8% Poor? Or a Comfortable Figure?

14 February 2026

According to the recent report of the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, 7.9% of the population is multidimensionally poor.

At the same time, 30.4% of households live below the income poverty line.

That difference is not a detail. It is politically relevant.

The Comfortable Number

A poverty rate of 8% sounds manageable.

It suggests the problem is concentrated, contained, and controllable.

For politicians, that is a reassuring narrative.For those who are (still) doing well, it confirms that society is broadly functioning.

But that 7.9% only emerges after:

Anyone just below that threshold does not count.Anyone struggling financially but avoiding multiple structural deprivations does not count.

In this way, poverty becomes smaller — not necessarily through manipulation, but through definition.

What Do People Actually See?

We see:

Meanwhile, income inequality remains high.

The Gini coefficient in Curaçao hovers around 0.5 — internationally considered a high level of inequality.

What does the MPI report say about that?

Very little.

The MPI measures cumulative deprivation, but it says little about the distribution of wealth and power.

You can have a relatively low MPI and, at the same time, a highly skewed income distribution.

In other words:

You can count few “multidimensionally poor,” while the gap between top and bottom continues to widen.

Technocracy and Framing

The report is methodologically sound.

But it is also technocratic.

It reduces social reality to measurable thresholds.

And once a percentage is on the table, the debate shifts from lived experience to calculation.

Anyone who says that more than 30% live in poverty is then accused of “going against the data.”

But numbers are not laws of nature.

They are the result of choices.

And choices have consequences.

The Uncomfortable Question

Perhaps

Miguel Goede

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