Beyond the Crisis

Beyond the Crisis

3 November 2025

It’s Sunday, November 2, as I prepare my writing for Monday. Sunday inevitably turns into Monday, and every week begins with the same choice: look back or move forward. I could, once again, hit the reset button and revisit the crises of recent weeks — the political crisis, the climate crisis, the integrity crisis, and the inequality crisis. But the thought of doing so wears me out. Instead, I decide to move ahead and open one of the books from my recent reading list: De crisis voorbij: Recepten voor een betere economie by Pieter Hasekamp (Hasekamp, 2024).

I must admit, I picked up the book mainly because of its title — Beyond the Crisis. The author, director of the Netherlands’ Central Planning Bureau (CPB), has compiled a collection of his columns. That already makes it interesting to me, as I’ve been advocating for a similar institution on Curaçao for more than twenty years.

It’s not an easy read; the short columns make it feel fragmented. (I often write in that same style myself — now I can see how it feels from the reader’s side.) The book is divided into three sections: Among Economists, Crisis and the Compensation Society, and Recipes for a Better Economy.

The central message is clear once you look beyond the format. Hasekamp argues that the Netherlands has become a compensation society — a country where every problem is patched with short-term fixes rather than long-term solutions. Governments keep slicing small bits (“kaasschaafbeleid”) from every budget, avoiding real choices. His plea is to shift from crisis management to future building.

Several ideas stand out. We must focus on the long term — on 2050, not just 2025. We can’t predict the future, but we can build scenarios. The book deals with productivity, innovation, education, aging, and healthcare, and the balance between profit, people, and planet — what Hasekamp calls “broad prosperity” and inclusion.

His main point: we have to make choices. We cannot do everything at once—no more “cheese-slicer” policies or endless compensations.

And what do I take from this for Curaçao? Precisely that question: What do we want to be in 2050? What choices are we willing to make to get there?

Maybe it’s time for Curaçao to build its own Central Planning Bureau — not to predict the future, but to prepare for it. Because the real test of leadership, whether personal or political, is not how we handle crises, but how we move beyond them.

Miguel Goede