In this week’s magazine story on poverty in the U.S., I briefly
mention that the way we typically count the poor is far from
ideal. The official U.S. poverty line dates back to the 1960s,
when Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security
Administration, came up with a measure based on how much money a
family had to spend on food in order to eat nutritiously. Over
the past 40+ years, a lot has changed with how families make
ends meet—as well as with social scientists’ ability to measure
it— and since the mid-1990s, the National Academy of Sciences
has been recommending that the U.S. update how it measures
poverty. The Obama Administration is now doing just that.
Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released its new
“supplemental poverty measure,” which takes into account not
just cash income, but also expenses in major categories like
child and medical care, as well as income from tax breaks and
non-cash benefits like food stamps. The new measure also adjusts
for the fact that it’s more expensive to