Diversity in Poland: The Blind
Poland's favorite diversity group appears to be the blind.
Poland has been booming economically, so it’s full of new things. For example, you are riding the train through an obscure industrial town full of factories. “Rust Belt,” you think, but then you notice … there’s no rust. All the factories were built in the 21st Century, probably for German firms. Downtown in this place you last heard of while reading about tank battles on the Eastern Front in 1945, there might be a few new blue glass skyscrapers like you lately see in Jersey City across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Both places I stayed in Poland looked like they’d been wholly refurbished with the latest technology since 2023. In Krakow, it took me 15 sweltering minutes to figure out what the countless buttons on the air conditioner remote control did. But when I finally got the hang of the remote, the AC worked as rapidly as any in Houston.
One newish thing you see a lot in Poland at tourist attractions like Wawel Castle in Krakow are ten-foot long bronze scale models of the site with Braille explanations for blind tourists. (These exist in other countries as well, but they seemed far more common in Krakow and Warsaw than in Berlin, Prague, or Vienna.)
I saw one blind tourist running his hands over a model, but lots of kids liked them too.
I see braille signs in hallways and elevators and wonder how the blind find them.
Per-capita GDPs:
.
[2014]
- 100: Poland
- 100: Hungary
- 100: Russia
(the three had equal per-capita GDPs as recently as 2014, according to the World Bank (with Russia's higher than the others for 2011-2013).
.
[2024]
- 176: Poland
- 164: Hungary
- 105: Russia
.
Supposedly most of that impressive-looking 2014-to-2024 GDP per-capita growth for Poland occurs after 2022. The line resembles very much what happened in the mid-2000s before the 2008-09 crash. (Thereafter, Poland was able to exceed its 2008 high-water mark only by 2018.)
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UPDATE 1: Some suggest a portion of Poland's +76-point growth by 2024 (2014=100), especially the unusually high growth of 2023-24, is driven by increased military spending after 2022. (The Ukraine War: the same ultimate reason why Russia has had zero net growth in that decade.)
There are lots of other things going on, naturally. In the long-run, it's a catch-up effect and clearly tied to the German economy. Measuring by labor productivity-per-hour, the numbers are less-impressive-looking than GDP per-capita, because Poland's workers work far MORE [thanks, AM] on-the-clock-hours than do Western European workers.
UPDATE 2: See further comments and explanation of why Nominal and not PPP is the basis for these comparisons, here:
https://www.stevesailer.net/p/diversity-in-poland-the-blind/comment/160686585