Poverty has always been a problem throughout history and despite being one of the most prosperous countries in the world, the U.S is not immune to it either. There are many approaches when it comes to poverty measure, although the most up to date measure of poverty in the U.S is based on the model, in which ‘’a set of thresholds for families of different sizes and composition that are compared to a resource measure to determine a family’s poverty status. And the threshold here represents the cost of a minimum diet multiplied by three to allow for expenditures on other goods and service.’’ (Iceland & Kim, 2000, pg 255). This concept was constructed in the mid-1960s by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the U.S Social Security Administration at the time (Iceland, 2015, pg 201). She was able to use the dollar costs of the foods in the two food plans in the process of developing her two sets of thresholds and surprisingly, the Office of Economic Opportunity adapted her model as the definition of poverty in 1965. It eventually became the official statistical definition of poverty in 1969. (Iceland, 2005, pg 201). However, there are some drawbacks when it came to this type of model. I think this particular threshold fails to address regional costs of living, in which the poverty thresholds maybe overstates in areas where the cost of living is low and understated in areas with high cost living.
