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.
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.
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.
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.
It certainly helps to be neighbor with an economically strong but demographically weak and overly beaurocratic country that hungers for eager, competent workers.
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.
Filed from Poznań, which is where I'm typing from. The dateline alone made me smile.
I've been building software here for almost 20 years. Started a software house, grew it to ~50 people, sold it, now back to bootstrapping from scratch. The fact that this is a normal sentence to type from a Polish city is, honestly, kind of the whole story.
That "institutional framework" line in the article is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having run companies through Polish bureaucracy — it's fine. It works. A generation ago that bar was on the floor. Boring is a feature.
Politics aside, the 35-year arc has been quietly extraordinary. European to the bone, with old roots and a real appetite for what's next.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, as a Pole, it's crazy how much safer it's gotten and how quickly. There's almost no petty crime in Poland nowadays. And I totally see where the stereotypes were coming from, we definitely exported some of the worst element to the Western EU for many years. Happy this is no longer the case.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 67.4 ms ] threadafter Brexit - noticed polish engineers didn't want to be in the UK
- Access to the EU market
- Cheap labour
- 250 billion in EU subsidies
All the polish I know that work in IT enjoy handwork as well. They are hard workers.
I've been building software here for almost 20 years. Started a software house, grew it to ~50 people, sold it, now back to bootstrapping from scratch. The fact that this is a normal sentence to type from a Polish city is, honestly, kind of the whole story.
That "institutional framework" line in the article is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having run companies through Polish bureaucracy — it's fine. It works. A generation ago that bar was on the floor. Boring is a feature.
Politics aside, the 35-year arc has been quietly extraordinary. European to the bone, with old roots and a real appetite for what's next.
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.
https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
- 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.