Firebird Thu Sep 17, 2020 10:56 am
Odin of Ossetia wrote: Kimppis wrote: Odin of Ossetia wrote:
In 2017 the "free market economic miracle" of Poland is only doing a little better than the South-Eastern Europe, without the wars that the former Yugoslavia had to endure (Croatia and Poland are on a similar level).
Back in the Communist period Poland was in the top 10 of the most industrialized countries in the world, and that after suffering horrendous destruction during the Second World War.
Doing a little better than South-Eastern Europe is actually a big improvement, though. The remaining gap between it and Western Europe is mostly due to the communist era, do you not realize that?
Cherry picking Croatia is also misleading (Slovenia would've been even worse), it obviously suffered much less than Serbia, for example.
Eastern European per capita GDP is also quite impressive by global and historical standards and the region (including Poland) is generally growing faster than Southern Europe.
"In the top 10 of the most industrialized countries"... yeah, sure. What's your source? And most of those industries were uncompetitive.
It is even worse in Poland than that map shows.
That is because the map shows the averages, not the medians, and medians would have been far more accurate in showing the actual situation in Poland. The reason for that is that there is a huge gap between the rich and the rest of the society in Poland; the small minority of the rich with their immense income inflate the average. I heard that the general population in Poland is actually poorer than the general population in Bulgaria, which officially is the poorest EU member country.
And during the 1980's Poland was tenth most industrialized country in the world, which was impressive.
Slovenia got lucky with its treatment by the West, it got better treated by the West as a reward for helping to destroy Yugoslavia; it was the first republic to secede. Also, its separatist war was very short lived and it caused almost no damage and no casualties to the Slovenian population as most of those killed were Yugoslav troops and foreign truck drivers.
"Averages" are wrongly taken as "typical".
For instance, I know a group of about 18 guys who are around the same age.
In around 2010 their earnings were around:-
1 on 1m GBP, 1 on 300k GBP, 1 unknown salary, 1 on 175k or so, 12 were on 48k or so average, 1 was on 30k and 1 was on 18k (and he was in London too!)
So one person pretty much earned as much as the rest combined. Which meant the average was double what it would otherwise have been.
Additionally, most people were WAY WAY WAY down from the average. So the average was an utterly meaningless statistic.
Furthermore in Britain, most good salaries are a fcuntion of rich, connected parents, not skills or hard work.
Young people go into the workplace thinking "the average salary is xyz". But in truth, most people will only ever earn quite a lot less than the "average".As shown by the group I actually know.
Its a major problem in many economies due to Neoliberal economics and won't go away soon... if people remain asleep.