Volledige column zonder betaalmuur 👇

Nieuwe column! Ik wilde eigenlijk over AI schrijven. Maar toen kwam Sammy Mahdi met een voorstel dat me eraan herinnerde dat niet alle bedreigingen voor onze sociale zekerheid artificieel zijn. Om de federale begroting te stutten wil hij een indexsprong alléén voor werklozen. Geen goed idee.

De Vlaamse regering besliste dat er bespaard wordt op het groeipakket. Ze bespaart daarmee op de periode die het cruciaalst is voor het verdere leven (de geboorte) en op de periode die het duurst is voor gezinnen (de jongvolwassenheid). Het zijn vooral de grote gezinnen die daar de dupe van zijn.

Wie? 😱

Ok! 👌

If I have one hope for the future, it is that you will speak up, and turn this unique combination of scientific rigour and societal insight into positive change. This is what distinguishes us from other sciences, and you should be extremely proud to have mastered this discipline.

To our graduates: you have both. You have received a strong education at the highest scientific standards, while being trained to see through the political, institutional, social and cultural mechanisms at play.

On all sides of this debate, academic standards were disregarded: in hiring, in evaluating the work, in the coverage that followed. High standards are our scientific guardrails. They are what protects us from irrelevance, and what allows us to speak with confidence and actually be heard.

However, if we want to be publicly involved in this and other debates, our answers have to be grounded in high quality research. This case demonstrated that the importance of upholding strict academic standards cannot be overstated.

This means that some of these fundamental questions stayed unanswered, and the focus remained on the individuals involved. Without the social sciences perspective, we haven't learned much.

These are questions about institutions and path dependency. Media logic and framing. Representation and discrimination. Political forces and power imbalances. These are the questions of our discipline. And in the public debate around this case, the social sciences were almost entirely absent.