About:

Lawrence M. Mead is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at New York University, where he teaches public policy. He is also a Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Wisconsin, and a visiting fellow at Princeton and at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Professor Mead is an expert on the problems of poverty and welfare in the United States. His early books—Beyond Entitlement (1986), The New Politics of Poverty (1992), and The New Paternalism (1997)—provided the chief rationale for the welfare reform of the 1990s, which conditioned much of welfare on work. He is a leading scholar of the politics and implementation of welfare reform and also work programs for men. His research and publications have helped reshape social policy in the United States and abroad.