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Comment by abracadaniel | Hacker News Reader

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sacrificing their children to increase labor availability.

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>If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages.

Sounds good, until you realize that doesn't do much for the starving family with kids to feed. Even though there might be some knock on effect to increase the adults' earnings, there's no way that it'll match the lost income from the kids not working.

Why are the families starving? Is the only option in that area growing cocoa for export to the West? Why can't those people work for themselves, to grow their own food, to feed themselves?

Is it because some wealthy landlord owns all the land? Is it because we dump subsidized food on the global markets, making local agriculture non-competitive? Could either of those have anything to do with it?

There seems to be a very obvious economic solution somewhere between 'grow cocoa for other people for a pittance' and 'starve'. These people are poor, not helpless.

Without knowing too much about Ghana specifically, I have been to third world countries and seen some of the conditions that prevent an economy from flourishing. It is usually a lack of property rights altogether (autocratic governments that take from individuals at will, which you can only avoid by being too small to cut down), deep corruption in the government that basically runs on bribes (whereby the highest bidders thrive), endless violence or war preventing an area from being able to benefit from long-term investment (either public or private), a broken currency system, a broken or nonexistent legal system to settle property disputes. A lack of skilled labor in the country itself, due to brain drain, war, and nonexistent infrastructure.

There clearly are property rights, since the landowners seem to be reaping the lion's share of the bounty, year after year.

Perhaps they are not property rights that serve the people doing the work, but that's a separate problem.

>since the landowners seem to be reaping the lion's share of the bounty, year after year.

Where does it say that? It's not mentioned in the CBS article nor the youtube video.

Everyone is better off if children don’t work, but if everyone else has their children work and you don’t, you lose. Sounds like moloch!

(I’m ignoring corporate profits and consumer prices for simplicity-but I think most of us would be happy if child labor was banned even if it meant higher prices)

They're only "better off" if there's better things for those children to be doing. If schools are not available, then what? If there's no adults available to supervise the children (because they're doing labor themselves), then what?

For most of human history, child labor was common practice. It's purely a first world, modern thing that you can truly dial back child labor.

This. You can literally read the history of China since the 1990s and witness this exact phenomenon! Child labor goes down, wages go up, adult employment goes up, poverty goes down...

No, it's the other way around: wages go up, then child labor goes down. Also, China is not a great example as it had a One Child policy for most of the last 50 years. In Ghana, for example, there is an average of 4 children per woman.

That's a good point about the OCP. I hadn't considered that.

Yes thank you good lord. IDK if it's the ritual contrarianism or what but HN consensus is extremely tolerant of or even flat out pro- child labor. Unreal.

Another point of view - road to hell is paved with good intentions. Policies pushed by idealists often hurt the people they are supposed to help. Even policies pushed by cynics often have unforeseen second order effects that bite the people in the ass. People writing here don't share the risk of any solution going downhill with the people actually in Ghana.

A pressure on the big companies to clean up their supply chain of child labor (noble effort) - do you know which segments of Ghana laborer will be hurt and how. If you don't know (or at least have very good guesstimate) - then be prepared to be surprised unpleasantly from some of the results.

This isn't a novel point of view this is the point of view repeated over and over on HN every time this comes up, including today. I have considered it and I still think we should not have child labor!

Small-l "libertarianism" has convinced many otherwise reasonable people that if you raise wages, giant corporations with huge profit margins will elect to shut down.

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