Lawrence Mead

Mead is best known as an expert on poverty and welfare in the United States. In the books he wrote between 1986 and 2004, he provided the main theoretical basis for the American welfare reform of the 1990s, which required adult recipients of welfare to work as a condition of aid. His books have also influenced welfare reform in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.[3]

Most other experts on poverty and welfare defended the traditional policy of entitlement under which recipients qualified for assistance simply by having low income, regardless of lifestyle. Instead, Mead advocated that assistance should be conditioned so that each recipient could and would take steps toward employment and self-reliance. Employable recipients now had to help themselves to get help from society. However, he also differed from other conservative critics of welfare, such as Charles Murray, who wanted simply to abolish welfare. Mead had no objection to aid as such but insisted only for it be less permissive. Mead is not a small-government conservative but a big-government conservative who wants to use government for conservative ends, enforcing the work ethic. That approach came to dominate welfare policy in the 1990s. It is also seen in other areas of social policy such as tougher enforcement of the criminal law and the movement for higher standards in the public schools.

Other experts were mostly economists and sociologists. They blamed poverty or welfare largely on adverse social conditions that denied the poor the chance to work and support themselves. The answer, they argued, was to push back the barriers by giving the poor new benefits and opportunities. In contrast, Mead was a political scientist who blamed poverty largely on a breakdown of public authority. Poverty reflected disorder more than denials of opportunity. The poor were too free.rather than not free enough. The solution was to enforce values such as the work ethic or law-abidingness more effectively. Other experts did statistical analyses of the conditions surrounding the poor. While Mead published some quantitative research, his books were based largely on field research on welfare work programs in New York and Wisconsin. He argued that better-run, more demanding work programs had a power to move the adult poor into jobs and thus reduce poverty and welfare.[4] In the 1990s, welfare reform drove most recipients off the rolls, mostly into jobs, apparently confirming Mead's prediction. Other experts, however, attributed the success of reform mostly to excellent economic conditions and new benefits.

Mead has written three books, coauthored one book, and edited or coedited three others, all of them on poverty and/or government welfare policies. Government Matters, his study of welfare reform in Wisconsin, was a Co-winner of the Louis Brownlow Book Award (2005), which is given by the National Academy of Public Administration.[5] He has published dozens of articles on poverty, welfare, program implementation, and related subjects in scholarly journals, such as the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Public Administration Review, The Public Interest and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. His book reviews and commentaries have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets.[6]

Mead has lectured on poverty policy and welfare reform in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. Recently, he has been researching how to better enforce work among poor men who owe child support or are leaving prison on parole.[7] He has also written a book and teaches a course on the reasons (namely, an individualist culture) that the United Kingdom and then the United States became dominant countries in international relations. The book is called Burdens of Freedom.

Scholars Stanford M. Lyman and Arthur J. Vidich have compared his idea of requiring the poor to work to an earlier notion of 'warrantism' espoused by Henry Hughes in the Antebellum South.[8]

Experts at nearby universities have pointed out that Mead's philosophy is largely rooted in racism; for example, Mead has argued that African-Americans face disadvantages other than institutionalized racism, namely freedom.[9] "The chief problem for low-income blacks was no longer oppression but freedom."[10]