I’m writing a small thing on poverty in Norway for a class I’m taking. One of the richest countries in the world and our poverty problem (and since I’m going to become a librarian, why a library is so important for poor people).

The thing I have a hard time wrapping my head around is the numbers I find.
We have no poverty of the kind you find in some countries, no people living on less than a dollar each day. That is almost the only data that is completely reliable.
Everything else is numbers where they put the parameters for the numbers such that it makes no sense.

You don’t have a car = poor
You can’t eat meat/fish every other day = poor
unless you happen to be a student, or on a social welfare program, then you are automatically excluded from the statistics

After doing a bit of searching I found that about 11% of the population is what the EU would call poor. That translates to about 8600kr a month for a person living in a couple and 11 600kr for someone living alone.

But, no… The eleven percent is the people that were poor for the span of a full year. At any given point about 1/5 of the population has less than the required amount of cash.

The numbers in cash seems pretty large, and probably are. But not if you consider the fact that Norway actually is the most expensive country in the world to live in. I’m spot on the EU requirement for being poor, and I spend 1/10 of my income each month just to be able to take the train to school (and that’s with a discount!)

What I found is basically that we have no real numbers for how many poor people there are, and no one has bothered getting accurate numbers for how many homeless there are. Somewhere between 7 000 and 30 000 is all the government knows…

I don’t really think they care. While searching for something I cite for this little hand-in I found a lot of crap… ALOT of it. Like the fact that my own government actually thinks that a person should be able to live on 37kr a day, the only thing not included is rent. That is enough to buy a bread and a couple of oranges. But you would have to do without toilet paper… This has everything to do with the fact that the social welfare rates are about the same now as they were 15 years ago.

Oh, and the 1/5 part of the population with a lot of cash is not surprisingly getting a lot richer..

If we keep up this way we might actually be able to shake off all our socialist influence in due time.
(I’m just very angry right now, very, very angry)

Tags: norway, oslo, poverty