Social Services Medal Strength In Numbers

ore than 30 years ago, Daniel Weinberg went to war; he hasn't returned.

Weinberg was 15 when President Lyndon Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty and urged every American to rescue those who lived "on the outskirts of hope."

Weinberg took the call to heart. Today, nearly 40 years after Johnson's emphatic summons, reasonable people argue about whether the war on poverty has succeeded or failed. And when they do, they often use Weinberg's data to make their case.

Weinberg, 52, is a member of the Senior Executive Service and chief of the Census Bureau's Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division. He's also the nation's lead intelligence-gatherer on the lives of the poor. Weinberg pioneered a new method for measuring poverty that augments the official figures Census produces. For more than 30 years, the official government indicator, known as the poverty threshold, has been based solely on the consumer price index.

The poverty threshold for a family of four was just under $18,000 last year. That figure, derived using the CPI, is incredibly low, Weinberg says. Weinberg's experimental poverty measures include more realistic costs of living and sources of income than does the poverty threshold.

Before Weinberg came to Census in 1989, he'd spent nearly 10 years studying poverty as an analyst and eventually an assistant secretary at the Health and Human Services Department. For decades, federal poverty grants were based solely on the 10-year population count. Because the information was so infrequent, it was of little use. Weinberg helped find a better way to target aid. Since 1993, his Census office has released an annual poverty report using experimental measures taken at the county level. Now, reports are released by individual school districts, as well.

Despite receiving accolades such as a 1995 Commerce Department Bronze Medal and government reinvention "Hammer" awards from then-Vice President Al Gore in 1998 and 1999, Weinberg is modest about his contributions. He won't take credit for helping redefine poverty, or for how his reports have changed policy. "We're providing the outlines of the playing field, what the data show about the world," Weinberg says. "Let the policy-makers argue about the issues, not the data."

Weinberg chose his profession in reaction to political upheaval in the 1960s. In 1968, he enrolled as a mathematics student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Televised images of race riots in urban California stuck in his mind. "Cities were where the action was," he recalls. "I decided very early that I was more interested in what happened to people," than in macro level trends. "I followed that by trying to focus on the poor."

Census gathers poverty data much the same way as it counts heads-by talking to people face to face. Weinberg still meets with those whose life stories make up his poverty report. Through his work, Weinberg says, he can help people understand what it's really like to be poor in America today.

But ever the evenhanded mathematician, Weinberg won't advocate policy changes. When asked if the lives of the poor are better now than at the dawn of the war on poverty, Weinberg falls back on science. "I think we have some better measures than we did 40 years ago."

He would know.