Make poverty history - done.

One thing I really respect Playboy for is the wide variety of people they give space to in their pages. I just got my copy of the August 2010 issue, featuring an interview with Cornel West, an outspoken African-American professor at Princeton. In that interview, he made the most astonishing comment I've ever read in Playboy.

Playboy: Won't there always be poor people in America?

West: It's hard to say. There are no poor people in Norway. There are no poor people in Sweden. It depends on how your society is organized.

I had to read that three times until I believed that it actually says what it says. A Princeton professor is seriously telling us that there's no poverty in Scandinavia.

I can't believe it. Has the man ever seen Scandinavia? At least a while back one of the things one might notice in Oslo was the heroin addicts living in the public parks. And I'm sure that if the esteemed professor cares to, someone can show him the homeless people living under the bridges in Stockholm.

The only way I can make sense out of his comment is that he doesn't understand definitions of poverty. Sure, neither Sweden or Norway officially have any percentage of their population under the international poverty line. That does not mean there are no poor people in those countries.

For example, according to Statistics Sweden, a government body, in 2008 every sixth child under the age of 6 in Sweden lives below the poverty line. Child poverty is also growing in Norway. Incidentally, out of a total population of around 300,000,000, the United States had 660,000 homeless people (Wikipedia: that's just about 0,002% of the population. Sweden, with a population of circa 9,000,000 had 17,800 homeless (thelocal.se): 0,0019%, or just about 0,002% of the population. It's funny that although Sweden does have much less poverty, absolute or relative, than the United States, the amount of homeless people is apparently the same.

Is Scandinavia really so mythologized in the United States that a university professor can say something like that with a straight face? Does he really imagine that the Scandinavian countries have come up with a magical formula to eliminate poverty completely?

Certainly I agree with his broader point, that to a large extent the amount of poverty in a society is a function of how the society is organized. But to say that there are no poor people in Sweden or Norway is just so downright ridiculous that I can't take the guy seriously.