This article examines how poverty came to be identified as the key category of the new social question in Argentina during its post-1983 transition to democracy. It pays special attention to the conformation of an expert group at the Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas y Censos (National Institute of Statistics and Censuses, INDEC), which focused on the construction of statistical instruments aimed at describing the social reality of poverty. Through practices of objectification and classification carried out by those experts, poverty was made into a measurable object, at the same time that it was publicly instituted as a political-moral problem and as an object of state action.
