But guess what, for the Abakrs of the world collectively, it's far better if they are all denied the ability to work.

And there is a simple reason why. If the children aren't allowed to work, adults elsewhere will be allowed to work, and almost invariably at a higher wage, so they will have more money to bring home and possibly pay the taxes to fund schools for their children.

Not necessarily there Nathan. Basic micro economic theory 101 says that a firm will operate so long as its average variable cost is at or above the price level (at least for the short run, ideally firms want their average cost to be above the price of the good). So is they can't hire children and hiring an adult for more means that the average variable cost goes above the pirce level the firm shuts down.

So it most certainly does not have to be the case that an adult will get the job the child is prohibitted from filling.

Repeat that-- you take a job away from a child, you are creating a job slot for an adult, improving his bargaining leverage, and increasing the collective wages paid to the poor in the developing world.

Repeating a claim that may or may not be true does not make it true. Your claim is an empirical one and one that does not have to hold in every case.

Those who talk about the benefits of child labor....

You mean guys like Paul Krugman?

Uh, Steve, I did a word search, and there was only one reference to child labor in Krugman's article, and I don't think it could be stretched to the point of endorsing child labor... the article was more about cheap labor ... and even adults in a third world country are going to be cheap labor.

And BTW - watch out for econ 101 logic. It is based on mathematical models that many times exist only in the reality of econ professors, else we could all predict our business cycles...

actually banning child labor would encourage a decrease in the number of adults employed. the reason is that families like akbar's would lose their income and become unable to support other workers.

a much more serious objection is that the most needy families usually do not have a adult member who can work. so even if nathan newman's analysis is correct the neediest families would still suffer.

Umar- And if adults collectively had greater income, the neediest families without adult members (by definition not a family but orphans), would have a society where people were paid enough to afford the social services where orphan children were not forced to work to survive.

Steve- As for the Econ 101 simplification, peoples demand for clothes and manufactured goods will not disappear because the price of labor goes from 30 cents per hour for a child to 50 cents for an adult-- at that point labor is such a small part of the purchase price that it is hardly effecting the demand curve at all.

nathan newman,

actually the families i had in mind were families with a disabled, old or sick adult member who is unable to work. such families are more needy (since there is an extra member to support) and are probably a larger segment of the population than orphans.

also it is highly unlikely that any change in child labor laws would make welfare significantly more affordable. (if anything banning child labor would make welfare slightly less affordable.)

Umar- You paint one of the best sympathetic anecdotal portraits to sell child labor for the individual family, but the fact remains that child labor impoverishes society as a whole, shifting income from better paid adults to lower paid children-- thereby decreasing the overall income of workers in the developing world. Less income means less money for social services, which means less money for all disabled adults, especially the disabled adults without a handy child to supposedly take care of them.

Nathan,

Steve- As for the Econ 101 simplification, peoples demand for clothes and manufactured goods will not disappear because the price of labor goes from 30 cents per hour for a child to 50 cents for an adult-- at that point labor is such a small part of the purchase price that it is hardly effecting the demand curve at all.

Nice fallacy of composition. Just because the demand is inelastic does not say much about the firms that are behind the supply curve. Again, your claim may or may not be true. However, it is an empirical one, i.e. one that needs to verified with data and for each market.

George,

Uh, Steve, I did a word search, and there was only one reference to child labor in Krugman's article, and I don't think it could be stretched to the point of endorsing child labor... the article was more about cheap labor ... and even adults in a third world country are going to be cheap labor.

The point of Krugman's article is that judging things by Western (and developed world) standards and imposing Western conditions can actually result in people, including children, being worse off. It isn't that child labor or even cheap labor in third world countries is a good thing, but that the alternatives are worse.

By the way, isn't one of the points in Nathan's article that child labor is not a good thing? Since child labor is cheap, it seems to me that Krugman's article still applies.

And BTW - watch out for econ 101 logic. It is based on mathematical models that many times exist only in the reality of econ professors, else we could all predict our business cycles...

Nice bit of conflating there. Going from fairly well established micro-economic theory of the firm to macroeconomics and business cycle theory. Will you next trick be to note someting about atoms and use it to draw a conclusion about the behavior of dogs?

Also, you think firms will stay in operation when the average cost is above the price? I mean that is higher math, I know, but most people can see that such a firm is operating at a loss.

Steve- you're defending products that apparently can't be made unless child labor is involved.

Well kiddie porn certainly falls in that category. Name something else that people need to have that they can't get without 10 year-olds making it, please.

Hey, and everybody has multiple kidneys and lungs, so it would be stupid not to allow the people in that heart-rendering family portrayed by umar to sell theirs.

And another thought: we have families like that in the Western world. Why should they be constrained by child labor laws whilst somebody in Farfromeverywhereistan gets to send their kid to work?

Talk about intellectual and moral bankruptcy.

How about trying to identify and fix the underlying problems, rather than taking advantage of these people so you can afford to boing around in ridiculous looking sneakers? Or would that just be too much trouble?

The only credit I can give you is that you have just enough conscience to feel you have to come up with some justification for your selfishness.

Nathan: Are you willing to accept the fact that in the short term, while all of this labor shifting and equilibrium-reaching is going on, children and their families who depend on their income will die? I'm not saying I agree with your logic; I don't. I merely want to make sure that you understand and are willing to accept as a necessary consequence of your plan that these children, the ones working right now, will go hungry if their jobs are taken away. If that's okay with you, fine, but you need to be honest about it.

Amy- I love the concern for the havoc wrecked by market "equilibrium" changes by libertarians, who defend as much unregulated market havoc as possible. Along with a ban on child labor, I also support universal Food Stamps for every child in the world, so in my ideal policy there would be zero chance of any one going hungry do the elimination of child labor.

Now, in the less than ideal world, where families starve today because of too low wages due to child labor, would I support a policy that would lead to a net gain in income for poor families and less hunger overall, yet might negatively impact some specific families despite that net gain in social conditions.

Yes. Given that lesser evil choice, I'd rather have more children live.

This kind of argument against child labor is a bit like a terrorist demand. "If you try to save more children, I'll have to kill this one." It's a pretty common rhetorical trick and it reflects as much real compassion for child welfare as the terrorist has.

nathan newman,

i am surprised that republican types are making mucher better arguments than you are. banning child labor would encourage (a slight) increase in adult wages and (a slight) decrease in GDP. since a country's ability to provide welfare is determined by GDP banning child labor would (slightly) harm that country's ability to provide welfare.

Umar-- If wages increase, GDP increases. Raising wages throughout the developing world is the best way to increase their GDP-- and by putting more money in their hands, encourage imports and jobs in the developed world as well-- the basic virtuous cycle of wage-led global growth.

The idea that child labor and low wages are a requirement for growth is just rightwing ideology. The best growth in the US ever was in the years after the 1930s when child labor was eliminated, unions were the strongest and wage levels increased more than they ever did.

Kristof's article was particularly disappointing. He conflated two distinct kinds of child labor, suggested a good but grossly inadequate solution, offered a false choice between political activism and charity, and didn't even get the details right about his test cases. He uses anti-child labor activism in Bangladesh and Sialkot (Pakistan) as an example of self-righteously indignant Westerners making things worse, without ever mentioning that these campaigns specifically included programs to make education available to displaced child workers. What a waste.

Nathan: It's a bit disingenuous to claim that growth in the 1940s was attributable to increased strictures on labor. There was a little thing called World War II that we were building stuff for. Just because two things happened at the same time, that doesn't prove that one caused the other.

As for your response to my earlier post, I'm a little upset at the argument that I have "as much real compassion for child welfare as the terrorist has," but I'm not going to lower myself to such ad hominem attacks.

On the substance of your arguments, saying that you can oppose child labor because you support doling out millions of dollars worth of food aid doesn't actually address the substance of my argument. After all, I could just as easily argue that we should keep child labor legal and then give away all that food so that most kids don't have to work, and then child labor would go away naturally once families didn't need it to survive. I won't argue that, but the point is that saying you support program X doesn't address the flaws in program Y.

It's simply not true that rising adult wages will necessarily raise a country's GDP. If child labor makes up, say, 20% of a nation's GDP (I'm picking a random number. I actually have no idea how much of an average developing nation's GDP is children's wages), and banning child labor only pushes adult wages up by 20%, the nation's GDP would only be 96% of what it was before.

The point is this: Kristoff argues that people living in the real world right now shouldn't oppose child labor because families in the developing world need it to survive. You argue against Kristoff, saying that we as real people living in the real world should oppose child labor. You can propose all of the off-the-wall universal safety net programs you want, but in the real world, an international food stamp program is unlikely to ever be implemented, and even if it were, it's unlikely that it could ever reach every family currently surviving off of child labor. I would prefer to give those families the option to support themselves in whatever way they can find, given that they have very few other options. I'm open to a lot of different suggestions for how to give them other options, including food aid, setting up schools, reforming political systems, and many other things you could propose. I just can't see any good reason to take away their means of support in the meantime.