Counting lives.
Measuring poverty.
Mapping trajectories.
Two intertwined projects: a history of poverty measurement as political act, and topological data analysis revealing the shapes poverty leaves in data.
A historical investigation into the politics of poverty measurement — from Rowntree's dietary surveys to modern multidimensional indices. This book traces how numbers about the poor have always carried the values of those who made them.
Explore Counting Lives →A programme of topological data analysis applied to longitudinal UK household panel data. Ten linked papers applying Mapper, persistent homology, and graph-neural-network methods to employment and poverty trajectories.
Explore the TDA Research Programme →This chapter traces how Orshansky's 1963 poverty matrix — a transparent, household-specific measurement instrument — was standardised and simplified by the Bureau of the Budget in 1969 into a single administrable threshold, severing it from its material grounding, and how that institutional move is replicated in Universal Credit's standard allowances today.
Most statistical models of employment over a lifetime assume that what you do next depends only on w…
Mollie Orshansky built America's first official poverty measure from grocery budgets and household surveys, not theoretical abstractions. This essay traces her method, her biography, and the ethical tradition she represents — and what it means for algorithmic welfare today.