American social policy comes in waves from local outdoor relief and almshouses in the colonial era through welfare reform in the 1990s. Social science has almost always played a key role in justifying and structuring these policies. This book analyzes the community of researchers in academia, foundations, and government agencies who worked to measure poverty in the 1950s and then helped to determine the response that suddenly came with the War on Poverty.

The first section, “A Science of Poverty (1945–1963),” provides a unique analysis of the mostly female economists and statisticians—Ida Merriam, Dorothy Brady, Mollie Orshansky, Hildegarde Kneeland, Hazel Stiebling, Helen Lamale, Selma Goldsmith— who staffed or ran research offices across the federal bureaucracy, adding depth to works such as Alice O’Connor’s (Reference O’Connor2001) closely related Poverty Knowledge. They generated some of the first poverty rates and kicked off renewed interest in, understanding of, and controversy over the “paradox” of poverty amid postwar abundance. Huret argues that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the encounter between timehonored methods of quantifying working-class and rural family budgets and modern statistical methods for collecting and analyzing large-scale data” (p. 179).

This is a new and valuable historical account, but economists will likely demand more detail and rigor in this discussion. For example, Chapter 1 recounts how two agencies seeking to reconcile their estimates of rural family spending “incorporated nutritional and qualitative parameters into their updated studies in an effort to obtain stronger, more accurate data” (p. 32). What parameters? Accurate in what sense? Similarly, methods to estimate how much poor families “need” to spend on food are said to result in an “elevated norm of what constituted an ‘adequate’ living standard” (p. 28). This method relies on comparing income elasticities for food for richer and poorer families (“Engel’s Law”), and for an economic history audience that the original research is often a clearer source (Kellogg and Brady Reference Kellogg and Dorothy1948).

Still, the finding that one-fifth of the population was poor begged for an explanation beyond the inevitability of the Kuznets curve (Reference Kuznets1955) or John Galbraith’s (Reference Galbraith1958) dismissal of poverty as a “residual” phenomenon. One of the most engaging themes of the book is how scientific debates about poverty interacted with Cold War politics to create the particular solutions enacted in the 1960s. Chapter 2 describes how McCarthyism, embodied in Congressional hearings like the Cox Commission’s interrogation of private foundations, skewed federal and private research funding. Out went “structural” explanations for poverty that could be construed as criticizing American capitalism. In came “behavioral” explanations such as “motivation” (McClelland Reference McClelland1953), human capital, or “opportunity theory” (Cloward and Ohlin Reference Cloward and Lloyd1960), the conceptual basis for the War on Poverty’s direct predecessor, the Ford Foundation’s anti-delinquency Gray Areas program.

The book’s second section, “From Science to War (1963–1974),” traces these ideas about poverty and the social scientists behind them through the policymaking process that rapidly unfolded after President Kennedy’s assassination. As a comprehensive characterization of the War on Poverty this book falls short of the direct accounts in Michael Gillette’s (Reference Gillette1996) oral history Launching the War on Poverty or the alternately optimistic and curmudgeonly interpretations in Sar Levitan’s (Reference Levitan1969) The Great Society’s Poor Law and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s (Reference Moynihan1969) Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. It equates anti-poverty policy with the activities of the Office of Economic Opportunity, even though some of the most profound social policy of Johnson’s term addressed things like civil rights and medical care.

Yet the focus on the origins of the poverty research community provides a fresh analysis of a crucial turning point in 1960s antipoverty policy: the embrace of guaranteed income proposals. Gareth Davies (Reference Davies1996) also explores this shift in From Opportunity to Entitlement and emphasizes the influence of “rights-based” movements on the 1960s Democratic Party. Huret, on the other hand, frames guaranteed income as an attempt by academic advisers to get back into the policymaking fold after having been sidelined in the early development of the Economic Opportunity Act. The early experiences of people like Robert Lampman trying to measure poverty, showed that it extended broadly across the population and persisted despite growth, and convinced them that direct redistribution was the best way to eliminate it. Internal proposals along these lines from late 1964 long pre-dated Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan and George McGovern’s 1972 presidential platform.

This book will be most enjoyable for those who start with some understanding of this period. Many public servants whose work formed the basis for changes in the safety net receive credit and attention they deserve. Moreover, the relationship between advances in measurement, post-war politics, and the structure of policy feels familiar. In 50 years, will we reflect on the availability of administrative tax data, the Equality of Opportunity project (https://opportunityinsights.org/), how our polarized politics shaped its mission “to develop scalable policy solutions?”