>On Wed, 16 May 2001, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>> michael pugliese wrote:
>>
>> > Last week, All Things Considered interviewed the statistician
>> >at the Dept. of Labor who came up with the basket of goods guidelines
>> >for poverty for a family of X back in the 60's.
>>
>> Who? Are you thinking of the Social Security Admin economist
>> Mollie Orshansky?
>
>Yes, I think that's her name, I heard the piece too. She
>apparently did it rather ad hoc because someone in the LBJ admin
>asker her to, never expecting it to be enshrined forever in law.
It was a bit more casual than that even - she'd been doing work on equivalence scales (how much more a family of 3 needs to live on than 2, etc.), and was playing with numbers. She used some old gov't data on food budgets to come up with cost of living estimates. LBJ needed something to use in his war on poverty and Orshansky's work was floating around DC policy circles. The administration seized on it and enshrined it into the poverty line. She was kind of disturbed at the use to which her work was put.
Doug