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Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

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Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#571

Post by ltasdh »

jakubadamw wrote: post #489
2958a-123 wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Britain received more from the Marshall plan and did a little worse. The Marshall plan also did not involve the US having completely free access to Germany economically and move all their companies to Germany for cheaper wages. If you talk about asylum seekers (which may be a valid point), notice also that German social security institutions are filled to the brim with Eastern European claimants.

> Notice also that German social security institutions are filled to the brim with Eastern European claimants. Utterly false: nationals of Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania account for approximately 4.9% of all SGB-II Leistungsberechtigte (~256,000 of 5.24 million as of December 2025). > The Marshall plan also did not involve the US having completely free access to G…

You are arguing from the point of capital and the industry. West Germany was fine without an influx of educated Poles. The capital and the industry benefit, not the employees.

You are by the way underestimating the credit that the Marshall Plan gets in Germany. It is taught in schools and not commonly denied.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#572

Post by lo_zamoyski »

merpkz wrote: post #313
lo_zamoyski wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not prosperity, but consumerism . Consumerism causes demographic decline, because it unhinges people's priorities. Their conception of the purpose of life becomes more materialistic, and children compete with that kind of materialistic, self-indulgent consumption. In that sense, the Poles have been seduced by consumerism.

First time I hear this explanation of why demographics is in decline in Europe and it kind of makes sense, every so often having this discussion about having children people bring up that they wont be able to enjoy things anymore, like travel, which in itself is a form of consumerism - buying the "experience"

Indeed. People also like status. If consumerism ties status to consumption, then children constrain that consumption and thus constrain status.

It also used to be that having a large family was a source of honor. Today, it makes people uncomfortable. They may even take a condescending view of those with many children. People have formed a strange association between having many children and poverty.

What you find is that the highest fertility in the developed consumerist world tends toward the poor and the rich. It's the middle class that has the fewest children. This makes sense through the lens of consumerism: the consumption of the rich is not constrained by having more children, while the poor can't consume all that much anyway, so having more children doesn't really change their buying power meaningfully where conspicuous consumption is concerned. It is the middle class (especially the upper middle class) that is anxiously keeping up with the Joneses and engaged in aggressive and petty consumerist competition. They have just enough to consume conspicuously, but not enough that they don't need to prioritize their spending. Consumerism simply prioritizes conspicuous consumption to the detriment of fecundity.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#573

Post by baq »

avgDev wrote: post #570
VimEscapeArtist wrote: post #563

I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…

What kind of dev salaries are you seeing in Poland? I have family in Poland, they are from smaller villages and they ALWAYS complain about EU and the economy. I wonder if things are similar in large cities.

this is Poland for you. everyone complains about everything. perhaps that's the secret to success - there's always something to complain about and one in a hundred (or thousand) people actually does something about it.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#575

Post by cakealert »

tptacek wrote: post #568
cakealert wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the focus on Lynn? Focusing on his critics is more illuminating and damaging to your presumed position: Systematic review by Wicherts et al: "In light of all the available IQ data of over 37,000 African testtakers, only the use of unsystematic methods to exclude the vast majority of data could result in a mean IQ close to 70. On the basis of sound methods, the average IQ remains close to 80." They of course follo…

Part of the point of the Wicherts papers was to refute the Lynn data, observing that even taken on its own premises Lynn's team pretty clearly excluded data unfavorable to the conclusion they wanted to draw. But look at Wicherts 2009, at the samples they're talking about. One of the largest was 800 students in Nigerian high schools (a test arranged by IQ researchers to for a cross-cultural comparison, back in 1981).…

The purpose of IQ tests is to derive a value that would predict other values. The inverse is also true.

Given a multitude of such values it would even be possible to get back to a precise IQ value.

IQ tests are just factor analysis artifacts. You can dream up 100 questions that you conjecture may have something to do with intelligence and not even know the answers and have 10,000 people answer them. Product of the factor analysis of the answers will yield a normal distribution which you can then center on 100. Calibration can be more complicated than that but you get the point.

The natural circumstances people find themselves in are also just noisy questions.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#576

Post by baq »

VimEscapeArtist wrote: post #563

I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…

foreign dollars and euros being spent in the country definitely counts as growth no matter how you slice it and regardless whether you like it or not.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#577

Post by kazinator »

VimEscapeArtist wrote: post #563

I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…

Providing educated labor is a kind of build.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#578

Post by tehjoker »

VimEscapeArtist wrote: post #563

I live in Poland. This headline is misleading. Poland didn't build a top-20 economy. Western Europe and the US built their economy in Poland, because the labor is educated and cheap. There are almost no globally competitive Polish companies. The "growth" is branch offices of German and American corporations taking advantage of engineers who'll work for 40% of Berlin rates. Remove the foreign-owned sector and you're l…

Reading the article it attributed institutional strength to poland, which is great, but it sounds like this was something the west decided not to sabotage. The oligarchs taking over in e.g. Russia was engineered by the clinton administration and Larry Summers as "shock therapy" when the soviet government fell.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#579

Post by AlexandrB »

vrganj wrote: post #56
yu3zhou4 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The Soviets really valued STEM. They also quite valued emancipating women.

Try telling this to my mother, I'm sure she'll be excited to hear how emancipated she was.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#580

Post by orleyhuxwell »

chatmasta wrote: post #345
ptdorf wrote: post #21

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.

They also enjoy 15% tax, through some arrangement I’m still not convinced is legal for IT contractors… But yeah, some of the most skilled and passionate engineers I’ve worked with have been from Poland and the surrounding countries like Czechia.

This misses the obligatory health tax and pension fund contributions.

The pension fund is usually not considered a tax formally, but most people I know assume with our demographics and pension system we are just paying for current retirees (and our 'savings' will be impacted by inflation when it becomes impossible to maintain), so practically it's a tax.

Than there is 23% VAT (ofc much less than 23% because both the IT company and the contractor pass it to client and subtract some cost; so only a piece of it affects the contractor; it's a convoluted thing and I don't really know if I should treat it as ~22.9% or 2.3% tax on a contractor and it's client).

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