3 ms·
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 la
by 6d6b73 5mo ago
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.
- wvbdmp 5mo agoThat only explains some sort of “noob gainz”, not moving into the top 20.
- 6d6b73 5mo agoWhen 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.
- wvbdmp 5mo agoSure, 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.
- trinix912 5mo agoWhich in some ways is what happened here in Slovenia. We used to be doing much better than other communist countries (as a part of Yugoslavia), exited relatively peacefully, entered the EU, and everything seemed to be going great until the 2008 financial crisis. Then it seems our politicians stopped being pragmatic and started bringing up ideological issues more often, which divided the population, while IMO not doing nearly enough to promote further development of the economy. So now we have a population split on ideological issues, while Poland and Croatia are overtaking us economy-wise. We have had every advantage (geographically at the crossroads of multiple trade routes, sea access, EU funds, hard-working population, didn't turn into a Russia-style oligarchy...) but mostly slept on it.
- thfuran 5mo agoSurely 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.
- keiferski 5mo agoDon’t know why this is downvoted. The history of Poland for the last 300 years is pretty much exactly what you wrote.
- ch4s3 5mo agoWell 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.
- 6d6b73 5mo agoBut maybe that's because these countries did not have to struggle as hard as Poland did?
- ch4s3 5mo agoI don’t find that to be a very compelling argument.
- PunchyHamster 5mo agobeing in the trade union helps, especially when for most part it was "cheap labour" for that union
- ch4s3 5mo agoYou can provide cheap labor inside of a trading block and still be economically a mess, Mexico comes to mind and Turkey was sending workers to parts of Europe starting in the late 1940s. Poland did a lot more than just supply cheap labor, and it really undersells all of the work they've put in to develop their work force, education, economic policies, and so on.
- MrBuddyCasino 5mo agoWhy are polish people like this.
- mrits 5mo agoWe did that in the US and became the #1 economy. Leadership just changed.
- ash162 5mo agoHundreds 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.
- keiferski 5mo agoI 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.
- 6d6b73 5mo agoMost 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?
- 2398 5mo agoSure, 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?
- artylerzysta 5mo agoAre you still lacking lebensraum?
- 6d6b73 5mo agoGermany lost the war. That's just small price they should be paying for exterminating millions of people and destroying many countries. And these lands were Polish, and Czech way before there were Germans. That's why Prussia had a systematic depolonization going on in the 1800s on these lands. They wanted remove the inhabitants of these lands for a long time..
- 10xDev 5mo agoI remember when Poland colonised half the world.