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Lawrence Mead

Lawrence M. Mead
Born (1943-06-06) June 6, 1943 (age 74)
Huntington, New York
Residence New York City, New York
Education Amherst College (1966)
Harvard University, M.A. (1968), Ph.D. (1973)
Occupation Political scientist
Known for Arguing that employment is an obligation of citizenship.
Notable work Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship, The New Politics of Poverty: The Nonworking Poor in America
Title Professor

Lawrence M. Mead (born 1943, Huntington, New York) is a professor in the department of politics at New York University, where he is currently professor of politics and public policy.

He received his B.A. from Amherst College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1966, and his MA and Ph. D from Harvard University in 1968 and 1973.

Mead has taught at New York University since 1979. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin (1987), Harvard University (1993-4) and Princeton University (1994-5). He was a visiting fellow at Princeton (1995-6, 2001-2) and the Hoover Institution at Stanford (1988). Prior to NYU, Mead was Deputy Director of Research for the Republican National Committee (1978–1979), a Research Associate at the Urban Institute (1975–1978), a speechwriter to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger (1974–1975), and a policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (1973–1975).

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.

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. Mead rejected wanted conditionality. 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.


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