Social theorist Charles Murray has repugnant politics, but the very progressive Nick Kristoff is able to find common ground with him on an aspect of poverty. That’s why I like Kristoff so much: He doesn’t care about sides, only solutions. The opening of “The White Underclass” in the New York Times:

“Persistent poverty is America’s great moral challenge, but it’s far more than that.

As a practical matter, we can’t solve educational problems, health care costs, government spending or economic competitiveness so long as a chunk of our population is locked in an underclass. Historically, ‘underclass’ has often been considered to be a euphemism for race, but increasingly it includes elements of the white working class as well.

That’s the backdrop for the uproar over Charles Murray’s latest book, Coming Apart. Murray critically examines family breakdown among working-class whites and the decline in what he sees as traditional values of diligence.

Liberals have mostly denounced the book, and I, too, disagree with important parts of it. But he’s right to highlight social dimensions of the crisis among low-skilled white workers.

My touchstone is my beloved hometown of Yamhill, Ore., population about 925 on a good day. We Americans think of our rural American heartland as a lovely pastoral backdrop, but these days some marginally employed white families in places like Yamhill seem to be replicating the pathologies that have devastated many African-American families over the last generation or two.”