Does Murray have a hidden agenda? Actually, it’s not all that hidden. He is a laissez-faire communitarian who thinks that unless a do-gooding government foolishly interferes, people will naturally form communities that protect themselves by enforcing ““norms of safety’’ and ““norms of self-respect’’ (stigmatizing unwed motherhood, for example). In person, Murray adopts a more-in-sorrow-than-anger tone, as if once you take the ““underclass’’ problem seriously, you must embrace his cut-’em-off prescription. But there are at least three areas where his theories deserve more scrutiny than they have been getting.

You have the makings of an underclass, Murray argues, ““when you have in a community a whole lot of people with kids without fathers.’’ That is what was left in the black ghettos when the black middle class moved out in the ’60s and ’70s. Today, in many of these ghettos, more than 80 percent of births are illegitimate. But it was race segregation that created the ghettos. Will there be a similar geographic concentration of poor, broken white homes? Impoverished whites, after all, tend to be spread throughout the population – only 4 percent live in high-poverty ghettos, according to one study, compared with 26 percent of poor blacks. Although it can’t be a good thing that about 22 percent of white births are now illegitimate, 22 percent is still a long way from 80 percent. In an interview with Newsweek, Murray admits he can’t name any white underclass neighborhoods ““happening now.’’ He is merely predicting that some poor white areas will soon reach a ““tipping point.''

““I don’t care how many women go to work,’’ Murray has declared. He and his Republican champions like to pooh-pooh the importance of getting single mothers into the labor force. That distinguishes the Murrayites from Clinton, whose welfare plan will stress work. But does Murray really not care about work? He says he’s not very concerned about single moms who do work – the Murphy Browns. (They would be unaffected by his aid cutoff anyway.) At the same time, he seems quite troubled by the idea that welfare checks might go to two-parent families that don’t work, where ““dad and mom sit around the house.’’ Sounds like work is pretty important after all.

The nub of the underclass problem, black or white, is clearly the combination of illegitimacy and non-work. Who has the cure? Here the seeming gulf between the Murray and Clinton plans shrinks even further. Both wind up relying on the need to work as a deterrent to illegitimacy. Murray, by abolishing welfare, would in effect tell prospective unwed mothers that they’d have to support themselves in private-sector jobs. Clinton plans roughly to say the same thing, though he’d offer public jobs as a last resort. Even Murray concedes that a work requirement imposed after two years might have a deterrent effect ““if you have an absolute cutoff [of all benefits], so that on the 25th month, every woman who has been on welfare must report to a job site . . . or get nothing.’’ He just doesn’t think Clinton will propose anything that rigorous, or that any ““mechanisms of government’’ could make such a requirement stick.

So the debate comes down to the old question of whether, in Murray’s words, ““the government will screw it up.’’ If the Clintonites are naive about the ability of government, Murray seems equally naive about what would happen in the absence of government. Ending welfare, he says, would ““trigger . . . a wide variety of extremely helpful private activities.’’ Perhaps. But what if we abolish welfare and charity doesn’t flower? You can be alarmed about illegitimacy, even about a ““coming white underclass,’’ and still not think Charles Murray has found the answer.