I presume there is no Polish equivalent to Midi train station and its "corridor of evil". <https://newsinfrance.com/in-belgium-the-brussels-midi-statio...>
Also retiring early is not about the money in your bank account around here. You retire early by using certain government schemes where you might qualify for early retirement by working a physical job, or by reducing your hours to 10 hours are week while getting a full subsidized salary.
I happen to know a few software Engineers living there.
Berlin is pretty expensive, and some had to live in more outskirt areas (Potsdam for example). But none were living in gettho tier neighborhoods.
[1] https://images.euronews.com/articles/stories/09/86/71/11/108...
That's because GDP measures how much you did in one year, and wealth is accumulated over centuries.
Using GDP to measure wealth is like using speedometer to measure distance. You can be the fastest on the road at the moment, but if you just started driving and people drove faster than you for 100 years it doesn't mean much.
You need to integrate it over time.
in the U.K - a polish skilled workers are choosing to remaining in Poland instead of moving to the uk.
for the US - a lot of firms are setting up polish offices - hence when you hear 'a.i' efficiency most of those jobs have moved to Poland or India. Whether it's big tech, big banks and small funded VC startups. What remains in the US are just senior+, staff software engineers.
A lot. About 1 percentage point of Polish GDP in 2025.
They also had a lot of government spending, with the 2025 budget deficit being 7% of GDP.
Minimum wage was raised with ~10% in January 2025.
There is an irony in people attributing it to conservatism/rightwing politics rather than pretty much the exact opposite. Spain is another example of economic growth in the EU.
Least controversial is considerations for their education and human development.
It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy and I wonder if that's where a lot of the discontent comes from. It seems like there a lot of micro-nations in eastern Europe that have outsized influence over the union as a whole.
Gdp is not really a great measure of how well an economy works for it's inhabitants, if it was we should all spend our time breaking each others windows.
Keep being smug, it just proves my point, Americans still think Arabs live in tents in the desert, Chinese live in the jungle and eastern European build houses out of cow dung and straw. Enjoy your 1m+ stick and cardboard mcmansion that won't last two generations
Even in Mississippi what you describe would not qualify as a "top of the line house". In fact that would be pretty average working class home.
The kind of homes a lawyer or doctor could afford to buy in low cost area like mississippi can easily be 2 or 3x that size and resemble small castles. Think elevators and wrap around double staircases.
Oh and I forgot, it passes passivhaus requirements
I wasn't trying to be smug, sorry it came across that way.
Some of these models are pretty modestly priced (~$500k USD) but more modern than any house you'll find in North America until you reach a price point in the several million range. Certainly higher quality, nicer and more modern than any McMansion.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Okoboji_IA...
This is largely lakefront property in a somewhat touristy area of my state, so that influences the prices a lot.
If MS spends more on insulin than an EU state it improves that metric which is the opposite of what we're trying to measure I imagine.
Would you give an example of when that has happened?
> It just seems like the EU is too top-heavy
The EU intentionally admitted many poorer countries, to promote freedom, security and stability in Europe in the long term. Without EU membership, they would be under pressure from Russia and others.
> discontent
What discontent do you mean? There's always something, of course.
I mean, Brexit was the ultimate discontent and it didn't just come out of nowhere. It's still very recent history and, as far as I know, the circumstances that caused it haven't really changed.
Then instead of accepting the changing circumstances of the world, it is blamed on a single entity “EU” that is single handedly causing all their woes. Just leave and your lives will be better. Well, they learned.
This is how you get people to vote for someone like trump. They claim it is all the fault of some X, get people riled up, promise to fix X, get voted, and then you have to actually make their lives better.
The majority of taxpayers wanted to stay. The majority of under 65s wanted to stay.
And of course, out of the middle class crisis in the 21st century. You have the same discontent outside the EU, except it doesn't get blamed on Bruxelles. That's how Trump gets elected, for example.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur, at least as far as Eurozone's anemic growth is concerned. France and Germany stagnating isn't caused by Poland or Romania growing. It is mostly their own internal systemic problems. There were times when German and Polish economies were both healthy, as little as 10 years ago.
Sweden, another rich EU member, should grow by healthy 2.2 per cent this year, but Sweden is a lot more willing to actually reform its way out of problems than Germany is. Smaller countries have less inertia in such situations, and more maneuvering space.
Yes, the States' GDP is ginormous, and yet it's basically a third-world country masquerading as a first-world one on most metrics that actually matter to people.
Things don’t look great for the poorest Americans, but the average American isn’t living a life that’s even remotely third world.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_regions_by_Huma... Guess France is a third world country too.
I can't find any info about paid vacation by country. Everyone wants to talk about legislated minimums, which doesn't tell the whole story. The US legal minimum is zero, but the average is definitely not zero. The top country by that metric is Iran, and some other countries near the top of the list include Cambodia, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Overall it appears to correlate very poorly with first-worldness.
Worked hours per year, the US is at around the same level as countries such as Italy, Australia, and Ireland, and substantially lower than places like Greece, Poland, and Taiwan.
Job security also appears to be on the same level as peers. According to https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/oecd-countries-by-job-se..., the US is a bit worse than Denmark and New Zealand, and a bit better than Ireland and Finland.
I'm not seeing it.
The average American has decent health insurance. Our system can be painful and I'm not advocate for it, but the average American is not going bankrupt due to medical issues.
Even then, there are many surprises in terms of what you have to pay yourself and how expensive certain things are. Basically any chronic disease will be very expensive. And don’t lose your job either because then you can kiss the insurance goodbye as well, kicking you even further down. Potentially deep into debt.
The thing is, most Americans do have good jobs (or are in families with one), and do have decent health care. Should people with shit jobs have shit health care? No, and it's very unfortunate that this is how things work. But that doesn't mean we all face bankruptcy for major medical issues. The number of people who do face that should be zero and it isn't, but it's also not the norm.
To be totally honest a lot of people in America don't apply for public benefits for whatever reason. Plenty of my colleagues decided to pay for cobra instead of using free Medicaid which has a zero copay in my state.
In another situation, my brother's high school friends dad was preparing to die from prostate cancer because he could afford treatment. My mom made him sign up for public benefits and they covered everything
The US system sucks in a lot of ways, but it works OK for most Americans. If you're very poor, you'll have Medicaid and it'll cost you nothing. If you're an average middle class person, you'll have decent health insurance and your costs will be affordable. There's a slice of people in the middle who don't qualify for medicaid but don't have decent health insurance, and they're going to have serious financial trouble. But most Americans aren't in that situation.
There's a tendency to look at the worst situations and assume it applies to everyone. How we treat the least fortunate is extremely important and I won't defend the US here, but there's a pretty big gulf between a significant minority who can face massive financial burdens from medical care, and "it's basically a third-world country...."
It's objectively not "working OK" for most Americans, especially when you consider how much you spend for subpar results.
Source: https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
Now you can blame it on bad lifestyle, addictions, car culture, crime rate, etc. All true, and idiotic healthcare system is indirectly influencing all of that.
EU life expectancy was 81.7 in 2024. Two years makes one of them OK and the other not? What do we call a place like Hungary which is quite a bit below the US here? Or maybe it's OK because they don't spend as much?
I also said for most Americans. Bad life expectancy is concentrated in the poorest Americans. Which is not a good thing to say about this country, but it does mean that most Americans live longer.
Again, I'm not a defender of our system. But the average American gets decent care and is not bankrupted by major illness.
I'm in the UK. The smartest developers I worked with in my ~20 year career were all Polish.
The hardest-working and most skilled tradespeople that worked on my houses were Polish.
Had a lunch in Warsaw with a German friend who had relocated there. He said it was more Conservative than Germany and there was more freedom of expression.
Over forty years of Communist rule and they were never able to pull them away from their commitment to the Catholic church. Also lots of excellent museums and large parks.
Or what aspects of conservatism, and what aspects of freedom of expression, are you referring to here?
Depends on the status quo, I suppose.
Conservatives = resist change Progressive = encourage change
and change goes both ways -/+ right? We know this.
In Poland, they want to have a place to call home that feels European, feels Western. In the UK if you say that, straight-to-jail.gif or less flippantly, threatened and shunned by either people who don't want you to have an opinion or people afraid of them.
It's a sorry state of affairs.
And abortions due to fetal abnormalities are no longer permitted in Poland.
Isn’t that at odds with „conserve freedom“?
I assume that continues when the baby is born and people have to sacrifice their rights to feed the baby. Not in as extreme a way as bodily servitude, perhaps just taxation of the work they do to provide food, shelter, healthcare.
Protecting humans from being killed is protecting rights of individuals, not removing the rights of the would be murderer.
There is a clear way you can say banning abortion in about protecting rights. It is fine if you disagree, but I don't think there is any point in this conversation since you cannot even understand where people are coming from and just assume the worst in others.
Please remember that the US constitution is a slaver's document written to enable minority rule of slaver states at the expense of everyone else hence why it took nearly 80 years for the first republic to utterly fail and make way for the better second founding.
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/police-make-30-arr...
Is the boom related to the removal of PiS in 2023? Is it linked to Ukraine (businesses and people relocating across the border? Arms sales?)
During pandemic (which also happen during the right-wing coalition govt) public TVP2 channel ran breakfast TV segment where one of questions was if audience should kneel at homes during the broadcast of the Mass if they decided to "participate".
https://natemat.pl/303229,czy-klekac-przed-telewizorem-w-cza... (in Polish obv)
Still, this isn't as easy to digest as it may seem - you'd of course have to study our history to understand that connection to faith.
" Warsaw with a German friend who had relocated there. He said it was more Conservative than Germany and there was more freedom of expression." In Poland the constitutional court isnt working very good because of the former authoritarian Orban like PiS government. In case of a next Pis government only the European courts might help in case of a freedom of speech matter.
In Germany the constitutional court does work.
"they were never able to pull them away from their commitment to the Catholic church. " They do. Poland and especially the younger generation is securalising and also becomes more open to queer people. Also you can ask catholic officials how much they are willing to do for freedom of expression of atheism ("crazy") and gay men ("perverts").
And the people I've had the luck of meeting at a very early age during a student exchange lived up to that.
Poland is an indispensable pillar of the EU, and integrates countries such as UK, Italy, Germany, Greece, Austria, Romania, and many more countries in the east (I just don't want to list all of them here, because it's a slippery slope).
And Poland as a society has gone through a hard struggle to earn their very own power, stance and leverage.
I doubt I'd have gotten to visit Poland without the EU so far (I'm not a frequent traveler...).
And Poland has, even when they had a government being at odds with the EU, never acted in some openly destructive way inside the EU. They always made clear what they want to be a part of, and what they don't want, and then, honestly followed through.
Not having the Euro or being more conservative is completely fine, as long as basic human rights aren't violated in a comparatively excessive way, and my impression of Poland and Polish people has always been a very friendly one.
I was in Łódź at the time, and there was a well thought-out program to connect the students, who were quite disconnected in the early 2000s, and had wildly different living situations + language barriers between each pair of students were also very diverse.
Credit to the EU for funding such a program is very much appropriate.
Poland also has 4x the population of Switzerland.
Normalise the GDP and then let’s start having a conversation. Look at the PPP.
The map at the bottom correctly excludes Switzerland. It does however include Norway and Iceland.
Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein (EEA), and Switzerland ("Special Relationship") are basically EU in all but final official membership. They even contribute to the EU financially.
But it does look that they probably meant Sweden (according to the text of the article)
