Blank, Rebecca M

As an economics professor, she found serious flaws in how government determines who is poor in America. As under secretary of commerce, she fixed them.As far as her husband knows, Rebecca Blank threw a party with strawberries and champagne only once in her life.It was spring of 2010, and Ms. Blank was then the under secretary of commerce for economic affairs. Her guests were statisticians and economists in the civil service, the sort of people who write public reports on out-of-pocket medical expenses.But they were not celebrating a technocratic victory so much as a moral one: the first major overhaul of the government’s system for measuring poverty in nearly 50 years.The result was a powerful new statistical view of America’s poor, one that was far more accurate and that quantified the value of social welfare programs, blunting criticism that they had no effect.And that achievement was thanks, mainly, to Ms. Blank.She died at 67 on Feb. 17 at a hospice in Fitchburg, Wis. The cause was pancreatic cancer, her husband, Hanns Kuttner, said.The story of the calculation that Ms. Blank sought to reform — the Official Poverty Measure — is a parable of how skittishness and inertia can dictate government policy.The government’s definition of the poverty line was determined in 1963 by Mollie Orshansky, a little-known civil servant. She conceived of the poverty line as three times a family’s “subsistence food budget,” using as inspiration a 1955 public survey that found that families spent a third of their after-tax income on food.As food prices fell and housing costs rose over the last 60 years, that proportion grew ever more detached from reality. At the same time, poor people gained new forms of purchasing power outside of cash income, like food stamps, tax credits and housing subsidies.Yet the Official Poverty Measure remained the same.“There is no other economic statistic in use today that relies on 1955 data and methods developed in the early 1960s,” Ms. Blank told Congress in 2008. “The official poverty thresholds are numbers without any valid conceptual basis.”Nonetheless, one presidential administration after another declined to change the measure. This reluctance was dramatized in a 2001 episode of “The West Wing,” in which two White House spokesmen, fearing the political risk of newly defining millions of Americans as “poor,” try to weasel out of adopting a more realistic formula.The persistence of the old Official Poverty Measure put some of the government’s chief antipoverty programs at risk.“SNAP — what we used to call food stamps — and the earned-income tax credit, those two particularly stand out,” Robert Greenstein, founder of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a leading policy institute that advocates for the poor, said in a phone interview. “Under the Official Poverty Measure, it’s as if they don’t exist.”That mattered in Congress. “You’d have these very frustrating discussions,” Mr. Greenstein said. “A member would say, ‘I’m looking at the poverty rate now and 40 years ago, and they’re about the same, yet we have all these programs — they must be a failure.’ You’d have to explain, ‘Well the problem is in the poverty measure.’”In the 1990s, Ms. Blank, then an economics professor at Northwestern University, studied how to fix the poverty measure and recommended changes. For more than a decade, she got nowhere.But by the time of her 2008 congressional testimony, she had adopted a new approach. Rather than directly attack the Official Poverty Measure, she proposed that the government establish a revised measure alongside it. She hoped that this secondary measure would gradually replace the existing one, meanwhile providing a more accurate view.In 2009, after she joined the Department of Commerce under President Barack Obama, Ms. Blank set to work prodding the bureaucracy to implement something new.“Through her leadership, the Supplemental Poverty Measure was born,” David Johnson, the census bureau official in charge of computing the new measure, said in a phone interview.Beginning in 2011, the new measure joined the old one as features of annual Census Bureau reports. It changed the poverty calculus in numerous ways, for instance by using as a basis not merely food budgets but also an array of consumer expenditures, including on clothing and shelter. In addition, it updated the view of a family’s financial resources to take account of government benefits not issued as cash.Last year, when the Census Bureau wanted to determine the effect of the 2021 child tax credit on child poverty, it was able to do so thanks to the Supplemental Poverty Measure. (The tax credit helped bring child poverty to its lowest level on record, 5.2 percent, the bureau found. )“Becky Blank was a giant,” Mr. Greenstein said. “The introduction of the Supplemental Poverty Measure was probably without question the most important new development in poverty measurement in over 30 years.”It attracted bipartisan support. “There’s widespread agreement, that’s increased over the years, that the Supplemental Poverty Measure is a more accurate measure of people’s actual financial status,” said Ron Haskins, a former policy analyst for Republicans, including the former House speaker Paul Ryan and President George H.W. Bush.Rebecca Margaret Blank was born on Sept. 19, 1955, in Columbia, Mo., to Uel and Vernie (Backhaus) Blank. She grew up in Roseville, Minn., a suburb of the Twin Cities. Her father worked on behalf of the University of Minnesota to study and improve the local tourism industry. Her mother was a homemaker.Growing up, Becky participated in campaigns organized by the nonprofit advocacy group Bread for the World to write letters to members of Congress about the importance of combating hunger.She graduated from the University of Minnesota with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1976 and earned a Ph.D. in the subject from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1983.At the Commerce Department, she attained the post of acting secretary briefly in 2011 and again from 2012-2013. She left to become chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she tangled with state Republicans who were trying to cut funding. One achievement was her creation of a scholarship program for Wisconsin students from poor families.Last year, Ms. Blank was set to become the next president of Northwestern University, prompting her and her husband to take a trip beforehand to Europe. They found themselves returning to destinations from their honeymoon in 1994, including Lünersee, an alpine lake in western Austria.While strolling around the lake, she became ill. Upon returning home, she was diagnosed with cancer. On July 11 — the day she was set to start her new job — she announced that she would have to decline the offer.In addition to her husband, she is survived by their daughter, Emily Kuttner, and her brother, Grant.The Official Poverty Measure that Ms. Blank had hoped to jettison remains in place, a monument to bureaucratic stasis. But scholars and other analysts, Mr. Greenstein said, now overwhelmingly use the tool that Ms. Blank imagined, fought for and established. More