank you very much - not interested in it again, but honestly good luck to Russia being a peaceful prosperous country.
Also have you noticed how and why the trade stopped?
According to Russians they are the contineuation of USSR. heck they are celebrating victory day claiming they were the red army.
No, they don’t claim that - but they do see it as a continuous thing (Russian civilization and the genocidal threat they overcame). Also, it’s not just them who celebrate.
Also USSR was never an authoritarian communist state. They had elected leaders!
Unless Moscow is not part of russia you can't say they weren't occupied by russia.
Authoritarian has nothing to do with elections, it has everything to do with the ability of people without positions of power to influence those in power without retribution. Most countries have elections, these days, but there is no lack of authoritarian rulers staying in power for decades and jailing or murdering their opposition.
Motivation requires incentive. Probably hard to do when you're a communist bureaucrat offering an extra potato.
Yes, I agree. I believe cultural norms dictated their rate of expansion. Without so many people who enjoyed hard work they like would not have been able to expand their economy as much.
And high IQ.
It boggles the mind that people can look at a country whose average inhabitant meets the objective criteria for being developmentally challenged and wonder why it is an economic basket case.
Those IQ charts look very different depending on who is doing the sampling. One of the famous ones is from a self described "scientific racist".
I can't reply to the original comment but it's interesting how tunes change, because even into my youth a very different stereotype persisted: https://achewood.com/2007/02/08/title.html
My sibling comment understates the critique. There is no such thing as "average IQ". Countries don't IQ test representative samples of their population, so hucksters like Richard Lynn just make shit up and pull samples from mental institutions (where IQ tests are used, as they should be, as diagnostics).
This is a pretty simple and obvious observation. Have you ever been asked to take a proctored IQ test to help establish the "average IQ" of your own country? Presumably not. So why do people keep getting took by this silly idea that "average IQ per country" is a thing?
Why the focus on Lynn?
Focusing on his critics is more illuminating and damaging to your presumed position:
Systematic review by Wicherts et al: "In light of all the available IQ data of over 37,000 African testtakers, only the use of unsystematic methods to exclude the vast majority of data could result in a mean IQ close to 70. On the basis of sound methods, the average IQ remains close to 80."
They of course follow it with the conjecture: "Although this mean IQ is clearly lower than 100, we view it as unsurprising in light of the potential of the Flynn effect in Africa (Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan, 2010) and common psychometric problems associated with the use of western IQ tests among Africans."
It's always curious how "common psychometric problems associated with the use of western IQ tests among Africans" don't carry over to economics and other things. Wouldn't you expect them to have similar problems with other western "ideas"? Also interesting how Easterners adapted to western IQ tests so well they are better at them than the West.
Part of the point of the Wicherts papers was to refute the Lynn data, observing that even taken on its own premises Lynn's team pretty clearly excluded data unfavorable to the conclusion they wanted to draw. But look at Wicherts 2009, at the samples they're talking about. One of the largest was 800 students in Nigerian high schools (a test arranged by IQ researchers to for a cross-cultural comparison, back in 1981). Lynn's data includes, and is materially influenced by, a sample of 59 Senagalese children who were tested while recovering from malaria. The malaria thing is just funny, but it's the numbers that stick out to me.
I'm not getting further into the details here because the easiest-to-understand point here is that there are not in fact programs to generate reliable "average IQ" numbers in different countries. I am struck by the fact that message board nerds from America believe these programs exist, when almost none of us have ever taken an IQ test.
The purpose of IQ tests is to derive a value that would predict other values. The inverse is also true.
Given a multitude of such values it would even be possible to get back to a precise IQ value.
IQ tests are just factor analysis artifacts. You can dream up 100 questions that you conjecture may have something to do with intelligence and not even know the answers and have 10,000 people answer them. Product of the factor analysis of the answers will yield a normal distribution which you can then center on 100. Calibration can be more complicated than that but you get the point.
The natural circumstances people find themselves in are also just noisy questions.
This argument is basically a rejection of the science of IQ testing and I am here for it.
Possible conscripts are usually IQ tested in some way. If you have national consciption, then it would be a pretty good sample of the 18 year old male population.
Some armed forces administer general cognitive tests (like the US does with the ASVAB --- of course, not a random sample in the US, since we don't conscript) but most of these are not in fact IQ tests. Additionally, some western countries have done cross-sectional IQ tests for scientific reasons. In most countries, neither applies. Richard Lynn, responsible for the most widely known and cited "national IQ score" numbers, really did rely on mental health hospitals, and really did impute made-up scores to countries where he found literally no data at all.
What you do see are attempts to synthesize IQ from aggregate economic and educational attainment data. But obviously these are really just proxies for economic development, which then begs the question.
I'm from Poland, it sucks as usual. Our GDP comes from buying groceries.
7 years ago we got a Polish Hunting Spaniel, and did our first trip to Poland. Since then we've been back several times, and each time you really see the different - new and upgraded road, city buildings being renovated into new housing and commercial areas - also noticed the costs going up too.
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 EU funds argument works both ways. plenty of countries received similar transfers and didn't compound it the same way. the interesting question isn't where the money came from, it's what Poland did with it that others didn't.
Thank you. Many say our institutions are underdeveloped but I think it takes a certain maturity of the society to be able to execute projects successfully. It's not perfect, but I think we've come a long way.
Yep. Looking at Hungary.
Hungary and Poland charts look almost identical
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
I spent some time in Poland for work about 10 years ago. I remember the cities being very expensive and chic - on par with Paris, Berlin, etc but when you got out of the cities (my project was in Bydgoszcz) it's a completely different world - poor, rundown, etc. would be curious how it is now and also where most of the Ukrainian refugees settled.
Most Ukrainians (and Belarusians) settled in major cities, starting with Warsaw. In 2022 I had a Belarusian girlfriend, and at some point I tried convincing people coming here to target smaller towns, to no avail. Still, most of them stayed here, work hard and make it, despite rents literally doubling since when the war started.
That basically describes the US as well.
You haven’t seen that much of the US if your only impression of small towns and rural areas is rundown and poor. There are some vibrant and beautiful towns scattered throughout “flyover country”. Plenty that are decrepit too, but rural America is not a monolith.
> There are some vibrant and beautiful towns scattered throughout “flyover country”.
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.
I think this is largely an east vs west thing. Rural areas in the west certainly arent rich, but theyre generally not dirt poor like rust belt areas in the eastern US are.
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.
I never said that was my impression, as I'm sure there are also some vibrant small towns in Poland as well.
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.
Eh rural areas are quite beautiful in the US depending on the aesthetic you like.
Noah Smith had a good article about this in 2024 for those interested in reading more: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/six-ideas-for-poland
Mostly nodding along, with a few of these aged in interesting ways from where I'm sitting.
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.
I don't know much about Poland
Why was other comment flagged and dead???
The guy has a ghost ban on Hacker News. He was banned for some other comment. He doesn't know that no one else can see his post.
Probably not hellbanned, maybe spam filters gone wrong. I vouched them back into the land of the living :)
My best guess is people think it's AI written? I mean, I kinda get such vibes from it, but it (IMO) could also be human written.
One of the most underrated countries in Europe to visit if you’re a fan of history, architecture or food. I am so blessed to Be able to go every year and am hoping for continued prosperity for both Poland and the region.
They have had good public education for the past decade or two and rank high in international student rankings. So, I would bet that high 'human capital' would be the cause here.
> They have had good public education for the past decade or two and rank high in international student rankings.
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.
I suspect Ukraine and Belarus brain drain to be a measurable factor here too.
Polish education has a long tradition of excellence. Indeed, the last decade has seen reforms that have been heavily criticized for working against that.
You mean "MBA for a fee" Collegium Tumanum, or the best elite two universities which globally barely rank somewhere in the fifth hundred? Sorry it's not education. Poles are cheap and subservient, while cutthroat among each other.
Poland is fifth in the world with gold medals in informatics Olympiad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Olympiad_in_Info...
But yeah, it’s just cause they’re cheap and subservient right.
Romania is 6th, Iran is 8th, and your point is?
That Romania and Iran also have strong education in STEM.
Your point is these countries don’t? What point exactly are you trying to make.
IIRC Polish mathematicians were close to being the world's best prior to WWII, people like Banach and Tarski are remembered until today. Also, Enigma didn't get broken by Rejewski being cheap and subservient.
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 ;)
Look at the demography though. Poland will fall very hard, faster than its neighbours.
It's the Zabka economy.
To explain the joke, a Żabka is like a 7-Eleven, but there is way more of them per unit of area. And they have more services in offer.
Here I was wondering what Johnny Lawrence had to do with Poland's economy.
do they have good food, like in 7 eleven japan?
They're better than US 7 eleven imo. They have a section with baked breads and rolls for cheap.
Having studied in the Netherlands it was somewhat difficult finding a job (10 years ago), and my first job was in Poland at a large Pharma company. I started working there for a wage lower than Dutch minimum wage when I started, just to get an in into the industry.
There is a while set of jobs in Pharma that got moved to Warsaw and no longer available in NL/DE.
There's a large set of jobs in everything that expanded operations in Poland, for salary reasons, e.g. automotive (Stellantis, Volkswagen, MAN) electronics (Electrolux, Whirlpool), food (Ferrero)...
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.
Worked with many Polish developers for the last 8 years. Great group, very talented. However, the initial motivations to go there were to keep costs low. Eventually they saw their salaries increase 3x or 4x over the years. They totally deserved it, but the economics change if you're running a startup. Now with AI, not clear if the tech outsourcing dynamic will remain.
Anecdotal, but the company I work for offers to the juniors only +15% to what it used to offer 15 years ago. The salaries are growing mostly because previous government introduced huge increases to minimal salaries, but I don't feel the wages in IT grew significantly over the years. Which actually make sense - we used to have huge disproportion between regular worker salaries and IT ones, now the difference is getting smaller.
Two main reasons: Foreign direct investment, averaging ~5% GDP/year, largely to build and fully integrate Polish industrial base in to Germany. Secondly: an education system designed to create an economy on advanced manufacturing.
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.
Poland went more free market than the other former Soviet bloc countries. Free markets are the fastest and best way to prosperity.
No migrants leave the necessary attention on economy
Polish people migrating to the rest of Europe, sending money back, and eventually returning is probably a big part of the success.
If sending money back and then returning was the key, you’d expect more countries have the same success Poland did.
Except over 2 million Ukranian refugees: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asy...
He means no brown and/or muslim migrants. The EU border would infamously let in even exchange students when the war heated up in 2022, except for those they did not want for clearly racist reasons.
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.
before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work.
after Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK
Why would they want to bear the burden of an "hostile environment" (as the UK Home Office named their policy towards foreigners) AND declining economic prospects due to an economic suicide they had no say in?
Poland has been booming for a long time even before Brexit. I think it was a latent force just waiting to be set free by Perestroika and free market forces.
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.
Poles do have a business sense, much stronger than Czechs, I would say, and even stronger than Germans.
Before and after Covid. It made a lot of people (in general - not thinking about Poles in particular) think about where they wanted to live. it was a pretty bad time to be away from home, family, etc.
> before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work.
The comedian Omid Djalili (a Brit of Iranian descent) had a number of "Polish plumber" skits:
To be fair the gap has been tightening for quite a while and it’s likely that adjusted by living expenses it’s not that hard for those engineers to find higher paying jobs in Poland compared to the UK.
I’m not polish (but still european) and i wouldn’t go to the uk anymore.
The UK used to be “the dream” when i was a teenager, now it’s the empty shell of what it used to be.
Before 2004 there used to be a decent number of antipodeans working in finance in London.
After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably.
This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
This is because big corporations supporting Brexit figured out it will be better for their bottom line if they could source labour from wider pool and have it tied to visa. Something EU workers would never be comfortable with. Hence you had the so called Boriswave - an influx of workers paid below market rates supporting big corporations able to navigate Home Office corrupt system. Conservative party never told the public what it was really about - bringing in very much slave workforce to exploit - at the expense of working class and SMEs.
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 mean, it makes things more difficult, right?
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".)
Tbf, SWE salaries are constant across much of Europe, so anyone who is working in CEE feels less of a pull to work in London as a line-level engineer for roughly the same salary as they'd get in Warsaw. Funnily enough, even Bangalore salaries [0] are catching up to Italy [1] and Romania [2].
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
> [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
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)
The taxation is not though. It may be better working from Warsaw or Prague due to tax rules. In Czechia it's a sort of fake, but tolerated consultancy and self employment and I have heard there is a similiar status in Poland.
Yea. In Poland everyone is a contractor even if they are not in reality. This year Poland had started to indicate they will crack down on it though so a lot of companies are now turning their contractors into employees instead.
Wow, that sucks. Here in Czechia the politicians talk about cracking it down all the time, but in reality it is now more common than ever with no signs of stopping. Only higher execs at banks or in other regulated industries needs to have a normal employment contract.
They have been indicating it constantly for last 12 years, regardless of who is in power...
The biggest drivers for tech employment in the CEE aren't those consultancies but American and non-European FDI.
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 10-20% tax rate really helps though to have comparable or better pay rate to western europe with about 50% tax rate.
At the same time though, out of 6 developers, my team in London has two Brits (including me), two Eastern Europeans (Hungarian and Romanian), and two South Asians (Indian and Pakistani).
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.
but London VCs are poor quality compared to what you find in the States.
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.
> SWE salaries are constant across all of Europe
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.
As I've mentioned before, I've had intimate experience hiring across Europe and at the 75th percentile and above, the salaries tend to be extremely close when comparing Western Europe and CEE. The difference becomes attitude.
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.
Pretty sure salaries at large tech companies are way higher in places like London, Zurich or Amsterdam than in Warsaw or Prague for example. Berlin may be closer to the eastern countries.
It might help to discuss actual ranges instead of "intimate experience" so we can tell if your experience matches reality.
Zurich is probably in a league of its own. London next. But then it is quite similiar in Paris, Prague, Warsaw, Frankfurt, ...
I think Zurich is in a slightly different league than London or Amsterdam in that regard but especially if you go down to the median and below (low taxes are helpful as well)
I cannot confirm your experience with the attitude of the latter unfortunately (I can confirm the former though).
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.
For the ~500 million people of the EU, moving to Frankfurt means taking a train there, moving to London is a whole headache of visas, permits and permissions.
Founder visas are generally suffering from a chicken-and-egg problem, where only a successful company can sponsor anyone
Sure, but the entire VC and funding ecosystem that London has is nonexistent in much of the rest of Europe.
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.
God I miss Eastern European tradespeople.
British tradespeople in my experience are duplicitous, lazy, unmotivated, low quality, cocky and expensive.
I read Mila 18 by Leon Uris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mila_18) decades ago and been a big admirer of Polish people since then.
The Warsaw Uprising Museum is an excellent place to visit if you're into WWII history.
I live here and I know why. It is also not solely connected to any EU funds. Not at all. We have a large tech sector here. IT, software engineering, embedded, agentic AI, genAI, backend, platforms, and consulting firms and startups. We have hyper growth that is actively sponsored with economic development teams from govt in each region. Mfg also. Cheaper labor and growth in many sectors and industries.
Intresting systemic bias around the country despite large improvements. I would be curious if those views would be a signal for investment in some of poland's tech startups. I believe their economy is still growing and companies will flourish even more.
Filed from Poznań, which is where I'm typing from. The dateline alone made me smile.
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.
This paragraph is really odd: “As oppressive as it was, communism contributed by breaking down old social barriers and opening higher education to factory and farmworkers who had no chance before. A post-Communist boom in higher education means half of young people now have degrees.”
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.
These days it’s forbidden to deny the horrors of nazism but quite fashionable to glorify the murders and confiscations of communism and to even justify Marxist murderers like Mangione.
1670 on Netflix was hilarious
Living only a good hour away from the Polish border I must say that this is really great for our region, too. When the income difference was higher, there was a lot of property crime (mostly cars, but also other things) originating from Poland. I went to a Polish village just at border once and you could feel the crime there. Young guys driving too expensive cars despite houses being run down, suspicious looks if you drive by with your German number plates. But that is over. If you go to Szczecin or Bydgoszcz you feel no wealth gap at all and I am happy that it turned out this way.
Investment, infrastructure, education. Same as China. Same as every other growing country.
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.
The US spends over $1T per year on education, more than almost any other country on a per capita basis by a large margin. What is the rationale for characterizing this as "defunding"?
I would say that outsourcing and moving manufacturing to other countries is what has killed the US economy - now in a death spiral with interest payments on the debt starting to dominate government spending.
Can you give examples of western countries other than the US doing that?
I’ve never seen it, I travel a lot.
I can definitely speak for all German speaking countries (Germany, Austria, but also Switzerland). Absolutely the UK as well. But really, Austerity was a trend that was followed by pretty much all EU countries since 2008 and the trend has not been reversed. And the Chinese have been buying european key industrial companies left and right going back as far as 2010.
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.
This is generally true about how much damage austerity has done, but it's important to note that most of the bank bailout money was loans which have been mostly repaid.
(Yes, exceptions for Iceland, Ireland, Cyprus, and a few others)
Wow, since you're so well travelled you can also share examples of the US doing it, with the comparison to these other amazing utopian western countries.
Start with education spending per capita.
> defund education,
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.
Education hasn't been defunded. I don't know why so many people keep posting that misinformation when the opposite is true.
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)."
"I don't know why so many people keep posting that misinformation when the opposite is true."
Because it suits their prejudice.
To add to the argument about European funding, Polish people are also very hard-working and probably have the mentality closest among European countries to what the USA had in the twentieth century with the pursuit of the American Dream. The only difference is motivation. Polish people suffered a lot in the past, so they do not want to experience poverty again; thus, their drive is powered by insecurity compared to an optimistic confidence that hard work would lead to prosperity in the future (this is also seen in the Polish sense of humour, which is much darker). I suppose it is mostly because of the post-communist Balcerowicz Plan transformation and the first generations travelling to the West for work, which further solidified the belief in upward mobility from the lower class to the middle class to the upper class through hard work.
How it happened? (Source: I'm working with polish companies)
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.
I feel the need to correct the record. The only reason, there is this racist stereotype in some western countries that such and such ethnicities are not working, is because those countries make it exceedingly hard for those ethnicities to gain employment. For example requiring language fluency and forcing immigrants to attend language school full time instead of giving them a mop and a bucket and a minimum wage. In places where this banal legislation does not exist those same ethnicities are working fine in mixed ethnicity factory floors alongside Poles and Romanians.
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.
Some cultures legitimately are less hard working though. Ironically most of these cultures are western, the biggest examples are southern European cultures.
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.
> Czechia used it for stupid things like bicycle lanes, child playgrounds etc.
Without the full picture, these don’t seem like stupid things at all. What makes it stupid for them to invest in these things?
Invest? That sounds like a pure loss in economic terms.
I'd argue that creating infrastructure that allows people to move and take care of children isn't a loss, it's an investment in functional towns and cities, which leads to better outcomes in general (including economic).
I would say Czechia used it more to boost the agricultural holding that's totally not owned by our PM
I mean, both GDP and average salaries in Czechia is higher so arguably at some point you might want playgrounds for your children
As a Czech, I am fine with the playgrounds, but the infrastructure like bicycle lanes was quite often built in illogical places where it is underutilized, but where it was easier to build it.
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.
Vacuuming working age population from Ukraine since 2014. Poland did everything right, while Ukrainian governments and businesses were smirking "What are you going to do?" during salary discussions.
Over the past 4 years, millions of Ukrainians have fled there because of the war — many of whom had businesses and money in Ukraine and are integrating seamlessly into the Polish economy. Almost the entire Ukrainian IT sector that used to operate on an outsourcing basis is now there. Before the war, Ukrainians were mainly a source of cheap labor there, while Poles were doing the same work in other European countries. And since Ukraine is a bargaining chip in the current war, it is in the interest of all its neighbors for Poland to become strong, so that the Russians don’t cross the border.
"What are you going to do" was a phrase you could hear in Poland as well in 90ties and early 2000th. What differentiated PL w/ UA in my opinion is 2 things:
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
> 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
Not much I think. I had long discussions about it with my Ukrainian friends: we came to the conclusion that it was mostly the fact that Ukraine was part of the USSR (much harder crackdowns on opposition, actually including the church) - and that also built stronger ties with Russia. A lot of people forget that USSR really was a multicultural empire: you had families where in the 90s siblings abruptly woke up in different countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. Post-2022 some of those families stopped talking to each other, the propaganda is stronger than the family ties. Before the situation got clarified by falling bombs, the east/west choice was much harder.
Lack of oligarchy is starting to look like an absolutely critical ingredient, and it's lucky that Poland escaped from the PiS trying to turn it into an oligarchy.
Hmm, I think you’re not ever supposed to say anything negative about Ukraine.
What a buffoon take, you didn’t understand a word of what they’ve said, did you?
And yet, their air pollution level during winter months is so bad that local government issues public alerts to encourage people to stay indoors. Every winter there are days when air is in top 10 most polluted areas around the globe.
My Polish coworkers say that's due to the senior citizens stuck in a Soviet occupation mindset, and they're doing things like burning plastic trash to heat their homes.
I really enjoyed Warsaw in December, the air seemed fine to me.
Some people are burning trash at home, but the air pollution is mostly due to use of local coal for individual heating. Funny enough, their coal is called Eko-groszek. Eco!
True. But this problem is fixable individually with a smog mask outdoors and air purifier indooes. Systemic issues in other countries are rarely so easy to work around.
As an American that’s lived in Poland for the last decade:
- 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.
Polish-born person living abroad here. There definitely ARE "mind viruses" in the polish psyche, and pretty nasty ones at that. You might not have noticed them because they are from a different nature than the ones that infected Wester Europe and North American. For example, Poles by and large harbor an inferiority complex due to the decades of oppression and suppresson that makes them sell themselves short and act as people-pleasers to western nations and western firms (that's precisely what makes us so liked by those firms! and that's also your "looking to America" here). Poles as a nation are driven by romantism, not pragmatism, and that is the reason why we always get screwed on the world stage one way or another and have the reputation of being "dumb". I am as happy as the next guy to see economic development, but our mental maps let us down regularly, and I am not particularly optimistic for a change on that front.
Good thing that Trump is bringing disillusion regarding America; same for brexit regarding UK
Thanks to the internet they are also rushing to adopt the dumbest of the social mind-viruses of the West ... Saddens me tbh.
> 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.
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.
Rage-bait media is both profitable and the masses will defend you as "fighting the good fight".
The mind virus actually makes you love the host.
Poland has somewhat of a culture of overworking, "kultura zapierdolu".
Yup, a lot of older folk with ruined health here because they overworked to "build a wealth" that eventually didn't materialize, but who at same time are criticizing younger gens of not wanting to follow in their steps.
> A general lack of ideological “mind viruses” that seem to plague the western world
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
Didn't expect that stuff to reach HN... anyway:
> 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?
I mean more in the sense of the people themselves. PiS did some shady things for sure, but ultimately most of their supporters are just old conservative people. I would describe that as a fundamentally different thing from the cause-of-the-day ideology and its backlash movement that sweeps through Western countries every decade.
I wouldn’t describe PiS and its supporters as a dynamic cultural movement in the way MAGA is.
> A general lack of ideological “mind viruses”
Yeah when Poland banned abortion and declared a number of "LGBT free zones" a lot of Poles I know came here to Czech Republic
I don't think most poles dislike you if you're gay, it's just that the woke mind virus went too far and Poland is still normal.
And yet it's still not all roses in the actual everyday life given that we have higher prices than Germany (food, phones, computers) while earning 3x less. But it surely beats how we had it the 90s.
What's led to the higher prices than Germany? Usually substantially lower earnings would mean lower prices, even if not substantially lower (look at the UK, higher prices than much (all?) of Europe, average earnings slightly less).
How? They said "No" to mass migration.
Except when millions of Ukrainian refugees have been allowed in since 2022. You could say that they said "no" to mass brown people migration.
Polish people are some of the most pragmatic, straight-forward, hardworking and intelligent people on the planet in my opinion.
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.
Can anyone tell me what impact their whole government dying at once in a plane crash had on this?
Would they probably be doing better or worse if those people had stayed in power? Was that a significant factor in this?
Opinions will vary. Most people on that plane (not all) represented the equivalent of UK Reform party - isolationist, backward-looking, populist. That party, ironically called PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Law and Justice) brought in a lot of reckless spending and anti-growth measures. Still, GDP rocketed on under their government just as much as under the other ones. As did inflation.
Nit, but I don't think we're there anymore. We were there briefly around March, when this article was posted.
what a coincidence, I just bought a Bosch washing machine and it was made in Poland.
Poland is the best example of using the best capabilities of access to EU funds and the large EU economy. Its sucess case should be rubbed up the noses of the arrogant UK establishment and its Eton driven Brexit disaster.
It certainly helps to be neighbor with an economically strong but demographically weak and overly beaurocratic country that hungers for eager, competent workers.
Poland made the brilliant decision to protect its heritage and not allow unchecked immigration and illegal immigration. It is a very high trust society with far lower crime rates, especially violent crimes than other places like the UK and France that went the other way.
Poland benefited significantly from immigration (of Poles to other countries and then back).
And the other countries have benefited significantly from their hard work too.
Signed, Dutchman.
Our greenhouses, factories, trades works, all favorite destinations amongst Polish (season) workers.
Poland made many good decisions in the last 20 years - I do not dispute this.
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.)
They've done well for themselves for sure . 20 years ago, Poland was sending seasonal workers to the UK to pick tomatoes. Brexit largely won because of anti Eastern Europe immigration
> Eastern Europe immigration
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..
It's hard to believe, and I repeatedly said as much to people who thought as much prior to the vote who 'pfffd' me in response, and yet here we are.
The right to vote on fundamental societal issues should come with some sort of mental means testing. I'm only half-kidding. I think.
Poles return to Poland and get to see results of their hard work. Brexit people get exposed to more cultures. I guess everyone got what they needed and deserved.
It warms my heart that my country contributed to ejecting Britain, and right before it turned completely to shit.
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
- Educated population
- Access to the EU market
- Cheap labour
- 250 billion in EU subsidies
Also, the Poles who I talked to have the feeling like money is going into the right projects and corruption is relatively low. This is quite different if you talk to people from Bulgaria, for example.
Even if for many years the net value of EU subsidies is close to 0, many people claim that money is still better spent, because of checks and balances forced by the EU system.
250 миллиардов субсидий ЕС
EvroSoyuz is just a better offer, comrade. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
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.
A family member told me they knew of someone who once visited Poland from Yugoslavia and found, in their opinion, that Polish was a Slavic language perfectly suited to the Latin script.
But yes, transliterated Russian doesn’t look quite right- rather cumbersome- and I assume the same would hold true for a Polish Cyrillic.
It turns out it's not that hard to grow an economy once countries all around you stop trying to kill your culture, exterminate your population and steal your lands.
Surely there are more than 20 countries that have been in a position where their neighbors aren’t all trying to exterminate them for at least as long as Poland.
That only explains some sort of “noob gainz”, not moving into the top 20.
When you lose 20% of your population and then spend 50 years under communist rule because your allies sold you out, there’s really only one direction left to go—up.
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.
Sure, but the explanation is still Poland’s potential and its capacity to fulfil it. You could be free all you want and still plateau on some immediate post-war rebound gains.
Which in some ways is what happened here in Slovenia. We used to be doing much better than other communist countries (as a part of Yugoslavia), exited relatively peacefully, entered the EU, and everything seemed to be going great until the 2008 financial crisis.
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.
Don’t know why this is downvoted. The history of Poland for the last 300 years is pretty much exactly what you wrote.
Well there are plenty of countries that aren't facing those conditions now, or in the recent past and still have shitty economies. It undersells how hard it is to build a strong economy and therefore undersells how hard Poland has worked.
being in the trade union helps, especially when for most part it was "cheap labour" for that union
But maybe that's because these countries did not have to struggle as hard as Poland did?
Hundreds of billions in subsidies and Polish workers displacing West European workers inside and outside of their country have nothing to do with the success of course.
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.
I don’t understand why people constantly mention EU subsidies and not mention the billions of wealth destroyed or taken during the world wars, partitions, or the deluge.
That is not true. Poland run substantial trade deficits (as opposed to China) up to very recently giving sizable marked for products manufactured by western Europeans and thus __helping__ and not hindering West European workers. And this trade deficit was enabled by mainly external investments (and little but by subsidies). Also since PL was converging this investments were more profitable then in the west.
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.
Most of the subsidies go back to the western Europe in the form of cheap products, and cheap labor. Also these subsidies were used to buy technology, machinery and goods from the West. Let's have Germany pay few trillions in reparations, and we can give back the billions in subsidies. Deal?
Sure, Germany pays reparations, Poland gives back Pomerania and Silesia (which were part of the reparations) and Western Europe forms a new EU so we don't have to deal with Poles any longer. Deal?
Poland would've probably been my top relocation priority if it weren't for the atrocious air quality
Try 3city (Gańsk-Sopot-Gdynia up north on Baltic). Definitely better air quality then in other places in Poland. Do not know how it compares to other European cities though.
I'm Polish and I left because of the air quality. But, 15 years passed, and it got much better (obs. through holiday visits). People no longer heat with trash and coal isn't less of an option. Also, it isn't as cold in the winter so there is less need for heavy heating. Really thinking of coming back, to family.
It's getting better year by year but I suspect it'll take another decade before we'll have acceptable air quality during the heating season. During earmer seasons it's fine tho.
Subjective air quality is SO much better than it was in the early nineties though...
I definitely blame my difficulties with respiratory illnesses on living there as a kid...
> “I get asked often if I’m missing something by coming back to Poland, and, to be honest, I feel it’s the other way around,” Kowalska said. “We are ahead of the United States in so many areas.”
They're scared shirtless of communism and statism, have recent enough memory of why, and went full sail on classical liberal economics. It worked.
I'd also be a classical liberal if I were getting 1 out of 4 euros of the EU taxpayers.
Positive actions cited in the article: "independent courts, an anti-monopoly agency to ensure fair competition, and strong regulation to keep troubled banks from choking off credit"
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.
The rest of Europe would be also afraid if they didn’t have the nice cushy buffer of Ukraine and Poland to give them breathing room.
Worst healthcare among developed countries, which every ranking of healthcare systems confirms. Average people receive 19th century level of coverage and care for 21st century price. The only people on employment contract are public sector and some of the outsourcing and nearshoring, industries which are moving out of the country. Milllennials are 40 years old now and every reform which had been made, made sure they didn't have enough income neither housing to have children. Polish miracle is over, deservedly.
I'm pretty sure I got prescribed an antibiotic at least once :) Also, my father has been through 5 cancer "journeys", all successfully treated via public healthcare, last few caught "too early to operate" due to early detection PET scan programs. I don't know much about 19th century medicine, but it seems off.
> Kowalska works at the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, which is developing the first artificial intelligence factory in Poland and integrating it with a quantum computer, one of 10 on the continent financed by a European Union program.
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 are trained for high earning jobs while willing to take a lot less. That has to help. Ukraine was on the same path.
Poles love playing Doom.
It's because they didn't commit national suicide through immigration like most of the western world.
It’s punching way below where a nation of that size should be with all the zillions of free EU welfare money it gets.
I don't know. I have to admit that things might have been better, we could have been more active in international politics or trade, but we are a sort of low key, and maybe the money and effort is better spent on improving life of citizens. Would I like more Polish footprint in the world? Yeah. Do I prefer clean streets, nice infrastructure and safety? Hell yeah.
I think it’s less about footprint and more about improving your economy based on welfare.
updating my anecdotal views on Poland has been one of my biggest changes over the last few years
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.
In the United States, Red/Right leaning States typically receive more federal funding than Blue States. Red States get 'propped up'.
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.
This is a poorly supported take, once you factor in the productive parts of the economy.
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.
> 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.
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.
Wouldn't the red states be profiting off of blue states in your example? Why would General Mill's purchase of red states' outputs not show up as profits in the red states? This makes no sense.
That is a good point.
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.
This is a clear display that we need free trade, sensible economic polices and a common ground of what humans need to thrive. "Sovereignty" is overrated.
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.
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french and german working class tax. and obviously great leadership to use EU and that money well to win. unlike france for instance that got outplayed by germany that itself got outplayed by their dear ally the USA and are now going into energy obsolescence.
German working class is actually benefiting from this as Poland it one of their biggest importers now. And they are still benefiting from slave labor, stolen precious metals, and art they got during the WW2. Not to mention the Marshall Plan. They really can't be complaining.
> German working class is actually benefiting from this as Poland it one of their biggest importers now.
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.
German working class is displaced or has their salaries driven down by either Poles or Romanians working in Germany while their families live cheaply at home or by corporations moving factories to Poland and Romania.
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.
I believe this is called competition, encouraged since the EU markets are open and freedom of migration is guaranteed. If it wasn't for those guys, you'll have migrant workers from Ukraine, or India or some other place. However, I suspect that before the Poles and Romanians came to DE, you already had quite a bit of migration from Spain, Italy and Turkey, isn't that right?
So, countries inside a large, free-trading, economic zone, with a diversity of economic standards, tend to do well from central investment and all the many benefits that accrue from said economic zone.
Shocking.
Well done, UK. You really shat the bed and, by the look of it, still are. Diarrhea, possibly.
Prosperity is a curse. People are no longer having children in Poland. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
It's the South Korea model and road, people are working hard to chase constantly and quickly moving goal of securing extremely expensive home, basic setup for having the family. But process itself is exhausting and depleting.
It's not prosperity, but consumerism. Consumerism causes demographic decline, because it unhinges people's priorities. Their conception of the purpose of life becomes more materialistic, and children compete with that kind of materialistic, self-indulgent consumption.
In that sense, the Poles have been seduced by consumerism.
First time I hear this explanation of why demographics is in decline in Europe and it kind of makes sense, every so often having this discussion about having children people bring up that they wont be able to enjoy things anymore, like travel, which in itself is a form of consumerism - buying the "experience"
Indeed. People also like status. If consumerism ties status to consumption, then children constrain that consumption and thus constrain status.
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.
It's crazy to think that a 21st century genocide could be as simple as extending massive amounts of credit to your victims for a long enough time to obliterate their social order.
Ironic.
Poland is basically Germany without the historical baggage and with less cultural cruft (to avoid trigger words). Having said that there is one Olympic discipline that they perfected even beyond German standards (which are quite high in that department already) and that is: whining.
I'm a red, white, and blue American, born and raised in the USA. My family is all from Poland, and made America a home. The other day, someone asked my ethnicity, I said American Polish. Each of us are from somewhere, that where my family happens to be from. Nice Polska.
