Mollie Orshansky
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Orshansky Mollie Orshansky
It has remained essentially untouched since 1963, when Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, first came up with it. She never expected that it would be used today as a trigger for billions of dollars in government spending. Her method was to use the cost of a nutritionally adequate diet as the basis for a cost-of-living estimate and to adjust for families of various sizes and compositions.