Since 1994, welfare caseloads have fallen an astounding 60 percent nationwide, with inner-city declines almost as deep. However assessing welfare reform's long-term impact is complicated. Single mothers are working in greater numbers, but the number of disadvantaged men in the workforce remains low. Welfare caseloads have decreased and incomes among the poorest families have increased, but government aid to low-income families is at a post-depression high--little change in nonmarital birth rates and marriage formation has occurred as well. In the second Bradley Lecture of the 2002-2003 season, Douglas Besharov will discuss what the future holds for welfare reform.

Douglas J. Besharov is the Joseph J. and Violet Jacobs Scholar in Social Welfare Studies and director of AEI's Social and Individual Responsibility Project. He is also a professor at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, where he directs its Welfare Reform Academy. Between 1989 and 1990, he served as the administrator of the AEI/White House Working Seminar on Integrated Services for Children and Families, a project designed to improve the delivery of services to disadvantaged children and their families, and from 1975 to 1979 he was the director of the U.S. Center on Child Abuse and Neglect. He is the author of the upcoming Family Well-Being After Welfare (Transaction Publishing, 2003).