| Mollie Orshansky |
Article Index for Mollie |
Information AboutMollie Orshansky |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT MOLLIE ORSHANSKY | |
| 1915 births | |
| orshansky, mollie | |
| american economists | |
| american university alumni | |
| 2006 deaths | |
| deaths by myocardial infarction | |
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In 1939 she bacame a Research Clerk with the U.S. 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 where she became 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. 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. See http://www.ssa.gov/history/orshansky.html |
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