"The outlook for Poland's aspiring artists is brighter today because the economy is in better shape than a couple of years ago, Kaminski thinks. But he doesn’t believe that Wandachowicz and his ilk have produced an entirely honest appraisal of the post-communist condition. Their understandable frustration at the lack of opportunities that came their way blinded them to the very real advantages they in fact enjoyed, in his opinion.
“My first play was staged two years ago, so you can imagine how much time I would have waited without earning any money. The choice I had was to either die of starvation or take on commercial work,” he says."
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The trouble with that article is that it's cultural in orientation, i.e. it has no statistics, charts and graphs. On one level you have the thirty-somethings who are just old enough to remember what it was like growing up in the bad, old days and having to stand in line for moldy potatoes, wait years for a car or an apartment and having to scrape just to survive. The "baby-boom" generation presumably grew up with much higher expectations and is less willing to compromise. I guess added to that is the fact that there are so much more of them and the labor market is glutted.