Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by screcth 634 days ago
Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?

It's pretty condescending to expect a lecture from a foreign government official to be well received and to tell them something they don't already know.
1 comments
flanked-evergl 634 days ago
> Do you think that Pakistanis don't know already that their country is poorly run and that their politicians are corrupt and incompetent?

Given that the trajectory has not changed, I think they don't care to fix it. South Africans also know their government is corrupt, and they consciously vote for it. Whether this is similar in Pakistan I don't know, but clearly if they cared to change trajectory it would not get worse all the time.

link
pas 634 days ago
Look at Hungary. It's pretty well documented, as the cuckoo in the big EU nest.

It's economy is stagnating (of course, because of all the legalized corruption and nepotism, the ruling elite meddling in everything, misuse of EU funds, and the usual), and we have very good data about this. We can even have a nice "natural experiment", because Hungary joined the EU in 2004, then the current regime was voted to power in 2010 with 68% of seats (by 2.7M ppl, 52% of voters)

and then again in 2014 (2.2M ppl, 45%), 2018 (2.8M ppl, 49%), 2022 (3M ppl, 54%). Every time with 67-68% of the seats.

Very methodically people were very nicely brainwashed. After 14 years in government with "absolute majority" around 3M people still think that bad things are bad because of the mystical others. Due to the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine we now have a live action 1984 black comedy where "war is peace" is basically the state motto.

link
flanked-evergl 633 days ago
Hungary is doing about as well as Poland, almost to the dot - It's GDP per capita is within a rounding error of Poland's. Not saying it's great, but if Pakistan was doing half as well as Hungary, it would be an awesome place.
link
pas 627 days ago
> if Pakistan was doing half as well as Hungary, it would be an awesome place.

Of course, my point is exactly that, there's always scapegoats, and even though 1-2 percents over long term matters a lot, and people instinctively know that folks in richer countries tend to have it better ... hence why migrants did not stop in Hungary and went straight to Germany. And similarly, people risk a lot to get to the US, even though Mexico is amazing compared to - let's say - El Salvador 5 years ago.

So those 1-2 percents.

Poland's economy has been growing roughly 3times faster over the past year than Hungary's. (And before that Poland was usually 1+ basis points above.[0])

Poland's debt-to-GDP ratio is more than than 20 basis points lower than Hungary's.

Hungary's actual individual consumption is the last in the EU. [1]

But at least Hungary had the best inflation hump. [2]

It would be good to see Hungary springing back to life, but currently things are not great.

[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/cf98cf45-...

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/bookmark/e1be8012-...

link
acdha 634 days ago
Don’t care, or can’t? Here in the U.S. we have a high chance that the presidential race will be won by a convicted felon who tried to falsify the last election he lost and encouraged a violent attempt to change the results, shielded by a series of blatantly political court decisions, so I'm not sure we have much standing to criticize other countries’ governance.
link