Remembering Mollie Orshansky--the developer of the poverty thresholds.

In December 2006, Mollie Orshansky, known to many as Ms. Poverty, died at age? 91 after a long government career during which she did pioneering research on poverty and the measurement of income inadequacy. Mollie Orshansky was born in New York City in 1915, the daughter of immigrants from what is now Ukraine (Chan 2006, 4; Cassidy 2006, 42). Although her father worked hard at a number of different jobs, Mollie and her sisters grew up poor-in her words, the family could "barely...make ends meet" (Social Security Administration 1971, 15-16; Hadnot 1999). Mollie remembered going with her mother to stand in relief lines to get surplus food. As she was to say later, "If I write about the poor, I don't need a good imagination-I have a good memory" (Eaton 1970, 24). Her experience also gave her first-hand awareness that it is possible to work full-time and still be poor (Burke and Burke 1974, 12). Mollie was both the first high school graduate and the first college graduate in her family; she graduated from Hunter College in 1935 with an A.B. in mathematics and statistics. Later, after she started working as a federal employee in Washington, she took graduate courses in economics and statistics at the Department of Agriculture Graduate School and at American University. Mollie started her first job in 1935, working in New York City as a statistical clerk for the New York Department of Health. During the rest of her career, all but one of her jobs were with federal government agencies. In 1936, she moved to Washington to take a job as a junior statistical clerk with the U.S. Children's Bureau, with a promotion to research clerk in 1939. She later held higher-level statistical jobs at the New York City Department of Health, the U.S. National War Labor Board, and the U.S. Wage Stabilization Board, and worked as a family economist and later as a food economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). It was during her work at USDA that she became familiar with the food plans and the food survey that she was later to use to develop her poverty thresholds. As a family economist from 1945 to 1951, she conducted research in family consumption and levels of living. In 1948, Mollie and a colleague were responsible for responding to letters from members of the public asking how they could make ends meet on their existing income in the face of rapidly rising prices after World War II. Mollie and her colleague would send pamphlets about preparing a family budget and about planning low-cost and moderate-cost meals using USDA's food plans (theoretical nutritious diets at different cost levels) (Burke 1948). This shows that Mollie was working with USDA's food plans at least 15? years before she used them to develop her poverty thresholds. As a food economist from 1953 to 1958, she planned and directed the collection and analysis of data on food consumption and expenditures of American households. She wrote a major section of a summary report on USDA's 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey, the same survey she would later use to calculate the "multiplier" for her poverty thresholds (Orshansky 1957). In February 1958, Mollie Orshansky joined the Social Security Administration (SSA) as a social science research analyst in the Division of Program Research, which later became the Division of Research and Statistics and then the Office of Research and Statistics. Her first assignment at SSA was to prepare an article on standard budgets (estimates of necessary family living costs) and on practices in setting fee scales in 21? large cities. For a later assignment, she prepared a medical care standard (which included among other items, the number of physicians' visits per year) as part of the "Budget for an Elderly Couple" that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was then revising. In a 1960 congressional hearing, a senator asked Arthur Flemming, Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), if he had figures on how much it costs a retired couple to live. …