It could be they just crank out a standard ATM that has braille and figure why try to save a few bucks on the drive thru (if anyone even thought of it)
Yes, this is the objective reason; it is literally easier for everyone to just have ATM's in Braille than make separate ones for drive-thrus, but Thomas Jones is being an obtuse dipshit
It’s also possible that you’re being a scold, and Thomas’s point—I don’t want to put words in his mouth, so maybe it’s my point—is that many hundreds of millions (billions?) have been spent complying with the ADA without any cost/benefit analysis just because it feels so virtuous to help anyone with a disability in any and every way possible. Few would dispute it’s a good cause, but that doesn’t justify a virtually infinite checkbook.
I assume governments use a lot of standardization. Blind people may have a strong mental model of "the words are this high above the ground" or "if I reach in this corner then I'll find the words" etc. It may be the same way that sighted people can walk into an airport in a foreign city and easily find where the security gates are. You just "know".
Yes, Ralph L is being an obtuse db in the responses; obviously governments have building codes that mandate the placement of such things. In a similar vein headlights are white and brake lights are red because it would be chaos otherwise
(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.)
_________
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:
There seem to be a range of estimates for hours-worked-per-year, but in all of them Poland is doing hundreds more hours per year than the wealthier countries of the old-NATO bloc, 30%+ more hours per year.
> Measuring by labor productivity-per-hour, the numbers are less-impressive-looking than GDP per-capita, because Poland's workers work far on-the-clock-hours than Western European workers. <
This is true of the US as well. The US has labor productivity numbers that nestle in there with the Germanics
Which is a pretty decent accomplishment given America's hauling around a pretty large diversity boat anchor. Still the US's rather substantial lead in GDP per capita--which I think does show up in "lifestyle"--comes from modestly longer working hours.
For the US--and Poland--it still counts. What you really want is to get there with higher productivity. But flat our higher living standards matter as well.
On a related note, it’s hard to find accurate data, but a “White U.S.” country would be in the top 10 or 20 in the world in virtually every metric (education, health, income, crime, happiness).
Would be pretty easy to fill out the remainder of the top ten, I should think. The most striking one on an otherwise interchangeable list would likely be Japan
A fair bit of that increase will have come from companies to the west closing plants in higher-wage places and reopening in Poland. Quite often making products for say Germany or the UK, but not wanting to pay Germans or Brits to make said products.
Similarly large UK supermarkets like Tesco want Brits to shop in their stores, but they don't want to pay Brits to do their IT, so it's farmed out to India.
My flight from Warsaw to Los Angeles was full of Polish tourists. Many gave the impression they were more familiar with train travel than air travel. E.g., upon landing at LAX, they immediately stood up and crowded into the aisle and then were surprised that they couldn't disembark immediately.
Similarly, Krakow during the daytime, while the college students were sleeping off their hangovers, seemed full of patriotic small town Poles come to see their historic capital.
It seemed nice that, after a tough 20th Century and a lot of hard work in the 21st Century, the Polish masses are now able to afford modern luxuries like tourism to Disneyland.
Poland in the 1990s and 2000s was known for car thefts . And certain other forms of dysfunction frustrating to Westerners, but car thefts seem to stand out.
The rate of car-thefts was, amazingly, above 1.0% of all cars stolen/year. That sky-high rate held for year after year, back then. On the US scale, that would be competitive with the worst places during the early-2020s spike. But for Poland it was nationwide, and for a long time.
I've heard the car-theft rates by the 2020s in Poland are so much lower that it's no longer thought a serious problem. I suspect a lot of Poles continue to assume it is more of a problem, because these memories still sting. It was a national embarrassment, really.
How did Poland get rid of its car-theft problem? Maybe a story of the rising per-capita GDP more than any innovation by police or technology.
Hardly surprisng that more Polish tourists visit US than go the other way.
And it won't be for Disney, I bet all the Poles on your flight had previously taken the cheap 2 hour flight to Paris to go visit Eurodisney.
More that the Economy airlines that so many Poles fly on turn around very very quickly so they expect to get off pretty quick. This is common behaviour in Europe and of course we rarely wait to pick up checked-in baggage (which can cost 2x the price of the seat).
I also wonder why anyone would do this calculation in GDP and not GDP at PPP.
And of course even PPP understates the value for money in Russia, particularly in military spending. Russia really does get much much much more bang for its buck than those mostly buying from US.
Also your suggestion that spending on military expenditure slows GDP growth is odd.
This seems counter to every historical military spending episode that I know of. Indeed many criticise the European willingness to spend on arms and promote war as simply a mechanism to steady the domestic economies.
There is currently a lot of talk about a failing Russian economy and a voter base turning away from Putin. It is an excellent method of encouraging countries to spend money on Ukraine and even send troops. But pure dishonest propaganda.
It's based on the World Bank's "GDP (current US$)" data-set, which is not PPP.
PPP is not suitable for head-on country-to-country comparisons of economic activity. Those who seek to make national-power comparisons, especially, avoid PPP and stick with nominal-exchange per-capita GDPs.
One of the big things you're seeing with PPP is a measure of "people being cheap." If "people are cheap," PPP is a lot higher because if you walk in with $10,000 you can get a lot more person-hours of work from the cheap people around. But think it through, a big PPP bonus is not a good thing, not a society you want to be in. Another way to say this is: a large PPP bonus tends to be a proxy for "Third World" norms in social-economic activity.
More importantly for data-comparison purposes, PPP fails to capture the competitiveness of products and services on the world market, so it's not adequate for comparing Poland and Russia or others if what we're after is some proxy for overall health of the economy. (Even Nominal will have its weaknesses and many small countries yield extremely distorted pictures for various reasons.)
________
Here is the World Bank data for Nominal GDP and population ("World Development Indicators," data release: July 1, 2025). A slightly wider comparison with Germany and Greece, and then making it reducing it again to the 2014=100 peg:
.
[Russia]
- 2004: $591B / 144.1m = $4,102
- 2014: $2,059B / 144.2m = $14,277
- 2024: $2,174B / 143.5m = $15,145
.
[Poland]
- 2004: $256B / 38.2m = $6,712
- 2014: $542B / 38.0m = $14,262
- 2024: $915B / 36.6m = $25,023
.
[Hungary]
- 2004: $104B / 10.1m = $10,291
- 2014: $141B / 9.8m = $14,352
- 2024: $223B / 9.6m = $23,311
.
[Germany]
- 2004: $2,852B / 82.5m = $34,567
- 2014: $3,966B / 81.0m = $48,971
- 2024: $4,660B / 83.5m = $55,800
.
[Greece]
- 2004: $235B / 11.0m = $21,449
- 2014: $234B / 10.9m = $21,475
- 2024: $257B / 10.4m = $24,752
.
_______
Pegging 2014=100 for Russia/Poland/Hungary:
.
[Russia]
- 2004: 29
- 2014: 100
- 2024: 106
.
[Poland]
- 2004: 47
- 2014: 100
- 2024: 175
.
[Hungary]
- 2004: 72
- 2014: 100.5
- 2024: 163
.
[Germany]
- 2004: 242
- 2014: 343
- 2024: 391
.
[Greece]
- 2004: 150
- 2014: 150
- 2024: 174
____________
In 2024, Poland exceeded Greece in per-capita GDP for the first time in modern / post-communist times. Greece was at 3x Poland in per-capita GDP back in 2004. Not as much of a catch-up effect as a Greece retrogressing after years of unsustainable and artificial growth.
Greece is a long-term basket-case, of course. It is still quite a ways off their 2008 peak. (2008 GDP/capita: $31,696, or 222 in our 2014=100 peg scale, obviously one of the most highly over-inflated when things crashed in 2008-09).
(How would the multiracial USA would deal with a Greece-style longrun economic meltdown?)
As for Poland's economic gains, they may be somewhat over-inflated by a temporary (non-productive) boom from its doubled military spending in recent years, as I wrote before. (Military spending boosts GDP but is not genuine growth. Like a jolt of energy from sugar and caffeine.) The catch-up effect is clearly at play at the macro level. For a long time, Greece (e.g.) was probably overvalued; Poland (e.g.) undervalued. It took a few decades for the numbers to swing around fully, but we're now there.
Poland vs Germany and catch-up: In 2004, Poland was at 20% Germany in per-capita GDP but reached 40% by the early 2020s. Its trajectory suggests it could rise to 50% Germany in this decade, but it may be in a bit of a growth-bubble (as with the mid-2000s).
Poland's "fundamentals" remain reliant on the German/EU economy and there is no way it could have performed so well without German good-will and EU stability and good-will). It's pretty clear why Poland is so pro-EU and pro-US, given these numbers.
Poland, however, has many signs of political immaturity, I think: even now it continues to pester Germany for huge sums of war reparations, a kind of political-emotional blackmail never meant to be settled but always used and re-used for leverage. It's short-sighted because it's been German (economic) good-will more than anything that's helped post-1990s Poland so much!
In the longer run, as AnotherDad might say, Poles and Germans are not so different and have many common interests.
"Poland's "fundamentals" remain reliant on the German/EU economy"
And the German/EU economy was reliant on cheap Russian energy, which they have chosen (with a bit of help from US or UK divers and explosives) to do without - what my mother would call cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Germany was the only world-class manufacturer left in Europe - they still had the steel, the chemicals, the engineering which has mostly vanished from the UK. They could even compete with the much lower cost Chinese. All that is increasingly going down the tubes. They'd already dumped nuclear in a hissy fit post-Fukushima.
"PPP is not suitable for head-on country-to-country comparisons of economic activity. Those who seek to make national-power comparisons, especially, avoid PPP and stick with nominal-exchange per-capita GDPs."
Sorry utter garbage.
If you are not using PPP you are an Economic illiterate.
Really can't be bothered to explain something so basic.
but hint - out the quote into an ai chatbox and ask "true or false and why?"
At one time Poland was a diverse place, the largest empire on the European continent, The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. All kinds of people lived there. It was an odd kind of empire because the kings were hired. Poles distrusted the government, so they enjoyed lots of freedom, even from taxes. One vote against a tax increase was all that it took to stop it. It was all called the "Golden Freedom." But, that did not sit well with the neighbors. The diversity undermined unity. The major powers Prussia, Russia and Austria attacked and partitioned it three ways. That is a lesson for the US.
They are both a bad idea and tend not to last. Though the imperial model--back in the day--certainly had examples with some staying power (Rome, Ottomans, Austria) it depends critically on the
a) not having--ergo suppressing--any surrounding state from credibly competing and hiving off chunks of your empire
b) not having--ergo suppressing--any nation/people within your empire from thinking "this sucks, we can run our own affairs better" or worse "this sucks, we ought to be running this joint."
Essentially the advantage of empires was mass. Mass has its virtues, but essentially empires--with no natural boundaries--mean continuous war. No boundary just "is".
Now of course--with modern mobility--the imperial model is even more fraught, because the imperial "citizens" can zoom--and will--zoom around anywhere within the empire bring their "diversity" with them.
What actually can be stable for a very long time is a nation state, where the state more or less squares up with an organic people and ergo has their loyalty.
Can be stable ... unless weirdos and loons go wreck it.
I asked chatGPT to tell me about long stretches of peace for empires and states that are essentially one people, and it agrees with you. The greatest empires manage double digit years of peace while the nation states have much higher numbers up into the 200s
A quick (possibly inaccurate) bit of web research indicates that one vote from a noble could block any legislation and there wasn't much of a central government tax authority anyway. They still had a system in which nobles owned lands far away and they farmed out the tax collection in the arenda system and still had serfs. Are the taxes you refer to something that was collected by the central government from the nobles? Also they didn't maintain a standing army.
Looks like a fascinating period in European history.
Poland's 18th century constitution was so dysfunctional that it was an object of fascination to foreign philosophes who competed in proposing replacements (since it was hard to come up with anything worse.) Even that "interesting madman" Rousseau, for example, was inspired into flights of moderation and common sense when writing his proposed constitution for Poland.
In Vienna, the government-owned or monopoly-run organizations seemed extremely well-run, as if being a civil servant had been a prestigious career since the Austrian Empire.
In Poland, not so much. But the capitalist part of the economy was delivering nicely, as if only losers worked for the government in Poland. Stalin said imposing Communism on Poland was like putting a saddle on a cow.
Interestingly, Poland doesn't have much in the way of middle man minorities left (e.g., Jews) or even it's old indigenous bourgeoisie (Katyn), but it seems to have plenty of enterprising contractors fixing up decaying apartment buildings into sleek pensions for tourists.
Whether Poland will ever get past Catch-Up Capitalism and into taking the lead in fields, the way, say, the Dutch build the world's most advanced machine tools for making state of the art chips in Taiwan is a question that will be answered in the future.
Responding to your tweet* about the deaths of Assata Shakur and Sara Jane Moore, I was going to respond to your post from last Thursday** about Angela Davis by stating that Shakur was New Jersey's version of Davis. The reason I didn't was that in 1977 New Jersey actually convicted Shakur of a 1973 murder of a state trooper on the New Jersey Turnpike despite being represented by William Kunstler. Shakur was evented busted out of prison in 1979 before escaping to Cuba in 1984 where she was granted asylum and lived out the rest of her days.
While she is infamous in New Jersey, I don't know how well known she is in the nation at large, although her death did make the NY Times. As an aside her brother was Tupac's stepfather and she was his godmother, which is why they have the same fake last name
Moore was before my time, but adding to my previous response, the Chicago Teachers Union has cluelessly decided to honor Shakur on twitter* by saying Rest in Power, Rest in Peace, Assata Shakur 🕊️. The twitterverse has currently ratioed the tweet 8-to-1
There is a subway stop in Paris named after Louis Braille and I noticed in Istanbul a Walter Isaacson style pop biography of Braille. I think the blind have more juice around the world than they do in the U.S.!
There's a blind woman who visits my local coffee shop. She's young and pretty. She speaks with a clear, carrying voice - refuses to hide. She laughs and takes social chances, making jokes with the baristas. I admire her quite a lot. Exceptional courage.
"Portland Fire and Rescue confirmed that on Tuesday, the front passenger tire of a charter bus caught fire near Southwest Oak Street and Southwest Broadway."
On topic: I recall Poland as having diversity in railway gauge. At some point in the Berlin-Grodno passage, the train was stopped for hours as every car’s undercarriage was traded out. This was in 1994. Can’t remember exactly where this happened; may have been just before the Belarussian border. Or just east of Warsaw? I have a feeling that such diversity was no one’s strength, if it was ever meant to repel invaders.
That was probably because railways built in Poland before 1945 likely used the UK/US/Western European standard gauge of 4' 8 1/2" rather than the Russian standard of 5', though Poland's shifting borders would have had an impact on that. It looks like most lines were converted to 4' 8 1/2" though one line was built with Russian 5' gauge in the 1970s.
I see braille signs in hallways and elevators and wonder how the blind find them.
The braille instructions on drive-through ATMs are what get me.
Yes, because a blind person could never take an Uber to an ATM or get a ride from a friend 🙄
Yes so the rule is, if someone can think of a scenario, however unlikely, then we should cater for it.
Are you familiar with the Americans with Disabilities Act?
When it comes to Democrat client groups, yes.
It could be they just crank out a standard ATM that has braille and figure why try to save a few bucks on the drive thru (if anyone even thought of it)
Yes, this is the objective reason; it is literally easier for everyone to just have ATM's in Braille than make separate ones for drive-thrus, but Thomas Jones is being an obtuse dipshit
It’s also possible that you’re being a scold, and Thomas’s point—I don’t want to put words in his mouth, so maybe it’s my point—is that many hundreds of millions (billions?) have been spent complying with the ADA without any cost/benefit analysis just because it feels so virtuous to help anyone with a disability in any and every way possible. Few would dispute it’s a good cause, but that doesn’t justify a virtually infinite checkbook.
I assume governments use a lot of standardization. Blind people may have a strong mental model of "the words are this high above the ground" or "if I reach in this corner then I'll find the words" etc. It may be the same way that sighted people can walk into an airport in a foreign city and easily find where the security gates are. You just "know".
Yes, Ralph L is being an obtuse db in the responses; obviously governments have building codes that mandate the placement of such things. In a similar vein headlights are white and brake lights are red because it would be chaos otherwise
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.)
_________
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
> "Poland's workers work far [more?] on-the-clock-hours than Western European workers."
Thanks, fixed.
There seem to be a range of estimates for hours-worked-per-year, but in all of them Poland is doing hundreds more hours per year than the wealthier countries of the old-NATO bloc, 30%+ more hours per year.
> Measuring by labor productivity-per-hour, the numbers are less-impressive-looking than GDP per-capita, because Poland's workers work far on-the-clock-hours than Western European workers. <
This is true of the US as well. The US has labor productivity numbers that nestle in there with the Germanics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity
Which is a pretty decent accomplishment given America's hauling around a pretty large diversity boat anchor. Still the US's rather substantial lead in GDP per capita--which I think does show up in "lifestyle"--comes from modestly longer working hours.
For the US--and Poland--it still counts. What you really want is to get there with higher productivity. But flat our higher living standards matter as well.
Of course, neither is what's most important.
“Diversity boat anchor”—love it!
On a related note, it’s hard to find accurate data, but a “White U.S.” country would be in the top 10 or 20 in the world in virtually every metric (education, health, income, crime, happiness).
Would be pretty easy to fill out the remainder of the top ten, I should think. The most striking one on an otherwise interchangeable list would likely be Japan
A fair bit of that increase will have come from companies to the west closing plants in higher-wage places and reopening in Poland. Quite often making products for say Germany or the UK, but not wanting to pay Germans or Brits to make said products.
Similarly large UK supermarkets like Tesco want Brits to shop in their stores, but they don't want to pay Brits to do their IT, so it's farmed out to India.
My flight from Warsaw to Los Angeles was full of Polish tourists. Many gave the impression they were more familiar with train travel than air travel. E.g., upon landing at LAX, they immediately stood up and crowded into the aisle and then were surprised that they couldn't disembark immediately.
Similarly, Krakow during the daytime, while the college students were sleeping off their hangovers, seemed full of patriotic small town Poles come to see their historic capital.
It seemed nice that, after a tough 20th Century and a lot of hard work in the 21st Century, the Polish masses are now able to afford modern luxuries like tourism to Disneyland.
Poland in the 1990s and 2000s was known for car thefts . And certain other forms of dysfunction frustrating to Westerners, but car thefts seem to stand out.
The rate of car-thefts was, amazingly, above 1.0% of all cars stolen/year. That sky-high rate held for year after year, back then. On the US scale, that would be competitive with the worst places during the early-2020s spike. But for Poland it was nationwide, and for a long time.
I've heard the car-theft rates by the 2020s in Poland are so much lower that it's no longer thought a serious problem. I suspect a lot of Poles continue to assume it is more of a problem, because these memories still sting. It was a national embarrassment, really.
How did Poland get rid of its car-theft problem? Maybe a story of the rising per-capita GDP more than any innovation by police or technology.
Hardly surprisng that more Polish tourists visit US than go the other way.
And it won't be for Disney, I bet all the Poles on your flight had previously taken the cheap 2 hour flight to Paris to go visit Eurodisney.
More that the Economy airlines that so many Poles fly on turn around very very quickly so they expect to get off pretty quick. This is common behaviour in Europe and of course we rarely wait to pick up checked-in baggage (which can cost 2x the price of the seat).
Why do you have 105 and not the 184 I calculate for Russia?
Russian GDP at PPP is up from $3.76 trillion in 2014 to $6.92 trillion in 2024 so up 84% in constant dollars.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.PP.CD?locations=RU
It's population has fallen less than 1%
I also wonder why anyone would do this calculation in GDP and not GDP at PPP.
And of course even PPP understates the value for money in Russia, particularly in military spending. Russia really does get much much much more bang for its buck than those mostly buying from US.
Also your suggestion that spending on military expenditure slows GDP growth is odd.
This seems counter to every historical military spending episode that I know of. Indeed many criticise the European willingness to spend on arms and promote war as simply a mechanism to steady the domestic economies.
There is currently a lot of talk about a failing Russian economy and a voter base turning away from Putin. It is an excellent method of encouraging countries to spend money on Ukraine and even send troops. But pure dishonest propaganda.
It's based on the World Bank's "GDP (current US$)" data-set, which is not PPP.
PPP is not suitable for head-on country-to-country comparisons of economic activity. Those who seek to make national-power comparisons, especially, avoid PPP and stick with nominal-exchange per-capita GDPs.
One of the big things you're seeing with PPP is a measure of "people being cheap." If "people are cheap," PPP is a lot higher because if you walk in with $10,000 you can get a lot more person-hours of work from the cheap people around. But think it through, a big PPP bonus is not a good thing, not a society you want to be in. Another way to say this is: a large PPP bonus tends to be a proxy for "Third World" norms in social-economic activity.
More importantly for data-comparison purposes, PPP fails to capture the competitiveness of products and services on the world market, so it's not adequate for comparing Poland and Russia or others if what we're after is some proxy for overall health of the economy. (Even Nominal will have its weaknesses and many small countries yield extremely distorted pictures for various reasons.)
________
Here is the World Bank data for Nominal GDP and population ("World Development Indicators," data release: July 1, 2025). A slightly wider comparison with Germany and Greece, and then making it reducing it again to the 2014=100 peg:
.
[Russia]
- 2004: $591B / 144.1m = $4,102
- 2014: $2,059B / 144.2m = $14,277
- 2024: $2,174B / 143.5m = $15,145
.
[Poland]
- 2004: $256B / 38.2m = $6,712
- 2014: $542B / 38.0m = $14,262
- 2024: $915B / 36.6m = $25,023
.
[Hungary]
- 2004: $104B / 10.1m = $10,291
- 2014: $141B / 9.8m = $14,352
- 2024: $223B / 9.6m = $23,311
.
[Germany]
- 2004: $2,852B / 82.5m = $34,567
- 2014: $3,966B / 81.0m = $48,971
- 2024: $4,660B / 83.5m = $55,800
.
[Greece]
- 2004: $235B / 11.0m = $21,449
- 2014: $234B / 10.9m = $21,475
- 2024: $257B / 10.4m = $24,752
.
_______
Pegging 2014=100 for Russia/Poland/Hungary:
.
[Russia]
- 2004: 29
- 2014: 100
- 2024: 106
.
[Poland]
- 2004: 47
- 2014: 100
- 2024: 175
.
[Hungary]
- 2004: 72
- 2014: 100.5
- 2024: 163
.
[Germany]
- 2004: 242
- 2014: 343
- 2024: 391
.
[Greece]
- 2004: 150
- 2014: 150
- 2024: 174
____________
In 2024, Poland exceeded Greece in per-capita GDP for the first time in modern / post-communist times. Greece was at 3x Poland in per-capita GDP back in 2004. Not as much of a catch-up effect as a Greece retrogressing after years of unsustainable and artificial growth.
Greece is a long-term basket-case, of course. It is still quite a ways off their 2008 peak. (2008 GDP/capita: $31,696, or 222 in our 2014=100 peg scale, obviously one of the most highly over-inflated when things crashed in 2008-09).
(How would the multiracial USA would deal with a Greece-style longrun economic meltdown?)
As for Poland's economic gains, they may be somewhat over-inflated by a temporary (non-productive) boom from its doubled military spending in recent years, as I wrote before. (Military spending boosts GDP but is not genuine growth. Like a jolt of energy from sugar and caffeine.) The catch-up effect is clearly at play at the macro level. For a long time, Greece (e.g.) was probably overvalued; Poland (e.g.) undervalued. It took a few decades for the numbers to swing around fully, but we're now there.
Poland vs Germany and catch-up: In 2004, Poland was at 20% Germany in per-capita GDP but reached 40% by the early 2020s. Its trajectory suggests it could rise to 50% Germany in this decade, but it may be in a bit of a growth-bubble (as with the mid-2000s).
Poland's "fundamentals" remain reliant on the German/EU economy and there is no way it could have performed so well without German good-will and EU stability and good-will). It's pretty clear why Poland is so pro-EU and pro-US, given these numbers.
Poland, however, has many signs of political immaturity, I think: even now it continues to pester Germany for huge sums of war reparations, a kind of political-emotional blackmail never meant to be settled but always used and re-used for leverage. It's short-sighted because it's been German (economic) good-will more than anything that's helped post-1990s Poland so much!
In the longer run, as AnotherDad might say, Poles and Germans are not so different and have many common interests.
"Poland's "fundamentals" remain reliant on the German/EU economy"
And the German/EU economy was reliant on cheap Russian energy, which they have chosen (with a bit of help from US or UK divers and explosives) to do without - what my mother would call cutting off their nose to spite their face.
Germany was the only world-class manufacturer left in Europe - they still had the steel, the chemicals, the engineering which has mostly vanished from the UK. They could even compete with the much lower cost Chinese. All that is increasingly going down the tubes. They'd already dumped nuclear in a hissy fit post-Fukushima.
"PPP is not suitable for head-on country-to-country comparisons of economic activity. Those who seek to make national-power comparisons, especially, avoid PPP and stick with nominal-exchange per-capita GDPs."
Sorry utter garbage.
If you are not using PPP you are an Economic illiterate.
Really can't be bothered to explain something so basic.
but hint - out the quote into an ai chatbox and ask "true or false and why?"
2% of Poland GDP is money transfer from the €U.
At one time Poland was a diverse place, the largest empire on the European continent, The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. All kinds of people lived there. It was an odd kind of empire because the kings were hired. Poles distrusted the government, so they enjoyed lots of freedom, even from taxes. One vote against a tax increase was all that it took to stop it. It was all called the "Golden Freedom." But, that did not sit well with the neighbors. The diversity undermined unity. The major powers Prussia, Russia and Austria attacked and partitioned it three ways. That is a lesson for the US.
Acquired diversity vs Imported diversity
Acquired diversity vs Imported diversity
They are both a bad idea and tend not to last. Though the imperial model--back in the day--certainly had examples with some staying power (Rome, Ottomans, Austria) it depends critically on the
a) not having--ergo suppressing--any surrounding state from credibly competing and hiving off chunks of your empire
b) not having--ergo suppressing--any nation/people within your empire from thinking "this sucks, we can run our own affairs better" or worse "this sucks, we ought to be running this joint."
Essentially the advantage of empires was mass. Mass has its virtues, but essentially empires--with no natural boundaries--mean continuous war. No boundary just "is".
Now of course--with modern mobility--the imperial model is even more fraught, because the imperial "citizens" can zoom--and will--zoom around anywhere within the empire bring their "diversity" with them.
What actually can be stable for a very long time is a nation state, where the state more or less squares up with an organic people and ergo has their loyalty.
Can be stable ... unless weirdos and loons go wreck it.
I asked chatGPT to tell me about long stretches of peace for empires and states that are essentially one people, and it agrees with you. The greatest empires manage double digit years of peace while the nation states have much higher numbers up into the 200s
Lesson is Libertarian Paradise = Geopolitical Roadkill ?
A quick (possibly inaccurate) bit of web research indicates that one vote from a noble could block any legislation and there wasn't much of a central government tax authority anyway. They still had a system in which nobles owned lands far away and they farmed out the tax collection in the arenda system and still had serfs. Are the taxes you refer to something that was collected by the central government from the nobles? Also they didn't maintain a standing army.
Looks like a fascinating period in European history.
I object.
Poland's 18th century constitution was so dysfunctional that it was an object of fascination to foreign philosophes who competed in proposing replacements (since it was hard to come up with anything worse.) Even that "interesting madman" Rousseau, for example, was inspired into flights of moderation and common sense when writing his proposed constitution for Poland.
As I understand it, the three partitions of Poland occurred before the written Constitution could be enforced.
In Vienna, the government-owned or monopoly-run organizations seemed extremely well-run, as if being a civil servant had been a prestigious career since the Austrian Empire.
In Poland, not so much. But the capitalist part of the economy was delivering nicely, as if only losers worked for the government in Poland. Stalin said imposing Communism on Poland was like putting a saddle on a cow.
Interestingly, Poland doesn't have much in the way of middle man minorities left (e.g., Jews) or even it's old indigenous bourgeoisie (Katyn), but it seems to have plenty of enterprising contractors fixing up decaying apartment buildings into sleek pensions for tourists.
Whether Poland will ever get past Catch-Up Capitalism and into taking the lead in fields, the way, say, the Dutch build the world's most advanced machine tools for making state of the art chips in Taiwan is a question that will be answered in the future.
O/T
Responding to your tweet* about the deaths of Assata Shakur and Sara Jane Moore, I was going to respond to your post from last Thursday** about Angela Davis by stating that Shakur was New Jersey's version of Davis. The reason I didn't was that in 1977 New Jersey actually convicted Shakur of a 1973 murder of a state trooper on the New Jersey Turnpike despite being represented by William Kunstler. Shakur was evented busted out of prison in 1979 before escaping to Cuba in 1984 where she was granted asylum and lived out the rest of her days.
While she is infamous in New Jersey, I don't know how well known she is in the nation at large, although her death did make the NY Times. As an aside her brother was Tupac's stepfather and she was his godmother, which is why they have the same fake last name
* https://x.com/Steve_Sailer/status/1971733672056488419
** https://www.stevesailer.net/p/how-many-honors-has-angela-davis
I (Canadian) wasn’t familiar with Shakur, although I’d certainly heard of Angela Davis. I’d forgotten about the would be assassin of Ford.
Moore was before my time, but adding to my previous response, the Chicago Teachers Union has cluelessly decided to honor Shakur on twitter* by saying Rest in Power, Rest in Peace, Assata Shakur 🕊️. The twitterverse has currently ratioed the tweet 8-to-1
* https://x.com/CTULocal1/status/1971749649951142009
Good grief! I think the people who run teachers’ unions are pretty radical.
There is a subway stop in Paris named after Louis Braille and I noticed in Istanbul a Walter Isaacson style pop biography of Braille. I think the blind have more juice around the world than they do in the U.S.!
With the phones we have these days I expect soon braille and guide dogs will be a thing of the past.
In Europe there are a great many people with black glasses and long canes. They have a dignity entirely disappeared from American life.
Old buildings are nice, but ultimately unimportant. What matters is actually preserving your people.
Poland hasn't put itself in soup that the Western Euros have. Though unfortunately it is subject to their silliness.
But in the other aspect of preservation--producing the next generation--Poland is crashing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate#Country_ranking_by_most_recent_year
Is its TFR much different from the rest of Europe's native populations?
Yes, is worse.
There's a blind woman who visits my local coffee shop. She's young and pretty. She speaks with a clear, carrying voice - refuses to hide. She laughs and takes social chances, making jokes with the baristas. I admire her quite a lot. Exceptional courage.
Have to tell you this, my friend's son made his debut for the Polish International football team last season. My friend is Ghanaian. His wife Polish.
I've known the family over 20 years.
OT: Did Antifa fire-bomb the tour-bus belonging to the rapper known as "Ice Cube"?
Reports say the bus had the word ICE written on it, was passing through Portland Oregon for a show, and, in a commotion, was engulfed in flames.
Try reading.
https://www.koin.com/news/ice-cubes-tour-bus-damaged-by-fire-while-in-portland/
"Portland Fire and Rescue confirmed that on Tuesday, the front passenger tire of a charter bus caught fire near Southwest Oak Street and Southwest Broadway."
A friend comments: "Sounds legit. (I hate it when my tire catches fire.)"
On topic: I recall Poland as having diversity in railway gauge. At some point in the Berlin-Grodno passage, the train was stopped for hours as every car’s undercarriage was traded out. This was in 1994. Can’t remember exactly where this happened; may have been just before the Belarussian border. Or just east of Warsaw? I have a feeling that such diversity was no one’s strength, if it was ever meant to repel invaders.
That was probably because railways built in Poland before 1945 likely used the UK/US/Western European standard gauge of 4' 8 1/2" rather than the Russian standard of 5', though Poland's shifting borders would have had an impact on that. It looks like most lines were converted to 4' 8 1/2" though one line was built with Russian 5' gauge in the 1970s.