Mollie Orshansky, (
January 9,
1915 -
December 18,
2006), was an
American economist and
statistician who, in 1963-65, developed the
Orshansky Poverty Thresholds, which are used in the
United States as a measure of the income that a household must not exceed to be counted as
poor.
Orshansky was born in the Bronx to immigrant parents. She attended Hunter College High School, and received an A.B. in mathematics and statistics from Hunter College in 1935. She continued graduate studies in economics and statistics at the Department of Agriculture Graduate School and American University.
In 1939 she became a research clerk with the Children's Bureau, working on biometric studies of child health, growth, and nutrition. In January 1942, as a statistician in the New York City Department of Health, she worked on a survey of the incidence of, and therapies for, pneumonia. In 1945, Orshansky moved to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she spent the next thirteen years a family economist, director of the Program Statistics Division, and a food economist.
In 1958, Orshansky joined the Social Security Administration as a social science research analyst in the Office of Research and Statistics. In this capacity she was responsible for analytical studies to measure income adequacy, family welfare and patterns of family income. In 1963 she developed the official measure of poverty used by the U.S. government (see Poverty in the United States). The basis of her idea was to use the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet as the basis for a cost-of-living estimate and to calculate a cost of living for families of different sizes and composition. In 1976, Orshansky received the Distinguished Service Award in recognition for her leadership in creating the first nationally accepted measures of income adequacy and applying them to public policy.
