Poland's economics and education against the background of the world

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Rofl what are you talking about brake on growth? Oecd just revised its 2018 figure of gdp growth from 4.2 to 4.6% - a phenomenal rate for a developed country.


USA, not Poland. It is not polands concern. Besides, the migrants can go to wealthy neighbors like saudi Arabia, Qatar, uae but guess what even their fellow arabs dont want them and cite security concerns as their main concern. Poland has nothing to do with it.


I know its too bad poland stopped giving them visas.. freaken beta journos from germany had to ruin a good thing even though nk runs hostels and restaurants in Germany - but that's okay in their eyes I guess. I could've used a few in our metal fabrication shop. They're great welders and they don't complain.

And actually r and d spending is gradually increasing according to paih. Yes it's below the eu western nations but it is nonetheless increasing as the economy grows. Much of that comes from the it sector. Poland is not wealthy enough yet to gamble with enormous r and d budgets that provide little to no immediate value. It's not going to spend money on projects like particle colliders when the country literally just became classified as developed a year or two ago. Unless you want poland to be like north Korea who has a huge R and d budget (mostly on nukes and missles) while it's citizens eat grass. Same with USSR, it spent a ton of money on r and d because it was a different system. It wasn't concerned about shareholder value. Now it's a balancing act, r and d is essentially gambling and If you can't afford to lose the money, you dont gamble. That's why R and d is the first thing to be cut when revenue and profits decrease. R and d doesnt pay the bills today and it doesn't create any immediate shareholder value which is all markets care about. Poland could make the cure for cancer today and it wouldn't mean anything for the economy if a polish company can't make money off of it tomorrow. That's the capitalist system. Like with every business decision, r and d is subject to pros and cons, roi, etc.

Besides, poles take a far more practical view towards r and d thats more similar to russia and China. Instead if creating new things, they copy ideas, manipulate them, and reverse engineer. They've done this with cars, medicine, computers, television sets, tanks, helicopters etc since the prl days. You will see r and d grow from foreign companies using cheap labor esp in it, but not from polish companies anytime soon. It's not ready for that.

And yes I agree that academia isnt competitive in poland, atleast not at the university level. And again that comes back to money. Professors in poland make in a month what german professors do in a week. Academia has always been like that. Teaching simply isn't regarded as a high paying noble career like in the West. Yes there are wonderful professors who care about their work more than money as in ebery country, but the majority nonetheless have mouths to feed so money is important to them.

Yes, but the brake on growth is labour - that is also the OECD's assessment. The labour market is fast tightening, creating wage inflation and workforce shortages which are predicted to get worse. That is holding back even greater growth. Although Poland is not quite fully developed as a country - it is still building infrastructure and opening up new areas of the economy/country, hence the rapid growth. Depopulation, brain drain and barriers to incoming talent threatens that.


You're missing the point. You have to build and invest in the infrastructure (physical and social) or it will never happen. R&D is a competitive field. With Brexit, if Poland had any sense it would be pouring money into universities, tripling salaries and flinging open the doors to anyone with a PhD, running English as a parallel language in the education sector, and massively cutting red tape for start-ups. But it isn't, so Finland and France are doing it instead and poaching some of the best talent and wealth-creation in the world, while Polish universities and institutional structures are still run as if they're stuck in the 1950s.

The British university sector is one of the biggest drivers of the 5th largest economy in the world (you could say the same for California). That didn't happen by accident. It happened because of policy. Now that policy is being forcibly changed (Brexit), it should be boom time for competitors and growing economies like Poland. Instead, it's still pushing its best talent abroad and making itself highly unattractive for anyone to invest their talent there. It's not just African migrants that Poland repels - it's virtually everyone in the European tech/academic sector too. That aint good for developing your economy beyond Korean tomato pickers.

And, in all seriousness, are you really comfortable with North Korean people being used as slave labour in Poland (or anywhere), with their lives and money controlled by a govt minder? I mean, I'm sure you have some humanity. These are people, working like slaves in Poland. You know it isn't right.


And those are low wage manufacturing economies. Poland can't compete with that because it doesn't have the people, and is still leaking people at an alarming rate. The UK and USA were also low-wage manufacturing economies once, but they have developed past that, which went hand-in-hand with increased living standards - it's now Poles that do factory work in the UK, and Ukrainians that do it in Poland.

To maintain that kind of economy and growth, Poland will need to keep wages low to remain competitive, yet it will also need to maintain the labour force. It can only do that by immigration - by contuinually importing people who will work for low wages while the Poles take the management roles and living standards rise. You must know this, with your business head on.

So unless Poland wants to face up to becoming an economy reliant on low-wage immigration from southenr Europe, then Asian, then Africa, it will have to develop into services, tech and R&D. Which means investing in universities, cutting red tape, and adopting a globalised model (open doors to skilled immigration, welcoming society, simple bureaucracy, ease of language).

The alternative is to peg Poles into low-skilled, low wage jobs with stagnant living standards, which wont work on election day. So Poland needs to develop its policies fast, because at the moment it is very confused and is relying on current growth (boosted by EU infrastructure opening up the country and access to EU markets) which wont be sustained in the medium term.

neoliberalism can only exist with some large group of people being cosisgned to the 'low cost labor' bin, neoliberals are very enthusiastic about low cost labor (but somehow don't want to be that themselves)

Yes, importing people who will WORK... not migrants who say 'I do no like job, I student - no job' or 'this is a full time job, can you stand for 8 hours and be here at 7 am? - no, no 6 hours is okay.. oh 7 am?! but bus come late, daughter needs food, no, no 7 am.'

And that's why Poland chose to import 2 mln ukranians instead of even a few thousands economic migrants that other countries wanted to get rid of because they weren't getting a benefit from them either...


Again, Poland's R&D increases proportionate to its economy, as with most democratic capitalist countries. Poland cannot afford to triple salaries for all teachers and build particle colliders or send research ships to map the Baltic sea floor, or go to the jungle and collect samples to turn into future medicines as it does not have the money to spend on that right now. When it does pursue such projects, generally in very limited amounts that type of academic research is done in conjunction with other universities, companies, governments even, - especially western ones. Even the best business school in Poland, SGH, does an English program with University of Quebec - not its own, as it does not yet have the money or necessity to develop such a program. Its no different with anthropology, medicine, IT, etc.


And like every business decision, whether it's to purchase/sell a plant, hire more staff, increase/decrease the marketing budget, etc R&D too is primarily a business decision in a capitalist society when made by corporations, not an altruistic one as with say research universities - especially in poorer capitalist societies such as Poland's. The only reason why Ford is investing tens of billions in R&D isn't because they care about the environment and want to reduce the planets' dependency on oil - no it's because it will bring them more money. They fell behind in the electric/hybrid car game and now must spend a bunch of money to develop new lines in order to recapture that market share. It's no different with R&D in Poland - if a company doesn't think they'll get return on a particular project they're not going to invest in it. Why do you think that pharma doesn't create 'cures' for diseases? It wouldn't pay nearly as much as treatments.

You forget one key thing - Poland has gone through everything from being one of the largest countries in Europe to being totally off the map, from very wealthy to very poor and everything in between. Poles got a taste of the open borders, the cutting red tape, globalization and all that jazz with PO. And guess what? They rejected it. While their economy was growing and all these reports saying that Poland is now doing so well, the average person didn't feel it. That is why they chose protectionism this time around.

Of course Poland can afford it. It is now an OECD developed nation, as you said yourself. If Finland can afford it, then so can Poland. You've been talking about the rapid growth.

But Poland is making choices of where it allocates investment. It can afford to fund Tadeusz Rydzyk's private college, which doesn't generate many spin-off companies or wealth generation, I'm guessing. So it's not a question of money, it's a question of policy.

In any case, investment in universities and R&D pays for itself, it generates wealth, as companies relocate to tech parks, build support industries, non-EU students pay handsomly to attend courses, local communities benefit from high-skilled and high-spenidng workers and postgrads relocating there from home and abroad, spin-off companies generate patents and products. There is no reason why Poland couldn't adopt such a model, that it does not is a matter of choice - social as well as economic. Poland is a hostile place to live if you're not Polish or don't look/sound Polish, and parts of Poland are hostile if you're Polish but not from there - there's a lot of unnecessary friction to getting by in everyday life.


That's rather putting the cart before the horse, isn't it. You know yourself that you have to invest up front in order to grow.


And that's why international investors and research talent are leaving or not coming. It's not just the economic protectionism, it's the social protectionism too (right down to the attitude of bureaucrats or shop workers). It's not sustainable if continued growth is the aim.

Not 'consigned', but rather the opposite - lifted up. The large pool of low cost labour is imported in most countries, who then work their way up the social ladder. The alternative is to export your low-skilled jobs to poorer countries, thereby raising their economic standards too. The model works so long as there is continued growth and cheap labour available somewhere in the world that you have access to.

It's rather the communist and protectionist models that 'consign' people to low-skilled jobs for life. Borders are closed to outsiders, so your only pool of labour is home-grown, and to keep it cheap you have to keep their living standards and life expectations low. A land of 'happy peasants'.

In theory, yes. In practice, not always. Third generation Mexican Americans have worse education and economic outcomes than do the first generation. What are the statistics of third and fourth generation Middle Easterners and North Africans brought to Europe to be cheap labor?


What's the steady state end game?

can afford can mean various things not just being able to finance something as you probably know


why do you actually bother - did you bother the same when PO was in power or was everything rose petals for you back then

Good question, although there is always going to be some part of the world where times are tough and people want to leave, or govts want investment. Look at how Spain and Greece's fortunes have turned around in 10 years. Italy could be next, maybe the UK or USA is the govts there continues with self-harming policies. As long as some economies are on the up and others are on the slide, there will always be labour moving by osmosis.


I bother because I engage with the Polish academic and research sector quite a bit, and have a stake in it, and becasue i think it's important - Poland has some very good scientists, but their working conditions, rewards and social standing are very poor. Science and research is an international community, and many people know each other.

As I said in an earlier post in this thread, this has long been an issue for successive govts in Poland - so stop playing your partisan games with me, and instead focus on the issue raised. However, that said, things have definitely got worse under the current regime, for the reasons I also pointed out earlier. The sector needs reform to allow more freedom and openness to the international community (academic and business), but instead it is getting top-down suppression through nativist policies that further isolates the sector and puts up barriers or disincentives to collaboration and incoming talent.

They may have a point.

In the US, with the immigrants and the H1-B's still pouring in, American kids know that competing with them while paying off student loans is going to be hard.

So they avoid going into STEM's. Then, the US corporations apply for more H1-B's. So the locals stay away from science and engineering even more.

In engineering, it's called positive feedback. Unfortunately, there is nothing positive about positive feedback. Avalanche is positive feedback.

If the US had brains, it would not allow any foreign students in, especially from the enemy countries like China, and stop all immigration.

I am not trolling. I mean it. The fact that I am an immigrant is irrelevant to the issue.

Many of our students cannot compete anymore because our school system is crap. When Betsy is done with it, American kids will be the future farm workers of the world.


You want to take away a big chunk of profit from our colleges and make them even more expensive for our kids? Tsk, tsk...

No. It's the foreign students with boatloads of cash that bid up the prices.

Just look at the stats of who attends the US universities. Like Berkeley, Harvard, etc.

If our skools are krap, fiks them. If your kids were failing classes, would you hire a tutor or replace them with a couple Chinese geniuses who do algebra and play violins at the age of 3?

No, not really. Even simple state universities now charge an arm and a leg for tuition.


No chance. Teacher unions prevent that.

Oh it absolutely is..go to any half decent college and a huge chunk of the students are wealthy Asians esp from China


All indicators show otherwise - lower unemployment, huge gdp growth - nearing 5% which is absolutely phenomenal, tons of new jobs, higher wages, more tax revenue than ever, higher birth rates, poles moving back due to new opportunities esp from uk.. yeah... polands doing much worse lol

.... And I bet pis will win the next election seeing as how distant 2nd po, who poles do not trust, would have to double their support just to come close and more than triple it to beat pis

Foreign students are NOT responsible for increasing tuition costs. The real reasons are student loans and the fact that high tuition costs enables colleges to recruit the exact type of students they want. There's a ton of literature about this out there, if you're interested.

You know that I meant worse for the university and R&D sector. Researchers tell me that it feels like it did in Communist times.

They're not the only responsible party, but due to the laws of sheer and demand they certainly contribute to increased costs. And most average/upper unis play a balancing act between taking in minorities esp athletes who have poor test scores esp of they went to a ****** high school but are good in football basketball or whatever, local kids who have high test scores but maybe dont have a ton of money to go so are offered grants and scholarships like in my case, and asian kids who barely know English but won't bat an eye at the 50k a year tuition. I had the misfortune of having such an Asian kid in my group an mba class last semester. I literally had to write out his presentation for him and read it verbatim because I wasn't going to allow some dude who speaks English at a 1st grade level to lower my grade and **** up my grant

Colleges are first and foremost a business. Always remember that. You could be a genius and go to some top school and boost their averages but if you can't pay theyll take some average kid who can over you or a black dude who is 7 feet tall and will play bball and make the school millioms while the teachers pass him in his parks and recreation or sports management major

Dirk, you don't seem to know much about this. You're thinking of American 'colleges' - it's very different in Europe, there isn't the college sport tradition (except for rowing at Oxford/Cambridge in the UK). Universities are not feeder academies for professional sports teams like they are in the USA.

There are also no tuition fees at Polish universities for EU citizens - the same as in many European countries. International students pay fees, but these are very low - about 2-3k US dollars.

Universities in Poland get most of their funding from the govt, as a block, which is directly related to their research ranking. Individual researchers and depts get additional fees for every scientific publication, paid on a sliding scale according to the journal's ranking by the Minister.

So if you are a 'genius', as you put it, then you are worth far more to a university than an international student, as you could publish 3-4 papers per year and earn the dept double or triple what the student pays in fees.

That is the funding model.

I should also say that govt funding is dependent on the number of students who are admitted to the course. The other big block of funding is from the winning of research grants.

Individual student fees, international or otherwise, are a negligible part of the income.

No **** I'm talking about us unis... The best.uni system in the world, more top unis than all of europe combined.

More of the best universities, but it's arguable whether it's the best system, due to the fees and access. You said yourself that it's corrupted by dullard jocks.

And the US has an awful low of garbage universities too. The UK system is similar - high fees (but not so high as USA) and without the jocks, and a high density of uni's that range from global top 5 to garbage. But the reason that the USA and UK dominate the world university rankings is because of their relatively open borders for academics, high degree of govt funding, low bureaucracy (promoting business links), and use of the English language. That's policy decisions.

That's the point I was making about Poland. Though at least the benefit of Poland is that you can get a poor degree from a poor uni and it hasn't cost you anything. Whereas in the USA or UK you will still pay a fortune for a poor degree that's worse than from Wroclaw or Siedlce.

Yes, but nonetheless us has more top schools than any other nation or even continent. Just the 8 ivies alone outnumber the top eu schools - which for now only has a half dozen or so good schools thanks to the UK belonging in it.


I'm aware. My dumbass cousin keeps asking me for money to study some bullshit in newcastle. I love the guy but he has two left hands.


You still have to pay for grad degrees and the bs private schools growing like mushrooms on sh1t. Sgh when i visited quoted me 30k zloty (and an additional 9k usd if I chose English mba) which to a westerner is super cheap but to an average pole making 4k a month is still a pretty big sum.

CasualObserver is a traitor liar. He is creating a thousand pseudo-arguments always with the final petty interest of tripling his own salary using money from taxpayers. Here in my Country there are thousands of mediocre people like him, the communist party bought the artists, the parliament, the members of the university, the businessmen, the philosophers, the teachers, the media, the journalists. The country was divided bordering on a civil war.

All these mediocre people worked for the party spreading cultural Marxism, anti-christ religions, anti-white ideology, drug apology, mass immigration, land invasion. The schools were turned into centers of doctrine, destroying the education of millions of young people, putting millions to receive government money and using it to win votes.

CasualObserver is not on the side of the common Pole man. He is a traitor who has money as god. A shame.

Hi Crow (you really do make it obvious, y'know),

Sorry to disabuse you of your prejudice, but my salary is not paid by Poland, and I am not a Polish citizen, so I am a traitor to no-one and don't need a tripling of the salary.


Well I am none of those, so I'm not sure what is your point (assuming that your brain had arranged the thoughts into a sensible order in the first place)...

And we all know that "your country" (Serbia) is a genocidal sh1thole, so I'm not sure that the world wants to take any lessons from Serbia, apart from how to murder people and get bombed back to the 1930s by NATO. Even PiS in Poland still stands with NATO and the UN against Serbia...every single time. Sweet!

" tripling salaries and flinging open the doors to anyone with a PhD, running English as a parallel language in the education sector, and massively cutting red tape for start-ups."

Naaah, they should be cutting the red tape on the whole public education and university system as a whole not just opening **** up for the big dawgs or the wannabes or the new wave or the pH.Ds as you called them but people with potential like me who are probably the most creative person this forum has ever since and my art is mostly self trained. By the way, the red tape i mean is their stupid entry exams and how they only have stupid windows like one or two hrs to take them on one particular date. this sort of red tape doesnt exist in the u.s. that I am aware or that always kept me from even trying to get a masters here plus i cant deal with polish normies and i can just learn design and illustration on my own anyway or via udemy cant I? look at anna spysz. but this is the sort of red tape they should cut also their stupid high level bureaucratic language and superiority complex or elitism they think polish is like some super language everyone should be linguists at and act stupid like they cant understand something when thy clearly can if you dont talk like them. thats who they should be cutting or firing those old uzendowce and uzendowa kultura. plus i can go on and on. its like they want as few students as possible in the warsaw uw or act like they are elitist and even have stupid requirements like learning multiple books by heart just to get a masters in journalism when their country alone isnt important enough and this wont attract foreign journalists or those deported wanting to get a masters in polish will it? but now im becoming a self trained illustrator anyway and am already a master in graphic design.

instead of some ph.Ds they should attract more artists and free thinking people and those with a creative ehe maybe they can change this stupid roughneck culture a bit no?

" while Polish universities and institutional structures are still run as if they're stuck in the 1950s."

baada bing baada bong bungo right here ladies and gentlemen. and you people wonder why i stopped my education in the us and never got my masters here in all these yrs? and you wonder why im stuck in such a backwards country i was deported to?

instead of some ph.Ds they should attract more artists and free thinking people

LOL and the phds people go to the USA and make over 250k usd a month, no wonder as they educate the leave Poland, I know a guy from Olsztyn in nj.

yea but their lives are boring. they have no fulfillment or create anything. instead they are corporste ****** bought and sold on wallstreet and clogs in the capitalist machine. They have no control of what they produce as they have some ******* telling them what to do all day behind their shoulders and basically have to kiss up to them like slaves.