In the summer of 1963, Mollie Orshansky, a forty-eight-year-old statistician at the Social Security Administration, in Washington, D.C., published an article in the Social Security Bulletin entitled “Children of the Poor.” “The wonders of science and technology applied to a generous endowment of natural resources have wrought a way of life our grandfathers never knew,” she wrote. “Creature comforts once the hallmark of luxury have descended to the realm of the commonplace, and the marvels of modern industry find their way into the home of the American worker as well as that of his boss. Yet there is an underlying disquietude reflected in our current social literature, an uncomfortable realization that an expanding economy has not brought gains to all in equal measure. It is reflected in the preoccupation with counting the poor—do they number 30 million, 40 million, or 50 million?”

Orshansky’s timing was propitious. In December of 1962, President John F. Kennedy had asked Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to gather statistics on poverty. In early 1963, Heller gave the President a copy of a review by Dwight Macdonald, in The New Yorker, of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America: Poverty in the United States,” in which Harrington claimed that as many as fifty million Americans were living in penury.

The federal government had never attempted to count the poor, and Orshansky’s paper proposed an ingenious and straightforward way of doing so. Orshansky had experienced poverty firsthand. Born in the South Bronx in 1915, she was one of six daughters of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who barely spoke English. Her father, a plumber and ironworker, was often unemployed, and Orshansky and her sisters wore hand-me-downs and slept two to a bed. Sometimes the family stood in relief lines to collect food. Nevertheless, Orshansky attended Hunter College High School, which was then a school for gifted girls, and went on to Hunter College, where she majored in mathematics and statistics. In 1939, she joined the U.S. Children’s Bureau, now part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and studied children’s health and nutrition.

Orshansky never married or had children, but she was passionate about children’s welfare. From 1945 to 1958, she worked in the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, where she worked on a series of diets designed to provide poor American families with adequate nutrition at minimal cost. In painstaking detail, the food plans laid out the amount of meat, bread, potatoes, and other staples that families needed in order to eat healthily. These were “by no means subsistence diets,” Orshansky later wrote. “But they do assume that the housewife will be a careful shopper, a skillful cook, and a good manager who will prepare all the family’s meals at home.”

In 1958, Orshansky joined the research department of the Social Security Administration, and decided to try to estimate the incidence of child poverty. “Poor people are everywhere; yet they are invisible,” she told a reporter for the Dallas Morning News in 1999. “I wanted them to be seen clearly by those who make decisions about their lives.” Building on pioneering research on diet and poverty conducted in York at the turn of the twentieth century by Seebohm Rowntree, a British social reformer, Orshansky used her food plans to calculate a subsistence budget for families of various sizes. For a mother and father with two children, she estimated the expense of a “low cost” plan at $3.60 a day, and of an even more frugal “economy plan” at $2.80 a day. Rather than trying to calculate the price of other items in the family budget, such as rent, heat, and clothing, Orshansky relied on a survey by the Agriculture Department, which showed that the typical American family spent about a third of its income on food. Thus, to determine the minimum income a family needed in order to survive, she simply multiplied the annual cost of the food plans by three. Families on the low-cost plan needed to earn at least $3,955 a year; families on the economy plan needed to earn $3,165.

Orshansky compared these figures with the Census Bureau’s records on pre-tax family incomes and concluded that twenty-six per cent of families with children earned less than the upper poverty threshold and eighteen per cent earned less than the lower poverty threshold. In total, she estimated that between fifteen million and twenty-two million children were living in poverty, a disproportionate number of them in single-parent households and minority neighborhoods. “It would be one thing if poverty hit at random, and no one group were singled out,” she wrote. “It is another thing to realize that some seem destined to poverty almost from birth—by their color or by the economic status or occupation of their parents.”

Heller and his colleagues on the Council of Economic Advisers cited Orshansky’s paper in an “Economic Report to the President” that appeared in January, 1964, shortly after Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, declared a “war on poverty” in his State of the Union address. In August of that year, Congress created the Office of Equal Opportunity, which used Orshansky’s method to determine eligibility for new anti-poverty programs, such as Head Start. Other federal agencies followed suit, and in 1969 the White House adopted a slightly modified version of Orshansky’s lower threshold—the one based on the economy food plan—as the official poverty line.

In the nineteen-sixties, many economists believed that economic growth and government intervention would eliminate poverty. Between 1964 and 1973, as Johnson’s Great Society programs went into effect, the poverty rate fell from nineteen per cent of the population to 11.1 per cent. But, while the nation’s inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has virtually tripled since 1973, the poverty rate has hardly budged. In 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, it stood at 12.7 per cent, a slight increase over the previous year, and in some regions the figure is much higher. The horror of Hurricane Katrina was not just the physical destruction it wrought but the economic hardship it exposed. In New Orleans, the poverty rate in 2004 was twenty-three per cent, a fact that George W. Bush noted in his address from New Orleans’ French Quarter on September 15th, when he said, “We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action.” (Six months later, the Bush Administration has yet to present an anti-poverty plan.) According to the Census Bureau, many cities are even poorer than New Orleans. In Detroit in 2004, the poverty rate was 33.6 per cent; in Miami, it was 28.3 per cent; and in Philadelphia it was 24.9 per cent. (In New York, it was 20.3 per cent.)

The persistence of endemic poverty raises questions about how poverty is measured. In the past ten years or so, significant changes have been made in the way that inflation, gross domestic product, and other economic statistics are derived, but the poverty rate is still calculated using the technique that Orshansky invented. (Every twelve months, the Census Bureau raises the income cutoffs slightly to take inflation into account.)

This approach has some obvious shortcomings. To begin with, the poverty thresholds are based on pre-tax income, which means that they don’t take into account tax payments and income from anti-poverty programs, such as food stamps, housing subsidies, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Medicaid, which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year. In addition, families’ financial burdens have changed considerably since Orshansky conducted her research. In the late fifties, most mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home, and they cooked their families’ meals. Now that most mothers work full time and pay people to help them take care of their kids, child care and commuting consume more of a typical family budget.