Haskins cited a study by a group of researchers who conducted interviews with 80 families receiving welfare in Philadelphia and Cleveland after the reform. Yet those receiving welfare did not seem to be opposed to the new program. Public assistance hadn't fundamentally changed the values of poor Americans. If it had, he argued, the increase in payrolls would have been less dramatic, as recipients would have resisted the government's efforts to make them work. For Haskins, now at the Brookings Institution, these figures show that welfare had not created a culture of dependency. A range of estimates produced by economists suggests that the country's welfare rolls were reduced by some 20 percent and that employment increased by about 4 percent as a result of the reform. The economy was doing well in those years, giving more people an opportunity to work, but economists believe that at least some of the increase was a result of the new law.
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