Mead has taught at New York University since 1979. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University and Princeton University. He was a visiting fellow at Princeton and the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Prior to NYU, Mead was Deputy Director of Research for the Republican National Committee, a Research Associate at the Urban Institute, a speechwriter to Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, and a policy analyst at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Mead has written 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 Americanwelfare 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. 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, which is given by the National Academy of Public Administration. 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.
Mead believes that welfare should be means-tested, so as to guide behavior in poor populations that he believes would reduce poverty. According to Mead, poverty is mainly found in minority groups and is caused by a lack of work ethic in their cultures. Mead believes that so-called "entitlement" form a harmful welfare culture of dependence. In a study conducted by fellow economist Stephen M. Petterson, Mead's argument was not supported, and Petterson found that differences in employment between Black and White men could not be attributed to differences in "willingness to work." Scholars Stanford M. Lyman and Arthur J. Vidich have compared his idea of requiring the poor to work to an earlier theory of 'warrantism,' a theory of mandatory labor espoused by Henry Hughes that paralleled slavery in the Antebellum South. In July 2020, Mead published a commentary in the journal Society entitled Poverty and Culture based on ideas from his 2019 book Burdens of Freedom. In the paper, Mead argues that Black and Hispanic people in the United States are poor because they "typically respond only weakly to chances to get ahead through education and work" due to cultural differences in adapting to the "individualist culture" of the United States, a culture he posits is derived from Europe. The paper drew widespread outrage from the academic community for perpetuating racist, xenophobic and classist stereotypes, and multiple petitions were circulated requesting a retraction. Mead's home institution of NYU issued a statement expressing their rejection of "false, prejudicial, and stigmatizing assertions about the culture of communities of color in the United States" in his paper, and the journal publisher launched an investigation to possibly retract the paper.
