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by The Wayfinder
A bigger number is not always an improvement. Ask anyone who has stepped on a bathroom scale. It tells one how much one weighs but gaining weight doesn’t automatically mean becoming healthier
For years, Sint Maarten has celebrated growth by counting visitor arrivals. Before another record is jubilated, one should ask whether records are broken, or whether something else is broken. One should not confuse volume with wisdom. It is easy to count. Becoming better requires thinking.
Sint Maarten may be measuring tourism arrivals more accurately than it measures whether its own people can afford to live here. Perhaps the most urgent statistic Sint Maarten needs is not: How many tourists arrived this year? But: How many working households cannot comfortably allow to live in Sint Maarten?
One should be careful about who are celebrated as heroes of economic growth. The person who brings the most visitors to the island may deserve applause, but not necessarily a medal. It does not automatically make the person a hero of national prosperity. Growth has a curious habit. It can become the enemy of the thing that made growth possible.
A tourism economy can announce record visitor numbers while many residents wonder: “If the economy is doing so well, why is my life becoming harder?” That question should especially worry every politician and policymaker. If economic growth becomes increasingly visible but its benefits are not widely felt, people will eventually ask: “The country is getting richer, but why aren’t we?” That question can become socially and politically explosive.
The economy may grow. Politicians like to open new buildings. New projects create photographs. Ribbon-cutting and ground-breaking ceremonies create headlines. However, ambition exceeding capacity is a fundamental problem; a growing gap between the ambitions a government has, and its capacity to deal with them effectively. Does Sint Maarten have more ambitions, responsibilities and problems than it has institutional capacity to manage? What if the honest answer is uncomfortably close to yes?
No one applauds the person who manages to cram twenty people into an elevator built for ten, especially not once the cables start making strange noises. An island also has a carrying capacity. Exceeding it should not be confused with progress. The word overcrowding may ring a bell. More visitors are wonderful, until the visitors become the problem.
Growth advocates and promoters can be doing what they sincerely believe is good for Sint Maarten while unknowingly contributing to a problem that eventually damages the very prosperity they are trying to create. Eventually, success can become the victim of its own success.
A captain who doubles the number of passengers on his boat is not automatically a genius or a visionary if the boat was designed safely for half that number. In fact, he has also doubled the chance that everyone ends up swimming.
A small island cannot grow indefinitely in volume. More visitors may also mean more pressure on the daily lives of residents. Sint Maarten urgently needs to begin thinking about tourism carrying capacity. How many visitors can it absorb without damaging the quality of life of the community? A country should measure its success only by how many of its people can afford to live with dignity within that wealth.
An economy can grow while inequality increases. The paradox of Sint Maarten is that it can appear prosperous. Yet simultaneously, a significant part of the population may be struggling to pay ordinary monthly bills. Poverty is not always visible. Sometimes it is a person with a job who cannot get ahead. A country can grow economically while becoming socially weaker. Are the people of Sint Maarten becoming more secure and more prosperous as the economy grows?
Social inequality and the falling into poverty of part of its residents is one of the most important issues. Sint Maarten will not necessarily become a poor country, but it could become a country with a growing divide between those who benefit from economic growth and those who merely watch it happen around them. That is socially dangerous.
The number could be uncomfortably high; possibly one-quarter to one-third of the population living either in poverty or close enough to it that one unexpected event could push them over the edge. The best available estimate: approximately 20–30%. A 27% household benchmark is serious enough that it should not be ignored.
How many working people earn less than what is necessary to maintain a decent standard of living? Poverty deserves much more urgent attention than it currently receives. The difficulty is that Sint Maarten does not have a recent, universally accepted official national poverty measurement. One cannot effectively fight poverty if one does not properly measure it.
Sint Maarten may have a large “working poor” population. The real issue is many people are not unemployed. They work. They may have one or even two jobs. Yet after paying for: rent; electricity; water; food; transportation; school expenses; healthcare; insurance; there is virtually nothing left.
They are not traditionally described as “poor.” But neither are they financially secure. They are economically fragile. One unexpected event can push them into crisis. That is a very different definition of poverty.
Tourism can produce record revenues while the people serving the tourism industry struggle to pay their rent. That is the contradiction Sint Maarten should urgently examine. One has become accustomed to measuring success by visitor arrival numbers. But none of these numbers, by themselves, answer the prosperity question.
A small country cannot afford a system in which: five departments are involved; three ministers have an interest; two committees are created; consultants write reports. Sint Maarten probably has enough reports to build a small library. What it needs now is a shelf marked: “Things We Actually Did.”
One should be careful who is celebrated as leader. The real hero is the person who understands when enough is enough and too little is too little and knows how to create more value. The essential question should always be: Who is responsible if it does not happen?
About The Wayfinder
A Wayfinder defines a role rather than a person. A Wayfinder is not a leader, a politician, or a critic. A Wayfinder asks questions, studies patterns, and searches for the safest and wisest course ahead. These essays are offered in that spirit—not as answers, but as invitations to think together.
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