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!

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trwired 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Perhaps I wouldn't use such harsh words, but it is a noticeable phenomenon when interacting with _some_ Western Europeans that if Poland's success comes up in a conversation, they immediately "offer insight" that it was in fact all outside help that made it possible. (There are also, in fact, some folks further east of Poland, who like to repeat that narrative as well, but it doesn't happen nearly as often as with Westerners.)

And yes, my own take why this does happen is that there was certain order to the region in the past centuries - the West was modern and wealthy, the East was backwards and poor and all was in its natural place. This new situation is unfamiliar and needs a sort of explanation that would preserve the balance somehow. In short, they cope.

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another-dave 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Some moron always show up with the "but it was all the EU subsides" 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!

Ireland were in a similar position for instance (received €40bn in EU subsidies in the first 45 years of membership; now a net contributor).

	▲	hobofan 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm wondering how much of the net contribution comes from tech companies and how it compares to the loss of taxes due to Ireland acting as a tax haven for tech companies. EDIT: Net contributions seem to be $3bn/year (total, independent of tech) while loss for other EU countries due to corporate tax evasion is $6bn/year.

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toasty228 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

idk who's racist but you didn't research this topic even 5 minutes on google apparently, you see the exact same trends everywhere, the GDP per capita rose pretty much in the same manner in Poland vs Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria for example.

Of course these countries have 5-10m inhabitants so in term of raw GDP and industrial power they can't compete

https://georank.org/economy/bulgaria/hungary

https://georank.org/economy/poland/slovakia

https://georank.org/economy/bulgaria/poland