Richard Sutch wrote:
>The second line of economic argument views the child as an asset to the
> family and views the family as primarily concerned with its own day-to-day
> welfare. Putting children to work increases the total family?s pecuniary
> income but (leaving the money aside) reduces the welfare of the child who
> would prefer "leisure" or schooling to work.
>
And why is this not equally true of you and I? The fact that people
would rather have leisure than school or work "money aside" seems pretty
universal. The whole argument for permitting child labor is that you
can't say "money aside." Families where children work are ones where
income IS the issue. To use an old line, "Aside from THAT Mrs. Lincoln,
how was the play?"
For poor families, both historically and in contemporary times, having
their children work was often the difference between abject poverty and
something akin to minimal comfort. If you want to call this a "high
discount rate," go right ahead. But to argue that somehow parents in
such situations are even considering the "invest in human capital for
future income" vs. "present income" choice misstates the real historical
situation. For them, the former choice wasn't even in the relevant
choice set. (And capital markets are never perfectly efficient, so the
"borrow now and pay back later" argument won't fly either.)
>Presumably others in the
> family value the child?s utility and will need to weigh that loss against
> the income the child could be expected to earn. The second argument assumes
> that in many cases, however, the parent or other adult who makes the
> decisions for the family will undervalue the child?s disutility of work
> and ?exploit? the child= in order to increase consumption. This line of
> thought assumes insufficient altruism or empathy on the part of the parent
> and a lack of voice on the part of the child. Society has an interest in
> preventing this ?selfish? exploitation of its children by their parents,
> or so the argument goes.
>
>
It is precisely the type of "paternalism" (pun intended) embedded in
this argument that perpetuates the stereotype of parents who put their
children to work as being "irrational" or "insufficiently altruistic."
This can quickly become worse than paternalistic when the parents in
question are non-white. This "selfish exploitation" of children can also
be viewed as parents making quite reasonable and altruistic decisions
about what's best for their families by recognizing that without the
child's income, they, meaning the whole family not just the parents,
will be worse off. Yes, we might like a world where all children can go
to school or play in the fields and not have to work, but if that's also
a world where they are starving because their parents' income is
insufficient to feed them and their siblings, I'd say that's a worse
world. Moreover, even from a hard-core choice-theoretic perspective, are
parents more likely to treat children well when they are, on net,
economic assets for the family (as they are more likely to be when they
work) or when they are "consumption sinks" as they are when they do not?
Even self-interested parents are unlikely to overwork or abuse their
productive children.
To tie this to the broader issue of this fascinaing thread, I would
argue that good economics is the study of both choices and the social
institutions that constrain, facilitate, and emerge unplanned from human
choice. We cannot understand child labor by imposing a model that frames
it in terms of the sorts of calculations that a contemporary family in a
developed economy might face. Our attempt to understand the phenomenon
must recognize the real historical institutions and the subjectively
perceived situation facing the chooser. Institutionless models populated
by "choosers" whose choice situation is imposed by the model rather than
being that actually faced by the chooser are likely to obscure more than
they illuminate.
Steve Horwitz
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