Think of it as an investment. The rest of the EU also benefits from their hard work, and economic prosperity. Other countries in the EU have also enjoyed economic growth and support over the years.

I'm old enough to remember internal borders with passport checks in Europe, before the wall fell and Poland was still on the other side of that. Nice to see them moving on from that.

Thanks to the EU free movement of people, I've now studied, worked and lived in four different countries. I know people all over Europe. I currently live in Germany. Germany benefits a lot from the EU. Yes it costs money. But there's trade, access to skilled labour, etc. as well. And if you look at Poland, it's what sits between Germany and Belarus & Ukraine. So, there's a strategic relevance as well. Poland doing fine is good for everyone else in the EU.

> I love the polish, but credit where credit is due

> I ment: „Poland gets money, Poland transforms it into more money”.

I have noticed that absolutely every time Poland's success is mentioned, someone from EU steps in to downplay it. A self-serving bias. Seriously, that type of comment is absolutely everywhere. Any YouTube video. Any Reddit post. In last couple days I have seen it about dozen times, last time today here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArchitecturalRevival/comments/1t6k7...

And each time it's some unsubstantiated remark, not once do those people actually bother to check what the actual amount of subsidies did Poland receive over the past 22 years, or how does Poland fare against other EU members. They always imply that ALL THIS SUCCESS is thanks to EU.

For the record: Poland received in total about as much as its yearly budget is in 2026. Other recent EU members also received more-less the same or, per-capita, much more! Did you bother to see how other EU countries developed in that time?

Growth-wise, since 1990, Poland's economy grew substantially each year (even before joining the EU in 2004) and is only behind China: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F5Z8u1mWMAAHtUU?format=png&name=...

Seriously, look at that damn map. Find other EU members on that list.

Ergo, Poland must be doing something EXCEPTIONAL if its combined growth FAR SURPASSES not only any other recent EU members but ALL BUT ONE country worldwide? It can't just be that relatively small amount of the EU money, or the EU membership itself, can it?

So, for f*ks say, how about western EU shuts up and acknowledges IT'S NOT ALL THANKS TO THE EU, will it?

I am personally a big fan of the EU, but those downplaying comments are so annoying I can't but think it's some sort of jealousy. Credit where credit is due to POLES themselves.

You could just as well claim the growth is thanks to NATO membership because, if you look at Ukraine and Belaraus, it's quite plausible as well.

Yes, this is how European social welfare works. And it is fantastic! Because the entirety of the EU is benefitting from it. Polish people have larger spending power, interesting and safe places to visit, etc.

This is not a "present" given to Poland. This is ensuring a better life for all Europeans.

They're also the 3rd smallest net recipient of EU funds per capita:

https://i.imgur.com/VlRkDMy.png

Definitely not the largest per capita though. There's a lot of people in Poland.

You greatly overestimate its significance. The benefits are roughly 1% of the GDP. In 2023 Poland netted 8.2 bn€ [1]. The GDP was 751 bn€.

[1] https://www.pap.pl/en/news/poland-largest-recipient-eu-funds...

The EU is working as intended then.

Even without funds distributing EU cash, a common market works as a leveller this way and pulls up the poorer countries, because if you can live work and operate anywhere, people naturally pick the cheapest and easiest places to start a business serving the EU.

Spain and Portugal were the previous beneficiaries and everyone benefits really as jobs are created everywhere.

This is far better than a situation where larger economies dominate all others forever.

> „Poland is the largest beneficiary of EU funds 2014-2020, with one in four euro going to Poland“ https://www.gov.pl/web/funds-regional-policy/poland-at-the-f... Update: The comments below this are strange.

The comments are questioning what you wrote, which implies without evidence, that a small amount of EU money relative to Poland's own GDP, in just 6 years, is somehow entirely responsible for Poland's growth.

Since you seem to be implying causality here, I would assume that the other major beneficiaries have enjoyed a similar period of growth?

The Baltics and the Balkan states probably get just as many handouts as Poland, and still show lesser rate of economic growth.

And 90 cents of every euro returning to the Old EU. Not to mention tax avoidance schemes, western companies transfer their profits out.

Poland had a relatively clear idea of what they wanted to do once the Russians were out unlike some of the other countries in the eastern block, and it didn’t hurt that some of their neighbors to the north Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia also had pretty good idea of what they wanted to do once they were out from under the Russians, it’s just too bad that the Ukraine when they had the brief chance, they didn’t take advantage of it hopefully they’ll get a second chance.

If there was a correlation you would see the same trend in Slovakia, Hungary and such

Not surprised to see "German" quotation marks in this petty complaint...

There are many countries in the EU that get many more funds per person than Poland and have much worse outcomes.

Some moron always show up with the "but it was all the EU subsidies" talking point, which is quite frankly part of racist tropes of eastern Europeans being dumb and worse than westerners. Could you imagine them accomplishing anything on their own? That's ridiculous. It's us, the western saviors, who did this with our penny subsidies!

> I ment: „Poland gets money, Poland transforms it into more money”.

It's not trivial that this works. In Hungary we messed this up big time, hopefully it can get fixed now.

Per capita tho it isn't the largest beneficiary. The funds were just well spent.

Since one of the major donors is Germany, I also like to consider this as reparations for WWII. I wish people in Poland would realize more how generous the EU has been to them.

But be fair: Poland had to rebuild after WWII and 40+ years of communism.

When Western countries got money via the Marshal Plan:

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

Poland had... "friendly" Soviets "supporting" their country for almost 44 years...

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

It seems to be almost universally agreed across the former Soviet Bloc that Poland indeed used the EU funds more wisely than anyone else.

It’s a factor that’s not any more significant than the Marshall Plan was in your Wirtschaftswunder in the 1970s, which, oddly enough, a lot of Germans have no issue attributing to a domestic merit alone. Funny how that works!

If it was the EU contributions that were the dominant force here, Germany could… simply do the same and prop up its own struggling economy with money printed by the ECB. Instead, it prefers to see it crumble under an obese welfare state that largely funds inactive third-world fake asylum seekers. So clearly, there’s way more nuance to economic success than simply having funds redirected from one account to another.

In 2023 they got a measly 10% (8.2Billion) of the GM and Chrysler bailout that will never be repaid ($85Billion)

The EU gets huge benefits for that investment, the CEO of GM gets a multi-milion dollar pay packet.

Oh no, other countries have been in that position but it did not go well

Countries don't mechanically convert inputs into development. There are many examples of countries with large capital inflows and/or strong capabilities that still fail to become strong economies. Corruption is one of the major frictions that prevents those resources from translating into broad economic success.

This is such a bad take. I'm impressed how often this gets parroted online.

Next time, please check how many Poles left Poland for western EU since they joined.

Well, Germany had their own EU funds when they raided other countries. Today, noone bats an eye?

At least Poland does it legally.

No one can deny EU funds have helped, but putting credits only there is pure misinformation. Take a look at what part of GDP are EU funds and what is the size per capita. Hard work and open market were actually the biggest contributors to the development of Poland.

> „Poland is the largest beneficiary of EU funds 2014-2020, with one in four euro going to Poland“

The lion share of this budget has been defrauded, fraud is only slightly less widespread than in Hungary. Piles of (only) documentation are produced by professionals then funds are funnelled to the families of local authorities. Honestly I'm confused, maybe that's indeed how EU funds are suppoused to work?

It's important to understand the difference between handouts and investments with an expected ROI.

It's unfortunate that 0th order thinking jumps to this framing, it's one reason I always laugh when people talk about SpaceX taking 'government handouts' without these folks realizing the 100x ROI the government got out of their investment. All investments are 'hand outs' but not all 'hand outs' are investments.

Clear thinking at a large enough scale will prevent a populace from self destructing due to stupidity about this topic.

Honestly, it’s not why their economy has grown. That money is just wasted on government projects? Has it hurt? No, but it is a small amount when it comes to the entire Polish economy.

Government investment works. That's why America's billionaires are mostly just people stealing as much of it as they can.

Well, fuck you. If you take a look at the GDP growth, Poland grew fastest BEFORE joining EU, and also during “populist” government, when much of EU funding was withheld for political reasons.

Polish economy grows despite EU membership, not because of it.

It's a first line buffer state against Putin.

Think of it as defense spending

Now compare that number to this number:

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

And don’t forget the Partitions and The Deluge, too.

Crazy how people just like to pretend that wealth acquired before 1950 somehow just appeared there naturally.

I have to admit, I feel the same envy about industry and economic growth. But there also seem to be many explanations of why Canada continually fails to attract large cap business other than resource extraction. The cost of living / skilled worker wages / tax structure / high levels of regulation means that if you have large cap, you could just build your factory somewhere else and make more money. We've got golden handcuffs in many ways. Still, that 'envy' or ambition is what keeps me coming back to HN, I think it is still possible to start something successful and innovative in this country.

As A Finn I’d like to see Canada figure out that “oh shit we could be a world superpower with all the smarts and natural resources we have” and start trading culture and goods with Nordic countries. We would rule!

Would you happen to know any of the motor companies by name? I’m often trying to find quality motors and it’s surprisingly difficult.

Some anecdata: in the area I'm from in the northeastern US which has a large number of manufacturing/tool & die companies of all sizes, and with a large Polish diaspora, 80% of the most skilled machinists are Polish (or 2nd or 3rd gen descendants), at least that was the case when I was working with these business between 20-30 years ago. Many of the best engineers at these business are Polish as well.

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, the reason you can buy motors and robotics components from Poland and not Canada is because Poland has lower costs (i.e. people make less money because the economy is less developed), not because Canada doesn't know how to make them.

Again, I'm not saying this is a good or bad thing, and I think we've certainly started to see problems as the manufacturing know-how of advanced countries deteriorates as they outsource much of their manufacturing to lower cost locales. But having an economy with a lower percentage of economic activity from manufacturing isn't some sort of failure, as it just means that economy has moved into more profitable activities.

>> Poland was the first country to make a remarkable peaceful transition from a bankrupt, failed Soviet satellite state.

In what sense? Czechia is richer per capita. Almost all of the former Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe have had largely peaceful (since 1991) sustained economic growth. The exceptions are exactly those countries which continue to have Russian troops occupying portions, namely Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.

As a Polish IT worker I feel that we enjoy hardwork too much. I'm talking here about "kultura zapierdolu" [0] which is what we call the specific Polish version of culture of unhealthy work/life balance.

[0] https://lubimyczytac.pl/ksiazka/5124728/czesc-pracy-o-kultur...

They have a strong reputation as hard-working. After the liberation of Eastern Europe, Polish crews were all over Eastern Europe doing everything from restoring historic town centers to quickly and reliably putting a fresh coat of paint on apartments.

I guess it's anecdata. Polish engineers I've worked with weren't that good at technical stuff nor communication (in English). They're overprotective with "their" code and in general we've had more luck with western/southern Europeans.

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.

All the Polish engineers I've worked with have been top notch.

Yes, I agree. I believe cultural norms dictated their rate of expansion. Without so many people who enjoyed hard work they like would not have been able to expand their economy as much.

Were they not educated and motivated before?

And high IQ.

It boggles the mind that people can look at a country whose average inhabitant meets the objective criteria for being developmentally challenged and wonder why it is an economic basket case.

Most Ukrainians (and Belarusians) settled in major cities, starting with Warsaw. In 2022 I had a Belarusian girlfriend, and at some point I tried convincing people coming here to target smaller towns, to no avail. Still, most of them stayed here, work hard and make it, despite rents literally doubling since when the war started.

Poland 10 years ago and Poland today is night and day.

That basically describes the US as well.

Mostly nodding along, with a few of these aged in interesting ways from where I'm sitting.

The drones bit hurts the most. There's a war an hour from our border eating FPVs by the millions, and Poland - sitting on batteries, motors, chips, a generation of engineers - has not stood up a real domestic drone industry. Money is there. Will is there. We just... haven't shipped. That should keep ministers awake.

EVs are worse. Izera is a punchline at this point. Noah literally called the play in 2024 - "don't bet on one champion, run a bunch and let them fight" - and the state did the exact opposite. We picked one horse and it never left the stable.

The Korea idea, on the other hand, Noah might have undersold. Framework agreement is for ~1,000 K2 tanks. By 2030 Poland will field more main battle tanks than Germany, France, the UK and Italy combined.

Rest holds up. "Try all the things" is right - we're just very uneven at the trying. Defense procurement: shipping. Civilian industrial policy: not so much. Software still works the way it always has: quietly, in apartments, mostly without the state in the loop. Which honestly might be a feature.

I don't know much about Poland

Why was other comment flagged and dead???

Polish education has a long tradition of excellence. Indeed, the last decade has seen reforms that have been heavily criticized for working against that.

Anecdotal, but the company I work for offers to the juniors only +15% to what it used to offer 15 years ago. The salaries are growing mostly because previous government introduced huge increases to minimal salaries, but I don't feel the wages in IT grew significantly over the years. Which actually make sense - we used to have huge disproportion between regular worker salaries and IT ones, now the difference is getting smaller.

There's a large set of jobs in everything that expanded operations in Poland, for salary reasons, e.g. automotive (Stellantis, Volkswagen, MAN) electronics (Electrolux, Whirlpool), food (Ferrero)...

But Poland did well capturing them and then growing new businesses locally, so now there's local brands and such that are expanding abroad on their own.

To explain the joke, a Żabka is like a 7-Eleven, but there is way more of them per unit of area. And they have more services in offer.

Polish people migrating to the rest of Europe, sending money back, and eventually returning is probably a big part of the success.

The Warsaw Uprising Museum is an excellent place to visit if you're into WWII history.

I would say that outsourcing and moving manufacturing to other countries is what has killed the US economy - now in a death spiral with interest payments on the debt starting to dominate government spending.

The US has done everything but defund public education lol.

Can you give examples of western countries other than the US doing that?

I’ve never seen it, I travel a lot.

Education hasn't been defunded. I don't know why so many people keep posting that misinformation when the opposite is true.

Inflation-adjusted funding per student rose from $14,969 to $20,322 over the past two decades.

K-12 funding rose $1,610 per student in real terms between 2020 and 2023 alone.

"Schools in the United States spend an average of $20,387 per pupil, which is the 3rd highest amount per pupil (after adjusting to local currency values) among the 40 other developed nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)."

Why would they want to bear the burden of an "hostile environment" (as the UK Home Office named their policy towards foreigners) AND declining economic prospects due to an economic suicide they had no say in?

Poland has been booming for a long time even before Brexit. I think it was a latent force just waiting to be set free by Perestroika and free market forces.

I'd travelled to Warsaw a few times maybe 20 or so years ago, and you could feel the vibrancy and energy in the air.

Before 2004 there used to be a decent number of antipodeans working in finance in London.

After 2004, the numbers dropped noticeably.

This feels apt: https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

Before and after Covid. It made a lot of people (in general - not thinking about Poles in particular) think about where they wanted to live. it was a pretty bad time to be away from home, family, etc.

> before Brexit - a decent number of polish people in the UK doing all types of work.

The comedian Omid Djalili (a Brit of Iranian descent) had a number of "Polish plumber" skits:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vppmzUZENfc

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8mjzu0Runo

To be fair the gap has been tightening for quite a while and it’s likely that adjusted by living expenses it’s not that hard for those engineers to find higher paying jobs in Poland compared to the UK.

This is because big corporations supporting Brexit figured out it will be better for their bottom line if they could source labour from wider pool and have it tied to visa. Something EU workers would never be comfortable with. Hence you had the so called Boriswave - an influx of workers paid below market rates supporting big corporations able to navigate Home Office corrupt system. Conservative party never told the public what it was really about - bringing in very much slave workforce to exploit - at the expense of working class and SMEs.

By the looks of it, Conservative party will never recover from this betrayal and soon followed by Labour who decided to maintain the status quo.

I mean, it makes things more difficult, right?

I think the bigger factor is that Polish immigration has effectively ended. We're seeing more Poles returning from abroad than leaving. With the prosperity and stability of Poland, coupled by living in your home culture, immigration is simply not that attractive.

(Traditionally, much of Polish immigration was meant to be temporary. A good number of Poles stayed abroad and assimilated, because immigration tends to be "sticky".)

Tbf, SWE salaries are constant across much of Europe, so anyone who is working in CEE feels less of a pull to work in London as a line-level engineer for roughly the same salary as they'd get in Warsaw. Funnily enough, even Bangalore salaries [0] are catching up to Italy [1] and Romania [2].

As a founder, it's a different story though - London is hard to beat from an entrepreneurship and capital access standpoint aside from parts of the CEE with strong ties to to American VC due to diaspora ties.

Edit: can't reply

> dzonga

Completely agree. I've O-1'ed plenty of European and British founders. But London is better than the rest of Europe from a raising perspective, which shows how bad the situation is in the rest of the continent.

[0] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/greater...

[1] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/italy

[2] - https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/romania

God I miss Eastern European tradespeople.

British tradespeople in my experience are duplicitous, lazy, unmotivated, low quality, cocky and expensive.

I hadn’t come across this before. Looks really good, thanks for sharing

True. But this problem is fixable individually with a smog mask outdoors and air purifier indooes. Systemic issues in other countries are rarely so easy to work around.

My Polish coworkers say that's due to the senior citizens stuck in a Soviet occupation mindset, and they're doing things like burning plastic trash to heat their homes.

I really enjoyed Warsaw in December, the air seemed fine to me.

Poland benefited significantly from immigration (of Poles to other countries and then back).

It’s punching way below where a nation of that size should be with all the zillions of free EU welfare money it gets.

Opinions will vary. Most people on that plane (not all) represented the equivalent of UK Reform party - isolationist, backward-looking, populist. That party, ironically called PiS (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, Law and Justice) brought in a lot of reckless spending and anti-growth measures. Still, GDP rocketed on under their government just as much as under the other ones. As did inflation.

Over the past 4 years, millions of Ukrainians have fled there because of the war — many of whom had businesses and money in Ukraine and are integrating seamlessly into the Polish economy. Almost the entire Ukrainian IT sector that used to operate on an outsourcing basis is now there. Before the war, Ukrainians were mainly a source of cheap labor there, while Poles were doing the same work in other European countries. And since Ukraine is a bargaining chip in the current war, it is in the interest of all its neighbors for Poland to become strong, so that the Russians don’t cross the border.

"What are you going to do" was a phrase you could hear in Poland as well in 90ties and early 2000th. What differentiated PL w/ UA in my opinion is 2 things:

1. Lack of oligarchy - which in fact was not obvious outcome and little bit of luck on our part and little bit of cultural zeitgeist of 90ties and 00ths. 2. No east-west dithering - PL knew right away to which economic and cultural sphere wanted to belong

Hmm, I think you’re not ever supposed to say anything negative about Ukraine.

What's led to the higher prices than Germany? Usually substantially lower earnings would mean lower prices, even if not substantially lower (look at the UK, higher prices than much (all?) of Europe, average earnings slightly less).

The Polish economy is not built on sending workers to Germany.

> 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.

I want to stray from the politics too much, but we definitely self-sabotage in canada. It's kind of an immature teenage angst to self-loathe to the point of punishing yourself all the time.

Polish-born person living abroad here. There definitely ARE "mind viruses" in the polish psyche, and pretty nasty ones at that. You might not have noticed them because they are from a different nature than the ones that infected Wester Europe and North American. For example, Poles by and large harbor an inferiority complex due to the decades of oppression and suppresson that makes them sell themselves short and act as people-pleasers to western nations and western firms (that's precisely what makes us so liked by those firms! and that's also your "looking to America" here). Poles as a nation are driven by romantism, not pragmatism, and that is the reason why we always get screwed on the world stage one way or another and have the reputation of being "dumb". I am as happy as the next guy to see economic development, but our mental maps let us down regularly, and I am not particularly optimistic for a change on that front.

Poland has somewhat of a culture of overworking, "kultura zapierdolu".

> A general lack of ideological “mind viruses”

Yeah when Poland banned abortion and declared a number of "LGBT free zones" a lot of Poles I know came here to Czech Republic

> A general lack of ideological “mind viruses” that seem to plague the western world

Uhh, the Law and Justice party was packing the Polish Constitutional Court, filling the government with party loyalists, and placing restrictions on freedom of speech and assembly only a few years ago. I suppose veering close to a constitutional crisis isn’t ideological per se, but that framing doesn’t seem quite right

We just didn't have oligarchs.