Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

I'm curious what this means in real terms from the perspective of a Pole.

GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times. For instance Ireland has one of the highest GDP/capitas in the world -- around 50% higher than the US. But that's because of economic games with their working as a tax haven to enable corporations to avoid paying taxes to their home countries. It doesn't translate to anything for the average Irishman.

The protests in Czechoslovakia came earlier, in 1968! The Soviets rolled in the tanks in response.

Poland had a mass solidarity movement rise up in 1980. The USSR didn't decide to send in the military then; they were lucky.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_reaction_to_the_Polish_...

There was a lot of unrest in Poland, and general strikes. Martial law was imposed.

If you were an immigrant from Czechslovakia in a refugee camp in Austria at around that time, you'd be learning to speak Polish.

Romania is still occupied by Russia. Unlike with Germany, where the East and West reunited, Romania failed to reunite with Eastern Moldova (Western Moldova is in Romania) because of Russian interference in the 1990s. The Russians invaded Transnistria (which was never Romanian) and expanded a bit west. So the Russians still occupy part of the land that is by right Romanian and still have political influence in R. Moldova. That is slowly being eroded.

Not to forget tens of billions in EU subsidies. Not trying to diminish the polish efforts, but not every country gets this opportunity of massive, predictable transfers without much conditionality.

I wonder how far Poland would be without the years of PiS corruption.

FDI itself is not enough. Modern national champions happen because state protectionism, typically under autocratic industrial policy (Asian Tigers), in combination with FDI. Hyundai was suppose to be Honda, you can throw TSMC in there. There's no sign Poland is going to get national class to world class champions, because democracies more easily captured and EU forbids tier of subsidies and protectionism that enable giants that compete with established incumbents. Is there any strategic Polish company on road to being world class?

On paper countries can build giants without FDI, but can't build giants without industrial policy Poland can't adopt due to EU trap (which basically designed to keep west euro industrial incumbents on top) and (IMO) if Poland ever tries, FDI tap going to stop. Structurally Poland is periphery not core, allowed to prosper but not overtake, which puts ceiling. Exception being defense, but even then stepping on west euro toes.

Yep, and today the situation is completely reversed. Through acquisition and business development Singapore is the country which owns the brands and invests in other countries. Poland just needs to stick to the formula. It's citizens are building global-class professional, managerial, and business development experience. Soon if not already those employees will start itching to build their own businesses. Poland just needs to maintain a competitive environment, and not let international companies suppress local startups by lobbying for anti-competitive laws and policies that favor the big guys, foreign or domestic. If it wants to give local companies a leg up, do it indirectly by investing in education and research.

This is zero sum thinking. The foreign companies benefit and the local Polish people benefit. Wealth is created in the process and everyone benefits. What if those companies never came and never employed Polish people? Would Poland be any better off?

if spotify employs an american and they become more experienced over their tenure were american resources extracted? human capital tends to get better with experience, particularly when dealing with high quality foreign management.

Those foreign companies still have to pay Polish taxes,and Polish wages. All that money gets spent into the local economy.

Ironically, most of early OpenAI engineers and scientists were Polish

Love waterloo grads. They're 2 years ahead of other college grads. They come to the internship ready to ship. They definitely power stuff.

But Stanford grads all take moonshots.

Which would I rather have? Waterloo, they're great workers. Not sure they've been crushing it long enough to be in charge everywhere, time will tell.

Britain, well… I’ll take Scotland, they’re sensible. But rest of you, we can’t just look what you are doing to yourself. Please Britain, get some help.

Well, the coming AMOC collapse will at least align the climates.

Don't forget Russia and USA!

Absolutely. For a lot of my career I worked from west coast Canada for US companies in California. After a few years of earning $80k CAD and working as hard as anyone I'd meet at conferences in the USA, I realized I was being an idiot. It was transformative. I only know a couple people personally in software here who work for Canadian companies apart from where I work.

I earned ~2–3x more than I do now working for a Canadian company, doing the best work of my career. I'm so unimportant here, they would readily discard me and laugh if I asked for a raise. This is Canada. But, I like this place, the people, and the work. I think it's important work. I'm at a stage where I prefer that over cash.

I don't think many of my peers feel the same. There's a sense that there's no point in working for Canadian companies if you don't have to. On balance they perform worse, pay less, have less interesting opportunities, and work you as hard as any American counterpart would.

I'm aware of the current economic state.

The point is that capital holders decided doing risky things isn't worth it, so they invested in unproductive low-risk assets, then the government juiced the immigration rate, said assets rose, capital holders are making off like bandits leaving Canadians behind in a stagnant economy holding the proverbial bag...

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.

China was the offshore haven and built their own domestic economy off the expertise while still maintaining very low income taxes and 15% corporate tax for tech companies.

You dont have money, you complain. You (as in your country) get the money, yet you still complain.

Sure, its not ideally distributed, but nowhete is. Such economic success will drag many parts of the country up. Yes, jobs not paid the best will have to commute from further. But compared to where Poland was 2 decades ago (been there many times), its great growth and success.

Plus you guys have correct mentality to by far the biggest threat to Europe - russia. Not so common in eastern Europe, russian-paid politicians are quite successful in some places. But of course Poland has a history with russia to remember so thats luckily not an option.

Hungary is massively pro-EU as shown by polls (86% in 2025).

They didn't do a 180 at all. Tusk basically shares Orban's entire platform, particularly vis-à-vis the EU. Orban just got caught in corruption scandals.

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Thankfully most people have learned from the absolute shambles of Brexit and either of these countries leaving is extremely unlikely.

There is pretty common trend of people complaining about X being bad coz EU but most of the time it turns into one of

* It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented badly by national govt * It was pretty sensible EU directive implemented okay but communicated badly * Outright lie about the problem and the scope of it.

One example: The people complained that "EU will force them to pay to scrap solar panels"

The truth: Some countries added price of recycling into price of the solar panels, some didn't. Those that did had free recycling, those that didn't needed owner to pay a fee when scrapping it. So, naturally, buying solar panel from country with no fee was cheaper and scrapping it in country with fee was free. EU noticed that loophole and forced countries into including the fee in panel cost:

The truth: Poland applied it by just applying fee to panels bought before the rule unification

The lie number 1: EU forced that implementation on Poland. Nothing was forced, that way of "fixing it" (vs eating the cost was what Polish govt chose

The lie number 2: (and I have no idea where it came from) "You will have to scrap your panels made before this date AND pay for it".

Sometimes I suspect most of that is just russian propaganda using anything to undermine EU

Thinking about that risk increases said risk.

Also, for Germany, and I assume, other EU countries, cohesion and economic strength of the EU is the most important value that exists.

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).

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.

>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.

That is incorrect for Portugal. We didn't took part on the WWII and came out with a rich country that kept growing on double-digits. Eventually it was attacked simultaneouly by the US/Russia proxies for 10 years until 1974.

It was after that US/Russia sponsored this communist takeover of our country that the new puppet governments have thrown the natives into extreme misery until someone from the EU decided to reduce the levels of corruption and misery. We simply swapped one master for another and hasn't been good for our land.

So please don't compare our country to whatever "solutions" brought by the same entities who caused our problems in the first place. We needed almost 50 years to remove socialism from this country and reduce the venezuelan/cuban style poverty forced upon us.

Spain is often given as an example of a failed economy ruined by socialists. GDP per capita is basically flat over the last 2 decades, $30K. https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/esp/spa... vs Poland that tripled or let's say Israel that had the same GDP as Spain and now has double.

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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.

Yes, in the EU they call it 'sharing'

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

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.

Lots of people who work in Luxembourg don't live there so anything "per capita" is a bit misleading.

Additionally a lot of the EU's institutions are based there or have offices there, some of which might count as investments as well.

Lastly, everything there is really expensive. So you need to invest a larger amount to achieve the same thing as elsewhere.

Notoriously difficult to portray correctly in EU money-shuffling statistics. Some money not granted to the grand duchy still filed under "beneficiary country: Luxembourg" due to some program or institution being headquartered there. And it is essentially impossible to compare apples to apples what happens in actual EU budget and what happens in Kirchberg, home to EIB.

I presume this is because of the EU institutions there and that expenditure to maintain those institutions counts towards receipts (and this effect is then exaggerated due to Luxembourg's small population). Certainly no one in the EU is under any illusion that Luxembourg is poor, much less vastly poorer than the next poorest EU country.

Small population plus lots of EU institutions.

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.

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).

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.

At one point, don't remember when, the money sent back home by Polish immigrants was about 8% of Poland's GDP. So 1% is not that much.

That's not really my experience as a person born and raised in Poland.

If anything the decades of communist occupation destroyed the work ethic.

We have a famous saying "whether you stand or lay down, you deserve 1000zł".

And intelligent, hence the Nazi stereotype.

NAFTA was pretty beneficial until people went nuts about it.

> Mind you that Polish workers are the next in line to be screwed if Ukraine joins the EU.

So when German workers got screwed when Poland joined EU it was fine, but Poland is where you draw the line?

Conservative estimates put the embezzled amount around 60,000,000,000 Euros. The upcoming government says it’s at least the double of this.

The article on AP literally has a graph showing outsized growth of Poland compared to these countries (measured in GDP per capita).

So called 'IP BOX', but it's very rare, as most people consider it risky and it requires a lot of paperwork. It's also frowned upon a lot.

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-...

Do you think the example of Poland is helping Ukraine resist and move towards the west?

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).

> There are some vibrant and beautiful towns scattered throughout “flyover country”.

In my experience, these places tend to be where rich people from cities own vacation property or can commute to a city for work. An example in Minnesota is the Brainerd Lakes area, which subsists almost entirely on people from the Twin Cities visiting their lake cabins from May to September. There are some nice small towns and plenty of beautiful homes, but it’s a result of outsiders bringing money in. Next door you have Aitkin County which is poor as hell because it’s basically a swamp/peat bog that has been partially drained for agriculture, 65% of the county is wetlands: https://www.mngeo.state.mn.us/maps/LandUse/lu_aitk.pdf

Most of rural America has been hollowed out to the point where local hospitals are closing. I’m not making any judgements about rural poor people, just that rural areas tend to be poor due to a lack of local economic opportunity.

I never said that was my impression, as I'm sure there are also some vibrant small towns in Poland as well.

But it's fallacy to think that lots of wealth hasn't further concentrated in cities over the last 50 years. A lot of my family is from upstate NY, and I remember visiting them as a kid and feeling like they were nice places. They have all deteriorated greatly since I was a child. E.g. people always complain about how expensive housing is in the US. Well, there are plenty of cheap places to live in upstate NY - housing costs in a lot of those places have lagged inflation for decades. The problem is nobody really wants to move to Cortland, NY.

The issue looks especially clear when you compare small towns in close proximity to big cities compared to further out. There are lots of vibrant, quaint small towns on Long Island, for example, because they get a ton of money from their proximity to NYC. I often think a lot of the upstate NY towns would look just like the "cute" Long Island towns (e.g. similar architecture and history) if they had an influx of money.

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Probably not hellbanned, maybe spam filters gone wrong. I vouched them back into the land of the living :)

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

IIRC Polish mathematicians were close to being the world's best prior to WWII, people like Banach and Tarski are remembered until today. Also, Enigma didn't get broken by Rejewski being cheap and subservient.

Given how strong Poland used to be in mathematical logic, I can see an alternate history line where WWII does not happen and first computers are developed in Krakow and Lwow.

But computer programming with Polish keywords would indeed be a bit of a hell ;)

It's decent. Treatment of franchisees, on the other hand...

Not quite, but better than a US 7-11.

They're better than US 7 eleven imo. They have a section with baked breads and rolls for cheap.

Sure. Recent Zabka food poster https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F4... https://www.reddit.com/r/Polska/comments/1t7ci4h/my_apologie...