This week over 1,000 workforce professionals from around the country gather in Anaheim for the Workforce Innovations conference, sponsored by the U.S. Labor Department. With this gathering, it is important to note how much both the welfare system and the job-training system in the United States have changed, for the better, over the past three decades. The lack of accountability, passiveness and benefits-orientation that marked these systems during the late 1970s have been replaced by systems that are market-oriented, active and oriented toward self-sufficiency rather than government reliance.

I entered the job-training world in the late 1970s, working at an inner-city training and job-creation agency in San Francisco. At the time, welfare rolls had been rising steadily for more than a decade. More importantly, government and foundation officials took the view that this rise was inevitable. Carter administration officials, and their liberal allies in the foundation world, regarded anyone who questioned whether welfare should be so widely available, as unrealistic or "mean-spirited."

Yet, the welfare system did change over the next several years. Republicans and Democrats willing to buck conventional wisdom enacted a series of reforms culminating in the major federal welfare reform of 1996, which re-oriented the welfare system to be mainly an employment system. In past decade, welfare rolls have fallen by more than 40 percent, both nationally and in California. In California, CalWORKS, the main welfare program, saw caseloads drop from 921,011 in 1995 to 516,591 in 2001. Further, most former welfare recipients, once placed in jobs, have seen incomes rise, as well as other family benefits.

Similarly, in the 1970s teen pregnancies and births i? 1/2 the main drivers of poverty i? 1/2 rose steadily, which was regarded by the Carter administration as inevitable. Yet, in the several years that followed government took a more aggressive role in trying to reduce teen pregnancy, through the welfare changes, abstinence programs and birth-control programs. U.S. teen birthrates fell from 62.1 births per 1000 in 1991 to 45.8 births in 2001, and the teen birthrate in California declined even more, from 79.2 per 1000 in 1991 to 45.2 in 2001.

The multibillion-dollar federal job-training system also has been dramatically restructured since the 1970s. In the 1970s, the Carter administration oversaw the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), which created public-sector jobs and funded job-training programs, all with little oversight or accountability.

Beginning in the Reagan years of the 1980s and continuing until the present, the system has become far more market-oriented, with training programs closely tied to jobs and tailored to the needs of employers. Most training today is sector-based, with training agencies developing close ties to and understanding of a specific industry sector, such as health care, finance or construction. Effective training programs operate as businesses, with close ties to customers and to the labor market, and an ability to move quickly and adapt to changing employer needs.

The improvements over the past 30 years in reducing welfare rolls and teen pregnancies and improving the performance of job-training programs show the promise of moving away from the welfare-state strategies of the 1970s. They also show how policymakers can demand and get programs that don't build government bureaucracies but, instead, truly improve the lives of low-income and unemployed Americans.

Michael Bernick is a senior fellow at the Milken Institute. He headed the California Employment Development Department, 1999-2004.