ABSTRACT
Counting the poor is an exercise in the art of the possible. For deciding who is poor, prayers are more relevant than calculation because poverty, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. The index is arbitrary in that it relies only on income as the criterion of poverty, but income statistics happen to be the only ones currently available on a regular basis. A lot has been said about the limitations of the Social Security Administration's poverty index. One of the difficulties encountered in the use of the poverty index is that the data used are not adequate for the applications. As it turns out, a substantial number of families are in poverty even when the man works all year. Present surveys of poverty and low income are based on the Current Population Survey sample and thus exclude persons in institutions, many of whom are among the poorest.
