Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by faeriechangling | Hacker News Reader

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faeriechangling

I worked from 12 in a fairly industrial business and mostly appreciated the experience because I was in poverty. Meanwhile the school I was actually forced to go to was abusive.

Of course businesses do this. If nothing else the kids in poverty are literally going to ask for a part time job and a few people will say yes because they won’t see the harm because there actually isn’t any.

The only abusive sounding part of this story to me is the kids were pulled out of school and seemingly working at the factory all the time. What is surprising here is that it went beyond “child helps contractor/small business on the weekend and gets money under the table” and instead “large corporation had full time child labourer at factory” which is rather extreme by American standards. But child labour is plenty common, if you’ve eaten chocolate recently there’s a good chance it was made with tiny child hands, rich people literally just can’t comprehend such things.

Forbidding child labor isn't enough on its own, it should come with enough social support for families that they don't need to send their kids working. A non-coercive education system would also be fantastic :-)

Is that kind of support really possible? Isn't our society literally built on coercing people to work under threat of starvation?

The entire civilized world provides that support.

Sincerely: how do you know that? Child labor is illegal, so I don't know how many families would feel a need for their children to work if it were legal.

If child labor were not illegal, you still wouldn't know how many families would feel that need (as opposed to acting on plain greed), so your question is unanswerable. Can you formulate the question in a way that would invite a sincere discussion?

> your question is unanswerable

You've only shown that my question is not answerable by simply legalizing child labor, not that my question is unanswerable full stop.

> Can you formulate the question in a way that would invite a sincere discussion?

Sadly, I don't know how to phrase questions in a way that invites discussion; I only know how to ask questions that I want to know the answer to. But here's my question, restated, in case it helps:

@lupire said that support systems in "the entire civilized world" are successful at making it so that no family needs to have their kids work. By what measure do we know that these support systems are successful at this job?

I think your question has two problems: first, it mentions need. It presupposes that we can accurately know the inner motivations of every parent in each country. Second, you're asking for the efficacy of the support systems specifically (since you discarded the influence of prohibition laws with your child labor is illegal comment). But no policy exists in isolation, so you cannot measure the effect of those systems in isolation.

In general, I can think of three different policies that all work to reduce child labor:

- a general ban on child labor, which obviously is a stick mechanism to prevent child labor

- compulsory education, which is another stick mechanism to make sure children do not work all day

- child benefit payments, which is a carrot mechanism to make sure parents have the means to feed and clothe their children

Then there's indirect policies like unemployment benefits, health insurance, and child abuse laws that also help parents to stay afloat and keep children out of labor. But the only measures we have are child labor incidence rate and school attendance rate. Neither of those measurements specifically measure the need for children to supplement the family income, nor do they measure the effects of the carrot policies alone.

So that's why I said your question is unanswerable: you're asking for the effects of specific policies on the decisions of parents, while the statistics will only give you the effects of the complete policy on the outcome of those parental decisions.

(edit: see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/incidence-of-child-labour... for example. If you can find a way to compare the child labor policies of e.g. Argentina, Mexico, Serbia, Peru, and Nigeria and correlate them with this graph, maybe you'll be able to get closer to an answer to your question)

You fail to grasp the rudimentary causal structure here. Reality itself imposes resource scarcity. A well-structured society must reflect that fact.

Yes, it would be awesome if we lived in a fantasy land. Unfortunately we need to perform locally feasible optimizations.

Some crazy fantasy land like... the EU

> non-coercive education system

That is an oxymoron given how "education" is currently defined in the US. The only way this could be achieved is if the whole system is torn down to absolute zero and rebuilt as something entirely different. That is, of course, not possible.

Good point about education. Child labor is ugly when it either forces children to do something they don't want to, or it's too hard on them, or it deceives them into thinking it's the best choice they got, or robs them of the opportunity to grow and develop their talents freely. If I squint a little, a coercive education system does the same.

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