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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

#851
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those IQ charts look very different depending on who is doing the sampling. One of the famous ones is from a self described "scientific racist". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lynn

I suspect accuracy of any IQ test falls off the further you get from 100 in either direction, so I’m not married to any global IQ dataset in particular. But they all show the same trend. All the politically and economically prosperous countries show as high and the basket cases show as low. And if you sit in on their political discourse it increasingly sounds like you’re in an open air mental institution. (Though reg…

Your whole argument is that low IQ leads to an undeveloped country rather than impoverishment leads to lower IQ. I don't think it is entirely one way.

IQ is also only one (mediocre) signal you are putting a lot of emphasis on. India does not score well, yet it is clearly emerging and has very successful individuals from mathematics to chess.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Russians are always conveniently forgetting that they were the other major aggressor of the European WW2 theater. Heck, the so-called "Great Patriotic War" starts in 1941, skipping over their alliance with Nazi Germany and invasions of neighboring states.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#853

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

>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.

As is alluded to by others, you might want to look into the disposition of those lands before 1100 or so

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times. "Often" is the wrong modifier. GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person. If you look at the GDP/capita growth in India and China since 1990, or South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, since 1950, that reflects very real increases in material standards for ordinary people. There's two, relatively well-understood…

When economy goes K shaped (only ultra rich or ultra poor with no in-between) GDP is good preidictor of how the ultra rich are fairing.

For everyone else a roulette wheel is a better measurement.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#855
post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"cutting deals" lol this was just yesterday: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0m2wjlkzplo Going by your history, you clearly have a strong bias for China but adding spyware or putting countries into debt isn't virtuous.

Irrelevant post, plenty of western spies working in China (and likely much better at it). Anyways, China never took a single dollar from my pocket nor bombed anyone in the last 30 years, so yeah - I’m going to push back on this idea of some inevitable clash with them that is being programmed into everyone.

You can't look at the evidence and just dismiss it as "irrelevant' because you feel like it or because "the west does it as well" when your whole argument is the lack of foreign interference from China due to "wisdom". We can extrapolate from their hostile actions (even the non-physical ones) and how they treat their own citizens how they would further treat other nations if they could get away with more.

China does behave in a very methodical way, but that does not mean it is not a hostile nation.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#856
post #854

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> GDP/capita is often a relatively useless metric in modern times. "Often" is the wrong modifier. GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person. If you look at the GDP/capita growth in India and China since 1990, or South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan, since 1950, that reflects very real increases in material standards for ordinary people. There's two, relatively well-understood…

When economy goes K shaped (only ultra rich or ultra poor with no in-between) GDP is good preidictor of how the ultra rich are fairing. For everyone else a roulette wheel is a better measurement.

No economy is K shaped. The vast majority of US income (78%) is earned by people outside the top 1%. It was as high as 90% during the bad economy of the 1970s. Since 1975, real GDP per capita has increased by a factor of 2.8. So the proletariat have 12 percentage points less of a number that’s 2.8 times bigger.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#857
post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect accuracy of any IQ test falls off the further you get from 100 in either direction, so I’m not married to any global IQ dataset in particular. But they all show the same trend. All the politically and economically prosperous countries show as high and the basket cases show as low. And if you sit in on their political discourse it increasingly sounds like you’re in an open air mental institution. (Though reg…

Your whole argument is that low IQ leads to an undeveloped country rather than impoverishment leads to lower IQ. I don't think it is entirely one way. IQ is also only one (mediocre) signal you are putting a lot of emphasis on. India does not score well, yet it is clearly emerging and has very successful individuals from mathematics to chess.

I don’t think it’s entirely one way either.

Someone mentioned malaria-afflicted test takers before. Of course better healthcare leads to lower disease load, which leads to higher IQ, but it’s only a weak link, simply not leaving old tires with water strewn about the place is free.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#858

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not arguing for this one way or another, but as countries become more economically developed, they invariably move off of manufacturing and more into services because it's a higher value part of the economic food chain (wish I could find the research article with all the data - I remember reading it as part of a post arguing that Trump's attempts to "bring back manufacturing jobs to the US" was doomed to fail) So, th…

> So, the reason you can buy motors and robotics components from Poland and not Canada is because Poland has lower costs I hear you, and I partially agree. What I worry is that this made more sense ten or twenty years ago, though. Living in Canada for 40 years, I'm no longer confident that we can continue using economic levers to allow ourselves to output less and buy more from poorer countries. We're stagnating, and…

Internal trade barriers are a real problem, Canada is a country with a small population and vast resource wealth, so its odd that there are barriers between provinces.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#859
post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Polish millenial the perspective is a rollercoaster. In one way the transformation of absolutely everything over and over and over is mind blowing in a positive way. OTOH we're also all paranoid running on what feels like a never ending hamster wheel of inflation, raises and mortgages. And then Gen-Z's feel straight get up locked out of everything. We visit western European countries and it's like WTF it's cheap…

Just as a quick note, the “second world” would have been the Eastern Bloc countries, so by definition, living in Poland in the 80s would have been 2nd-world conditions.

Thank you! Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who remembers this. For example, Ireland was a third world country because (theoretically) we were non aligned.

Re: Poland is now among the 20 largest economies

#860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For purposes of comparing countries to each other and the same country over time, it’s not 30% off. The average skews higher than the median everywhere, so it’ll be 1.3/1.x. If you have reported median incomes that are calculated the same way across countries and over time, that would be better. But many countries don’t reliably track that data, and the ones that do calculate it in completely different ways.

That all sounds reasonable. My concern was with your quote > GDP/capita aligns very closely with material standard of living for the median person GDP per capita is an average. This means it does not align with the _median_ person, but with the average. I believe this is factual and undeniable. No doubt it is interesting too to try to find other metrics for different usages as well. > For purposes of comparing countr…

> GDP per capita is an average. This means it does not align with the _median_ person, but with the average. I believe this is factual and undeniable.

That’s why I used the word “align” instead of the word “is.” If the ratio of mean to median is 1.3, if the mean doubles, the median also will double—the movement of the two values will be “aligned” even if one is offset from the other.

That means when you’re talking about the economic growth of a country, Poland in this case, the mean is a reasonable proxy for the median unless there has been a massive change in the ratio of the median to the mean.

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