Confessions of a Wayward Academic

by Tom Corbett

  I began collaborating with people like Kris Moore and Brett Brown from Child Trends, the late Bill Prosser (ASPE) and Matt Stagner (now at Mathematica) and others. With support from the PEW Trust, we went to work. I recall working with Kris and Brett on one paper where I laid out a conceptual framework for thinking about the use of indicators. I wanted to communicate a simple but often overlooked reality that a number is just a number until you put it in context. Kris, for one, loved the framework I came up with and used it often over the next few years.

  Take one measure, any measure. The meaning is not resident in the number itself but in how it is used. I laid out an ordinal scale of sorts. You could use a piece of data for descriptive purposes. For that limited use, not a great deal of attention or focus might be required. But let us say you use it for monitoring purposes. Then you might think about taking some action if, let us say, a time series suggests an adverse trend in these data. In that case, you might want to take more care in both the quality of these data and in subsequent interpretation. Say, however, you kick the same measure up to the accountability level of use. Now you are intending to use that measure in specific ways to reward or punish based on which way the data go when compared to some established standard or against the comparative performance of others. Now, collection and interpretation issues are paramount, and much care must be given to these factors. It can be very easy to game indicators when the stakes get this high. Some have discussed both the lure of this use and the attendant difficulties as the metric fixation. Finally, you might use a measure to make causal inferences. While people do this all the time, this is a hazardous venture to be done only with extreme care. You must be able to account for all other explanations for any observed trend, a scientific demand which is not easily satisfied.

  On a more practical level, I and others kept pushing the broader indicator agenda. In December of 1995, we brought together over fifty members of state and federal agencies and others concerned with the well-being of children. In 1996, I lent some assistance to a twelve-state project on state-level child outcomes that was launched largely under the aegis of the Administration of Children and Families (ACF). The goal of this effort was to continue the momentum that was building and to work toward a consistent terminology, toward a consensus set of child outcomes, and toward agreed upon measurement tools for assessing how children were doing as policy devolved toward the states.

  When I became acting director of IRP, I noticed that our prior work to generate all these excellent measures with a host of scholars had never been formally published as a book which we had intended to do all along. So, I beat the drums and got Bob Hauser, Bill Prosser, and Brett Brown to edit a comprehensive work titled Indicators of Child Well-Being, the compendium of social measures for our generation. I anointed Betty Evanson, our indefatigable editor at IRP, to set the ball in motion. Since I was running this show from behind the scenes I should have attached my name this final product but that was not my thing. For one thing, I was already pursuing other policy windmills. For another, self-promotion is not my style. In ways I discuss later, these decisions cost me professionally. Still, I did write the preface for the volume.

  All this activity and dialogue possibly had some effect at the highest levels of government. On April 21, 1997, President Clinton issued an executive order, “Protection of Children from Environmental Health Risks and Safety Risks.” Among other things, the order established a four-year, cabinet level task force to recommend federal strategies for children’s environmental health and safety; and to prepare a biennial report on research, data, and other information that would enhance the government’s ability to respond to risks to children. The order also required that the Office of Management and Budget convene an interagency federal forum on child and family statistics. Its purpose is to produce an annual report on the most important indicators of child well-being in the United States. The last time I looked the report was still being produced.

  I want to make one thing clear. I had little or nothing to do to do with the executive order. But in the policy world, things often work in circuitous ways. You nudge and prod and nibble around the edges, and suddenly something happens. Maybe you had something to do with it, maybe not. You never know! When in doubt, I like to take credit. As I often note, when I went to India in 1967 as a Peace Corps volunteer, the country was importing grains to feed its people. When I left two years later, it was a grain exporter. I like to take credit for the turnaround. Numbers don’t lie after all. Okay, thy don’t lie when you like them.

  Now let us switch to Act 2 in our drama which also starts with a phone call. I was contacted by Mike Laracy, who was with the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and by Jennifer Phillips, who was with the Mott Foundation at the time. Included in this four-way conversation was Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution. As best I can recall, Mike and Jennifer were interested in finding ways to make poverty a front-burner issue again. This was the 90s and everyone was focused on dependency. Could we help them out? Sounded good to me! I am in the poverty business. I never worried that we would end poverty, but the specter of people not caring any more about the issue was another matter entirely.

  Somehow, Gary and I turned that original concern into a project to update the poverty measure itself. In my eyes, this was a natural extension of the indicator work I had been doing. After all, how many times have we all used the old bromide “you get what you measure?” The official measure sucked. Everyone knew it. It could be that improving the measure was what Mike and Jennifer wanted all along, but I don’t recall that being the case. Unmi Song (Joyce Foundation) probably would be firing me again, probably on a weekly basis, but Mike and Jennifer were quite accepting of my tendency to wander off script.

  Our official measure of poverty went back to the onset of Johnson’s WOP. The generals of that war needed to define the enemy. The task fell to a mid-level bureaucrat in the Social Security administration named Molly Orshansky. She took an old study which estimated that food represented one-third of a poor families’ budget. Then she grabbed a more recent estimate of the cost of a minimal basket of food necessary to keep a family of four going. She multiplied that figure by three and there you had it…a poverty measure for the ages. All you needed was an equivalency scale to adjust for different family sizes and a way to update it over time like changes in the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Voila! Her statistical child probably represented fifteen minutes of work on her part.

  Of course, our conference call took place some three decades later. Much had changed by then while the only big changes to the official poverty lines were minor technical adjustments. Now, however, food represented about one-seventh of a typical family’s budget and considerably less than a third of even the poorest families’ expenditures. Moreover, we now had many more in-kind transfer programs whose resources were not even counted as income in calculating the official poverty rate. And what about cost-of-living differentials! You mean we used the same poverty line in New York City as we did Mayberry, North Carolina? Even my dog, Rascal, knows that is nonsensical and he still poops on the rug.

  I mean, really, how hard would it be to update the damn thing and at least use a halfway decent measure to assess something so vital to society? The answer is that it would be very hard indeed. Ideological and partisan conflict now was making everything virtually impossible. But that did not mean we would not bang our heads against the wall for a while trying to get around the paralysis that had crept into my craft. Insanity, according to Einstein (or maybe Freud or was it Aristotle?) is doing the same thing repeatedly and getting the same rotten result. Uh-uh, I do believe I resemble that remark!

  It goes without saying that we were not the first to see a problem here. A National Academy panel had been formed in the early 1990s which published a reasoned report on the topic in 1995. The problem, as we saw it, was that reports get published all the time and then nothing happens. It gets some press coverage and then some desultory comments pro and con before
disappearing in the wake of another scandal involving the Kardashian sisters. Gary and I decided to establish a venue for those most interested in advancing a better, updated measure and to get some smart people working toward that end. We hoped to keep the momentum toward change gong.

  When the project started, I had recalled seeing Gary at conferences and workshops over the years but did not know him all that well. He struck me, even upon these cursory interactions, as an extremely smart guy. I sometimes wondered how I got to work with these brilliant guys and gals, the ones who everyone in school would point to and say, “That one will be president someday or maybe find a cure for cancer.” I think the same kids pointed at me to say, “That schmuck will be doing twenty to life for being too stupid to breathe.” Come to think of it, though he could not have been that bright, he really liked the wage bill study I had done years before, at least according to Sheldon Danziger.

  Anyways, I noticed a pattern when we would chat on the phone. He would start off monosyllabic, as if my call had interrupted some deep thought or analysis that had him on the brink of a creative breakthrough. I was always tempted to stop and tell him I would call back later, when he could focus better. But then he would start to respond. Soon, we were going back and forth at breakneck speed deciding on future strategies or what needed to be done. And then, suddenly, he would say something like “gotta go now,” and the conversation would be over just as I was about to go on to my next point.

  I was flying out to Washington the day that the edition of USA Today came out naming me the national poverty expert. Notice how I have woven this very unimpressive accolade into the narrative in several places. I picked up a copy at the airport and brought it to a meeting I had scheduled with Gary and Wendell Primus. I showed them the story, assuming they were more the Washington Post or New York Times sorts and likely had missed this breaking news story with film at eleven. I would characterize both men as being on the serious side, but this piece of news left them doubled over in laughter. I don’t believe the New York Times picked up on this earth-shattering event. Go figure!

  The litany of problems identified by the NAS panel and others went something like this. Among other things, the official measure:

  Excludes in-kind benefits, such as food stamps and housing assistance, when counting family income.

  Ignores the cost of earning income, including child care costs, when calculating the net income available to families with working members.

  Disregards regional variation in the cost of living, especially the cost of housing, in determining a family’s consumption needs.

  Ignores direct tax payments, such as payroll and income taxes, when measuring family income.

  Ignores differences in health insurance coverage in determining family income, and medical care needs in determining family consumption needs.

  Moreover, the official measure has never been updated to account for the changing consumption patterns of U.S. households. I noted earlier that expenditures for food accounted for about one-third of family income in the 1950s (as Orshansky had estimated in her back of the envelope calculation) but they now account for as little as one seventh of such outlays. While subjective estimates of a reasonable poverty threshold (based on polling data) were very close to the line Orshansky drew up in the early 1960s, Americans now deemed the line much too low according to representative survey data tapping their subjective impression of how much it took for various prototypical families to get by at a minimal level.

  Several essential remedies were clearly required. We needed to change the measure of income, alter the poverty threshold, and update the survey used to determine the percentage and distribution of the poor. As we moved forward on these tasks, and others, we brought in all the heavy hitters involved in the poverty measure debate. This included Bobbi Wolfe (IRP director), Dan Weinberg (U.S. Census Bureau), Bill Hoagland (U.S. Senate Budget Committee), Katherine Willman (Office of Management and Budget), David Betson (University of Notre Dame), Allan Scherm (Mathematica Inc.), Cynthia Taeuber and Charles Alexander (both from the Census Bureau), Tony McCann and David McMillen (House staff members), and Ron Haskins just to name a few. We held workshops, commissioned technical work, and held larger conferences. The most frantic period of effort was over the 1998 calendar year.

  We generally attacked the problem on two levels. First, there were numerous details to be worked out. I never heard so much discussion of Out-Of-Pocket Medical Expenses or OOPME in my life or how variations in housing costs might be used for calculating differences in living costs across increasingly smaller jurisdictional areas. Good old Molly developed the original measure in an afternoon. Our brain trust was struggling mightily in a miasma of technical conundrums. For a big picture guy like I pretended to be, this was a level of minutia that had me nodding off at times.

  The political battle was the second line of attack. We were not naïve though perhaps just a smidge overly optimistic. We had all been around the track several times and knew this was not an easy sell. Therefore, we moved ahead very cautiously. We agreed that any new measure would only be used for statistical purposes. That is, any new threshold would not be used to allocate funds or determine eligibility for program benefits. Just think if the poverty thresholds were raised and suddenly millions of additional people suddenly became eligible for government help. Second, we would try to massage the details of any new measure so that the number of poor would approximate the number found under the old measure in some reference year, say 1992. This was a major concession but would provide some continuity to the numbers in the short term but then allow them to vary in the future.

  But even these accommodations would not be enough. I recall a presentation by a very smart analyst from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. He pointed out that under a likely new set of poverty measure thresholds the distribution of poverty across the country would change dramatically even if the aggregate number for the whole country were the same as under the old measure. Basically, the number of poor on the east and west coasts would increase while the number in the middle would fall. You could argue that this new-fangled measure was only for statistical purposes, but would you be believed? Governors on the coasts would soon scream that they were now at risk of being screwed in terms of federal support since they now had more poor people but might not get enough federal help to deal with them. Those in the middle would scream about some liberal plot to shift federal resources to the heathens living near the two oceans and deprive them of the necessary resources to help their own destitute families. We would only please the number crunchers.

  I can vividly recall a discussion I had with Ron Haskins on the issue. Ron, though a Republican, is a very thoughtful guy who loves evidence and approaches issues in a quite reasonable way. You might sense that I find the term “thoughtful Republican” an oxymoron. That is only because it is. In any case, he stonewalled me when I talked with him on the poverty measure issue. He would not budge. In fact, he would not even banter with me as he typically did, never calling me a Communist once during our conversation. I strongly suspected he knew he was responding politically rather than rationally and this bothered him deeply. It bothered me as well.

  Another time I was attending the IRP Sumer Workshop. It was lunch time and I left the wonderful eighth floor conference room overlooking Lake Mendota with Tom McCurdy. Tom was a high-tech economist who also loved doing policy and often worked with the state of California from his Stanford faculty position. He was also quite conservative, but we got along famously. As we exited the room, I brought up the need to change the poverty measure. Tom pushed back. I held my ground and our voices elevated. He is a big man, even bigger than I am, and we groused back and forth until I noticed the other researchers taking a wide path around us. I knew Tom’s bluster for what it was. It was simply the way he devastated his colleagues in the dismal science who made a methodological or econometric error in their work. He was never meek but, down deep, he remained a decent guy with a big heart.
It was just his style. Still, I was afraid that some who did not know him as well as I feared he might floor me with a right cross to the jaw. People did get vexed on these issues.

  As a last gesture, Gary Burtless, Barbara Wolfe, Wendell Primus, and I drafted a public statement setting out a reasonable set of principles for improving the official poverty measure. The principles we enunciated were developed and voted on at a conference we had convened in Madison. The attendees included many of the key stakeholders in the poverty measure debate. Unfortunately, we ran into a meeting space problem and used a conference hall located in the university hospital located on campus. While that was convenient for those who, by now, were sick to death of the topic, the real downside was that they had to eat food from the hospital cafeteria. Good thing medical help was so close.

  We circulated our statement of principles among key academics and government officials around the country. The number who signed on represented a who’s who of poverty researchers, political aficionados, and statistical measurement icons. Their prestigious reputations made the document a significant one indeed. Even years later, I remember getting contacted by Becky Blank, sometime before she became chancellor of the U.W. Madison campus, asking for a copy for some purpose or another. It is not that typical to get such a wide consensus from so many top people on any controversial policy question.