Guest blog by Robert Moldach
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 61 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2021. These are their learning journey stories.
I am fortunate to live in times when Europe and Poland in particular have undergone an incredible transformation. As a child, I remember the street protests my parents took part in, their talks about the Warsaw Pact troops invading Czechoslovakia, and the anti-Semitic campaign of the late 1960s. My student years coincided with the Solidarity uprising and the martial law that followed. The beginning of my academic career fell during a time of darkness and total economic collapse of the system. Then, in 1989, came the country’s revival, changes in the political system, and economic revolution. We joined the OECD, NATO, and eventually became a member of the European Union recording an extraordinary rate of economic growth. And while this is an undeniable success, along the way we made countless mistakes, some of cardinal importance. We could have approached challenges better such as social inclusion, coherent territorial development, utilization of existing economic potential, foreign direct investment, and finally understanding the sense of us.
The lesson on the “Sense of Us” is in fact the single most important thing I take away from the HKS Leading Economic Growth program. Are we Poles or Europeans, resettled from the eastern borderlands or residents of this land for centuries, Catholics or communists disguised as democrats? And while we intuitively feel how it is, or rather how it should be, we are divided and polarized as a nation in probably every possible direction. The thing that economically we continue to grow at an above-average rate does not change the fact that our economic vehicle is experiencing cracks, fractures and tears that are increasingly difficult to mitigate.
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