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- 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.by kingstoned
- I suspect Ukraine and Belarus brain drain to be a measurable factor here too.by ivanjermakov
- PIS party works to ruin it, republican style.by rvba
- Polish education has a long tradition of excellence. Indeed, the last decade has seen reforms that have been heavily criticized for working against that.by lo_zamoyski
- > They have had good public education for the past decade or two and rank high in international student rankings.
I suspect good public education is a symptom, not the cause.
The cause likely is valuing a good education. Culture always wins. You can give people who don't value it a good education and they'll barely benefit.
by BeetleB - the EU funds argument works both ways. plenty of countries received similar transfers and didn't compound it the same way. the interesting question isn't where the money came from, it's what Poland did with it that others didn't.by aykutseker
- Yep. Looking at Hungary.by linhns
- Thank you. Many say our institutions are underdeveloped but I think it takes a certain maturity of the society to be able to execute projects successfully. It's not perfect, but I think we've come a long way.by fwr
- 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.by comrade1234
- I haven't been to Poland but have a second home in Czech Republic (my wife's country) which has the same phenomenon. It has nothing to do with economics or poverty and everything to do with people. Young people move to where the jobs are which means the larger towns and cities (this happens worldwide BTW). This means old villages are entirely inhabited by old people, most of whom only worked during the days of communism. They can't and won't change. They don't want to renovate or live in a new house. So the village gets run down. Canada (where I was born) also has run down towns and even ghost-towns, you'll just never see them. In Europe secondary highways pass through every town it seems, so you do see them.
My wife's grandma, now in her 90's, lives in a >100 year old farmhouse that's crumbling and only 1/3 of the home is even heated. Hell installing the electric heaters and indoor toilet involved a ton of arm-twisting. She's been insisting she'll die any day for the last decade and refuses to move or renovate. Meanwhile my wife's cousin lives in the same town (is a remote worker) and lives in a super-modern new home that's built to a much higher standard than the average new home in Canada. Old people are just stubborn...
Anyhow the point is that things only get renovated when the owner wants to renovate it, it has nothing to do with wealth. In the city, land is worth $$$ so inevitably it gets bought and improved. In small towns, meh...
by dismalaf - That basically describes the US as well.
- That's funny, I spent several days in Bydgoszcz in 2015 due solely to a marvelous and slightly misleading video from the tourism board: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiogaJADvPw
I learned on arrival that the city was not in fact color-graded and filled with beautiful slow motion video opportunities. Since then, every time I mention to any Pole that I've been to Bydgoszcz, the question is always "Why?"
All my memories of two fairly long trips around Poland are now ten years out of date, and I've heard only good things about its development since then.
by alex0015 - 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.by rembal
- Poland 10 years ago and Poland today is night and day.by egorfine
- Noah Smith had a good article about this in 2024 for those interested in reading more: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/six-ideas-for-polandby seidleroni
- I don't know much about Poland
Why was other comment flagged and dead???
- 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.
by mlitwiniuk - 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.by jansan
- 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.by cromka
- 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.
by tanepiper - How it happened? (Source: I'm working with polish companies)
1. Hard working people
2. Biggest recipient of EU subsidies used for projects which generates more profit. Infrastructure, internet, etc. To compare, Czechia used it for stupid things like bicycle lanes, child playgrounds etc.
3. Building permit is very easy to get for basically anything. Yes, this way you can sometimes get chaotic new buildings, but this can be solved later. In comparison, in Czechia, obtaining a building permit is difficult and depends on the whim of the official. Also we have basically non-existent property taxes, so new homes are unaffordable for everybody and only used as an investment.
4. Not allowing imigration from countries where people don't want to work and with hugely different religions and customs. This worked for Czechia too though, our biggest immigrants are Ukranians which are also slavs and very hard working. Official statistics is, that they paid in taxes more than they got from social support.
by Fokamul - > Biggest recipient of EU subsidies us
Yet again this nonsene. Per Capita, which is where this matters, Poland is nowhere near the top of that list.
by cromka - I feel the need to correct the record. The only reason, there is this racist stereotype in some western countries that such and such ethnicities are not working, is because those countries make it exceedingly hard for those ethnicities to gain employment. For example requiring language fluency and forcing immigrants to attend language school full time instead of giving them a mop and a bucket and a minimum wage. In places where this banal legislation does not exist those same ethnicities are working fine in mixed ethnicity factory floors alongside Poles and Romanians.
And btw those same countries who make it super hard for, for example Syrians, to gain employment, then made a whole bunch of exceptions for Ukrainians. For example in Germany, Syrians without full command of German were told to attend language schools, but when the Ukrainians arrived they suddenly made exceptions and suddenly in our department we had Ukrainian cleaning crew who spoke neither German nor English.
- > Czechia used it for stupid things like bicycle lanes, child playgrounds etc.
Without the full picture, these don’t seem like stupid things at all. What makes it stupid for them to invest in these things?
- 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.
by ptdorf - 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.by reubenlavin
- Were they not educated and motivated before?by olalonde
- 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.
by chatmasta - All the Polish engineers I've worked with have been top notch.by zeafoamrun
- 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.by dakiol