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.
> 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.
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.
Hungary did a 180? Weird, last time I checked they picked someone even stricter / harder against immigration. People think because Orban (big scary authoritarian... who peacefully transitioned power) was not re-elected that it was a flip... They voted for someone even more against (rightfully) mass migration / invasion.
They did a 180 on their relationship with the EU, which was the context GP was discussing. Maybe 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'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.
"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).
> 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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
>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.
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).
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.
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
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?
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> „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?
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.
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.
Well, fuck you. If you take a look at the GDP growth, Poland grew fastest BEFORE joining EU, and also during “populist” government, when much of EU funding was withheld for political reasons.
Polish economy grows despite EU membership, not because of 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
> “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.”
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.
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
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..
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.
Worst healthcare among developed countries, which every ranking of healthcare systems confirms. Average people receive 19th century level of coverage and care for 21th century price. The only people on employment contract are public sector and some of the outsourcing and nearshoring which is moving away from 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.
Not allowing themselves to become inundated with third world fighting age male "asylum seekers" has no doubt helped Poland continue to grow as a country.
It certainly helps to be neighbor with an economically strong but demographically weak and overly beaurocratic country that hungers for eager, competent workers.
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.
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).
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
> 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.
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.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.
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?...
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.
> 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.
>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.
Hungary did a 180? Weird, last time I checked they picked someone even stricter / harder against immigration. People think because Orban (big scary authoritarian... who peacefully transitioned power) was not re-elected that it was a flip... They voted for someone even more against (rightfully) mass migration / invasion.
They did a 180 on their relationship with the EU, which was the context GP was discussing. Maybe 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'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.
"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...
> 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.
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.
The justice of the supreme court can't even answer the question "What is a woman?"
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
Preferably your taxes in particular.
A rising tide lifts all boats
> 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.
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
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.
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...
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...
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.
They're also the 3rd smallest net recipient of EU funds per capita:
https://i.imgur.com/VlRkDMy.png
You mean 13? You have to count the net contributors as well or its very misleading...
But that's not really meaningful in a "largest economy" point of view.
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??!
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.
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).
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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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).
Europe is the birthplace of democracy, socialism, feminism and secularism.
Ofcourse Christ conservatives hate it.
Good thing we are a Democratic Republic :)
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.
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
which things? care to be more specific?
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
Yes, in the EU they call it 'sharing'
Money is a claim on future work - it only works if the system works.
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?
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.
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.
Since you seem to be implying causality here, I would assume that the other major beneficiaries have enjoyed a similar period of growth?
> 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.
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.
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
Oh no, other countries have been in that position but it did not go well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_rising_tide_lifts_all_boats
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.
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...
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.
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
https://georank.org/economy/poland/slovakia
https://georank.org/economy/bulgaria/poland
> 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.
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.
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.
> „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?
Well, Germany had their own EU funds when they raided other countries. Today, noone bats an eye?
At least Poland does it legally.
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.
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.
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.
Well, fuck you. If you take a look at the GDP growth, Poland grew fastest BEFORE joining EU, and also during “populist” government, when much of EU funding was withheld for political reasons.
Polish economy grows despite EU membership, not because of it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
All the Polish engineers I've worked with have been top notch.
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-...
With all that Chemistry talent, they could have built and dominated battery industry.
A large country that kept their communist party in charge actually does.
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.
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 ;)
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.
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.
MBAs and company owners do not come from stem education.
Incomes in the former GDR are comparable to those of Poland. They still lag behind West Germany, however (as does Poland).
Quite simple. They all left.
I think mostly due to the bungled reunification that was basically an asset-stripping followed by enormous brain drain.
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)
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?
Motivation requires incentive. Probably hard to do when you're a communist bureaucrat offering an extra potato.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
That basically describes the US as well.
US cities don't look chic lol, they are universally dirty (if economic giants)
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
A German here, I think we have done that too with great success.
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.
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.
Laughed hard about Collegium Tumanum
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.
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.
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?
It's decent. Treatment of franchisees, on the other hand...
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppmzUZENfc
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo
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.
God I miss Eastern European tradespeople.
British tradespeople in my experience are duplicitous, lazy, unmotivated, low quality, cocky and expensive.
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
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.
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.
Source?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Poles love playing Doom.
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.
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.”
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.
> 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 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
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..
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'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.
Worst healthcare among developed countries, which every ranking of healthcare systems confirms. Average people receive 19th century level of coverage and care for 21th century price. The only people on employment contract are public sector and some of the outsourcing and nearshoring which is moving away from 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.
Not allowing themselves to become inundated with third world fighting age male "asylum seekers" has no doubt helped Poland continue to grow as a country.
It certainly helps to be neighbor with an economically strong but demographically weak and overly beaurocratic country that hungers for eager, competent workers.
The Polish economy is not built on sending workers to Germany.
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.
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).
Nit, but I don't think we're there anymore. We were there briefly around March, when this article was posted.
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
Hmm, I think you’re not ever supposed to say anything negative about Ukraine.
> 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.
Related?
https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
Here's per capita:
https://i.imgur.com/VlRkDMy.png
Are subsidies evenly spread between all citizens?
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.
They are trained for high earning jobs while willing to take a lot less. That has to help. Ukraine was on the same path.
Two letter answer: EU
They recently joined the EU?
Overnight success is often decades in the making.
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.)
How? They said "No" to mass migration.
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.
- 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.
I remember when Poland colonised half the world.
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.
Why are polish people like this.
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.
But maybe that's because these countries did not have to struggle as hard as Poland did?
We did that in the US and became the #1 economy. Leadership just changed.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> kultura zapierdolu
I want "kultura zapierdolu" t-shirt now.
> 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
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
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.
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.
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?
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"
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.