Selected Articles and Papers
by Mollie Orshansky
About the Poverty Thresholds
and the Poverty Population

(A profile of Mollie Orshansky is available on the Social Security Administration's History Page.)

Mollie Orshansky, "Children of the Poor"*, Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 26, No. 7, July 1963, pp. 3-13.

• [In this article, Orshansky described an initial version of her poverty thresholds — for families with children only.]

Mollie Orshansky, "Counting the Poor:  Another Look at the Poverty Profile"*, Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 1, January 1965, pp. 3-29 — reprinted in Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 51, No. 10, October 1988, pp. 25-51.

• [In this article, Orshansky presented a refined version of her thresholds — expanded to include all types of family units; she described how she had developed the thresholds, and analyzed the population shown to be in poverty by the thresholds. Four months later, the Office of Economic Opportunity adopted Orshansky's thresholds as a working or quasi-official definition of poverty.]

Mollie Orshansky, "Who's Who Among the Poor:  A Demographic View of Poverty"*, Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. 7, July 1965, pp. 3-32.

Mollie Orshansky, "How poverty is measured"*, Monthly Labor Review, Vol. 92, No. 2, February 1969, pp. 37-41.

Mollie Orshansky, "Memorandum for Dr. Daniel P. Moynihan[--]Subject:  History of the Poverty Line," July 1, 1970 — published on pp. 232-237 of Mollie Orshansky [compiler], "Documentation of Background Information and Rationale for Current Poverty Matrix," Technical Paper I of The Measure of Poverty, Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1976.

Mollie Orshansky, Harold Watts, Bradley R. Schiller, and John J. Korbel, "Measuring Poverty: A Debate," Public Welfare, Vol. 36, No. 2, spring 1978, pp. 46-55.

Carol Fendler and Mollie Orshansky, "Improving the Poverty Definition," American Statistical Association[:]  1979 Proceedings of the Social Statistics Section, pp. 640-645.

• [This paper included a discussion of a revised set of poverty thresholds based on data from the 1965 (rather than the 1955) Household Food Consumption Survey. (These revised thresholds were not adopted for official use.)]

Mollie Orshansky, "Commentary:  The Poverty Measure," Social Security Bulletin, Vol. 51, No. 10, October 1988, pp. 22-24.

• [This commentary was published in connection with the 1988 reprinting of Orshansky's "Counting the Poor:  Another Look at the Poverty Profile."]

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*  These articles were reprinted in Mollie Orshansky [compiler], "Documentation of Background Information and Rationale for Current Poverty Matrix," Technical Paper I of The Measure of Poverty, Washington, D.C., U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1976; see pp. 5-15 ("Children of the Poor"), 16-43 ("Counting the Poor..."), 44-74 ("Who's Who Among the Poor..."), and 244-248 ("How poverty is measured"). See also the Enhanced Table of Contents for Technical Paper I.

[Return to the page of Further Resources on Poverty Measurement, Poverty Lines, and Their History]

Last updated:  12/04/06