What Is Poverty, and How Is It Measured? 7 until every young mind is set free to scan the farthest reaches of thought and imagination. We are still far from that goal.12 In the context of the 1960s, and stemming from a desire to not only docu- ment the extent of poverty in the United States but also to attempt to do something proactive about it, Kennedy, and later Johnson, used the bully pulpit in order to promote their policy agenda. This provided technical expert Orshansky the substantive opportunity to operationalize her concep- tion of measuring poverty.13 The Orshansky Poverty Thresholds Mollie Orshansky developed her poverty thresholds based on the “econ- omy food plan,” which was the cheapest of the food plans developed by ana- lysts for the USDA. She made a key assumption based on the USDA’s 1955 Household Food Consumption Survey: that families of three or more per- sons allocated approximately one-third of their after-tax revenue to food.14 As Gordon Fisher noted: Mollie assumed that expenditures for food and non-food would be cut back at the same rate, so the family would continue to spend a third of its income for food. When the food expenditures of the hypothetical family reached the cost of the economy food plan, she assumed that the amount the family would then be spending on non-food items would also be mini- mal but adequate. (Her procedure did not assume specific dollar amounts for any budget category besides food.) Following this logic, she calculated poverty thresholds for families of various sizes by taking the dollar costs of the economy food plan for families of those sizes and multiplying the costs by a factor of 3. (She followed somewhat different procedures to develop thresholds for two-person and one-person units.) She differentiated her thresholds not only by family size but also by farm/nonfarm status, by the gender of the family head, by the number of family members who were children, and (for one- and two-person units only) by aged/non-aged sta­ tus. The result was a detailed matrix of 124 poverty thresholds (later reduced to 48). Instead of citing all 124 or 48 detailed thresholds, people commonly cite weighted average thresholds, one for each family size.15 Fisher further notes: To avoid confusion, the preceding explanation has been phrased in terms of the economy food plan. However, Mollie actually developed and dis- cussed two sets of poverty thresholds, one derived from the economy food plan and one derived from the somewhat less stringent low-cost food plan.
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