Jodie Allen

Public biographies identify Jodie T. Allen as an American raised in the United States who earned a bachelor's degree with honors in political science and economics from Vassar College. She was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Before entering newsrooms she built a parallel career as a quantitative policy analyst, focusing on how political and demographic change affected taxes and income support. That training shaped the explanatory style that later marked her newspaper and magazine work.

Allen worked at public and private research organizations including the Urban Institute and Mathematica, Inc., developing computer models of tax and transfer programs. She served as research coordinator for family assistance planning during the Nixon years and, from 1977 to 1980, as deputy assistant secretary of labor for policy and research in the Carter administration. Her Post op eds on Social Security and welfare led Meg Greenfield to hire her in 1980 as an editorial writer and business columnist. She briefly left in 1985 to help Lee Iacocca with a syndicated column, then returned as deputy editor of Outlook and, from 1990 to 1996, as editor of that Sunday commentary section. From 1996 to 1999 she was Washington editor and bureau chief at Slate. At U.S. News & World Report (1999 to 2005) she was managing editor and business editor and wrote Funny Money and a biweekly political economy column. As senior editor at the Pew Research Center (2005 to 2011) she edited the Pew Global Attitudes Project and published analyses on poverty, inflation and Muslim integration in France and Europe. She also contributed a chapter to Muslims in Western Politics and wrote on the negative income tax for the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

In 1960 she married Princeton alumnus George V. Allen Jr., a lawyer and conservationist who later served as a deputy assistant administrator at the founding of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They were married for more than five decades. Their son Ted became a faculty member in industrial and systems engineering at The Ohio State University; family remembrances also name his wife Emily and grandsons Andrew and Henry. Allen belonged to the Council on Foreign Relations and the National Academy of Social Insurance.

Allen died on 15 September 2026 at her home in Washington. She was 88. The Washington Post published a staff obituary by Paul Duggan on 28 September 2026 that described her as an editor who made arcane policy accessible. Talking Biz News summarized the same report the same week, noting her U.S. News years and earlier Labor Department service. Surviving family details are those reported in connection with her husband's earlier memorial notices.

Allen left a rare trail from federal policy shops into the heart of Washington journalism. Colleagues and obituaries credit her with translating budget tables, welfare rules and survey data into readable argument at The Post, Slate, U.S. News and Pew. Her Outlook editorship, Funny Money column and Global Attitudes editing linked think tank method to mass audience explanation, a craft still cited when journalists discuss how to cover economic and demographic policy without jargon.