Poverty Knowledge by Alice O'Connor

Author:Alice O'Connor [O'Connor, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781400824748
Google: CqPmgg6cwD0C
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-01-10T16:05:10+00:00

THE ANALYTIC RESEARCH AGENDA

Three issues dominated RPP&E’s research agenda, as befit the needs of analytical policy planning: poverty measurement; cost/benefit program evaluation; and quantifiable, controlled experiments to test out new approaches to helping the poor. Although recognizing these as thorny, ultimately political problems, the RPP&E planners also had faith in the tools of analysis to provide an unassailable scientific basis for the antipoverty plan.

Preceding all else on the agenda was the need for statistical data, which at the time was a sorely lacking but essential ingredient in the effort to understand, as noted in one OEO report to Congress, “the strength of the enemy” as well as “the nation’s ability to do battle at any given time and place.”68 Stimulated also by the prospect of developing predictive models for assessing program costs and benefits, OEO analysts set out to gather ever more precise information on the demographic characteristics of poor people, their income, household structure, and program use, and on their likely behavior over time. This they accomplished by funding a series of national surveys (including an oversample of poor households in annual census data and the longitudinal Panel Study of Income Dynamics) that have since become the essential data of poverty research—easily replacing the far more time-consuming methods of primary data collection and participant observation in community-based research. Like the Keynesian Revolution and its impact on aggregate income data, the War on Poverty led the way to a “microdata” (household and individual-level) revolution that itself would have a tremendous influence on the scientific understanding of the “nature and causes” of poverty.

In addition to immediate policy needs, the seemingly technical task of gathering more and better data was also shaped by a series of political decisions dating back to the original CEA task force on poverty. One was the decision, favored by the economists who dominated the early task force discussions, to define the poverty problem as lack of income, reflecting their assumption not only that income offered a universalistic and straightforward measure of need, but also their confidence that they had the means—through an economic growth-centered strategy—to win a war against poverty so defined. Second, and related, was the decision to use an absolute definition of poverty, on the grounds that any effort to target inequality through explicitly redistributional means would be both politically unacceptable and technically infeasible; absolute poverty could actually be eliminated; relative poverty, by definition, would always be with us. Third, and most recent, was OEO’s decision, announced in May 1965, to use the poverty thresholds developed by Social Security Commission analyst Mollie Orshansky in measuring the size and composition of the poor population.

Orshansky had first developed her poverty measure as part of a highly significant development in the research program of the Social Security Administration: taking note of the rising proportion of divorced or never-married as opposed to widowed mothers on AFDC, the Social Security Administration research division had determined to end what had been an ongoing statistical series on AFDC widows and to investigate the changing situation of all poor families with children instead.

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