Orshansky, Mollie (1915-2006)

In the early 1960s, Mollie Orshansky developed the federal poverty thresholds that over the past half century have defined poverty, determined program eligibility for many federal and state programs, and helped shape low-income policies. Though dubbed an “obscure civil servant,” this accomplishment was no accident. One of seven daughters of hard-working Ukrainian immigrants, Orshansky experienced poverty herself, sleeping two to a bed, wearing hand-me-downs, and standing in relief lines. This memory of poverty enabled her to study and write about the poor.

Orshansky was the first in her family to graduate from both high school and college (Hunter College), majoring in mathematics and statistics. With career opportunities in universities largely closed to women, she began her lifelong government career at the New York Department of Health, moving to Washington, D.C., in 1936 to work first for the Children's Bureau. There and at other agencies, she accumulated the expertise and experience that would later inform her work on poverty measures, working on health and children's issues, food plans, city worker's family budgets, and wages (at the Wage Stabilization Board). She even answered letters from families struggling with severe postwar inflation.

Orshansky joined the Social Security Administration (SSA) in 1958 and first worked on the issue of poverty measures while performing anonymous staff work for the secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur Fleming, on questions raised in a 1960 hearing. Her work began in earnest with an in-house SSA research project on “poverty as it affects children,” for which she developed poverty thresholds to measure the risks of income inadequacy among different groups of families with children. She first published her findings in July 1963.

In January 1964, President Johnson declared the “War on Poverty.” Meanwhile, the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) adopted a simple poverty measure, $1,500 per year for individuals and $3,000 for families, which was included as its first-ever chapter on poverty in its annual report. The White House declaration of a “War on Poverty” led SSA to give higher priority to Orshansky's work on poverty. Upset that the CEA measure categorized a family of six with an income of $3,100 as “not poor,” but an elderly couple with $2,900 “poor,” Orshansky set to work to expand her thresholds to all family sizes and ages, publishing both her thresholds and the analysis based on them in January 1965, in her most famous article, “Counting the Poor: Another Look at the Poverty Profile.” Orshansky's poverty thresholds were much more detailed than the CEA's measure, taking into account family size and composition (number of [Page 624]children or elderly). Since the only data available on what was “adequate” were found in the Department of Agriculture's food plans, she based her thresholds on the two lowest-cost plans, multiplying these costs by three because the average family spent about one third of their income on food. Although the lower of her two sets of thresholds (the one eventually adopted) resulted in a similar aggregate “number of poor” as the CEA analysis, it also resulted in 4 million more children being categorized as “poor,” helping to make the case for Head Start.

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