And then there is this

And then there is this

14 February 2026

I read two news items side by side, and I cannot reconcile them.

In the Antilliaans Dagblad it was reported that medical specialists are now officially allowed to earn more. That would make it easier to attract and retain them here. In itself, that is understandable. Good specialists are scarce. Competition with the Netherlands and the region is strong. If we want high-quality healthcare, we must be willing to pay for it. I wholeheartedly grant specialists their improvement.

But alongside this runs the court case on indexing the AOV (old-age pension). A case that many had been waiting for. The hearing appears not to have gone well. It is possible that not the Sociale Verzekeringsbank but the Minister of Ministerie van Sociale Ontwikkeling, Arbeid en Welzijn (SOAW) should have been summoned. If that is so, the SVB could be declared inadmissible. The case would then collapse on a procedural technicality, while the underlying issue is a principled one: should AOV benefits be indexed so that elderly citizens do not steadily fall behind?

And yet I see much joy and relief about the income position of medical specialists, and remarkably little public outrage about the purchasing power of AOV recipients.

That is where it becomes uncomfortable.

We seem able to mobilize sympathy effortlessly for high earners — because they are “needed,” because they are scarce, because they do important work. But our elderly are needed too. They built this country. Their security of existence is not a favor; it is a moral and social obligation.

Curaçao has for years had high income inequality, with a Gini coefficient hovering around 0.5. That is significant. It means wealth is heavily concentrated, while a substantial group struggles to make ends meet. If AOV recipients structurally lose purchasing power because indexation does not take place, we are literally creating “new poor” — people who worked their entire lives and now slip into relative poverty.

What troubles me is not that specialists earn more. It is the asymmetry of empathy. Why so much energy to secure top incomes, and so little urgency to protect those at the bottom? Why is poverty repeatedly reduced to a statistic, while incomes at the top are treated as a crisis?

Perhaps that also explains why the Gini hardly declines. Inequality does not disappear by itself. It is addressed through policy, through choices, through priorities.

And ultimately, that is what this is about: choices.

Who do we protect first?

Miguel Goede