Sam Bostaph asked: So, what's wrong with "child labor"? And, what's the age cutoff, below which it can't be defended? There are lots of arguments against child labor. Many of these are non-economic (moral, psychological, biological, etc). Here I confine myself to sketching out two strictly economic arguments. One is based on a consideration of the child as an individual with a full life ahead. The other views the child as a member of a family focused on the present. The individual model first. The argument supposes that working competes with schooling so that children who labor receive a sub-optimal amount of education. More precisely put the suggestion is that the higher lifetime earnings of the well-educated adult (compared to the ill-educated one who labored as a child) more than reward the forgone income of receiving the additional schooling. With this perspective society has an interest in prohibiting child labor with the objective to increase the future productivity of some of its citizens, to reduce the need for welfare payments and/or unemployment benefits to the ill-educated downstream, and to reap any external benefits to a more highly educated population (more inventions, for example). To complete this argument those who call for a prohibition on child labor must assume that the decision maker (the child or his/her parents making the work/school decision in the child=92s best interest) either does not perceive the advantages of education (lack of information), has unreasonably high discount rates (lack of foresight), lacks self control, or is unable to borrow against future income. In lieu of the wages the child would earn, borrowing may be required to finance consumption of the child=92s household. If capital markets were efficient, the child could pledge the higher future income as collateral (a student loan). There would be alternatives to the prohibition of child labor if lack of information were the key problem (subsidize the transfer of the relevant information) or if capital market failure was a problem (improve capital market efficiency, perhaps with a government guarantee of student loans). If the problem is thought to be incurable lack of foresight or lack of self control, the labor market in theory might provide a solution by offering compulsive life-time job tenure without the possibility of quitting or early retirement. Under such an arrangement the employer would see that the child gets the optimal education when young. The problem with that type of =93market solution=94 is that involuntary servitude has been outlawed by the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution. As an aside, I might mention, that slavery was sometimes defended by the (racist) assertion that Blacks lacked sufficient foresight and self-control to make their own decisions. If one accepts this class of argument against child labor, the answer to the second question what is the dividing line between (inefficient) child labor and (efficient) adult labor is conceptually easy to answer. It is the point where the individual has accumulated the optimal amount of education. Presumably this would vary from individual to individual based on their aptitude for education and their productivity as child laborers (child actors for example might be following an optimal education/career path). The age threshold would also vary with the structure of the economy. It is often suggested that more education is =93required=94 to be productive in today=92= s complex and highly specialized economy then was true in simpler times. If so the threshold age should be higher today than in the past. 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=92s pecuniary income but (leaving the money aside) reduces the welfare of the child who would prefer "leisure" or schooling to work. Presumably others in the family value the child=92s 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=92s disutility of work and =93exploit=94 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 =93selfish=94 exploitation of its children by their parents, or so the argument goes. The answer to the second question, if one accepts the exploitation argument, is that the threshold for labor should be the same as the age of independence and majority. The two arguments are not mutually exclusive, but are rarely joined when arguing against child labor. The two approaches have some different empirical implications. For the family balancing family income against the child=92s disutility there should be an income and wage effect. The lower the family income and the higher the child wage the less salient will be the disutility of work. Child labor should be more likely in poor families than prosperous ones (a correlation not predicted by the individual model). High child wages would increase child labor in the second model, but only affect the age threshold for child labor in the first case. If the work available for children was itself educational and skill building (as might be the case for farm labor on a family farm or work in a family-owned restaurant), child labor would be more likely in the first case, but those factors would be unimportant in the second case. If the family has several children we might anticipate that one child might be favored while the others are put to work if we take the second view, but no such multiple sibling effect should be present if the first model is correct. The higher the return to education the less child labor there would be with the first model and if high discount rates or imperfect capital markets were at fault, but those returns would not influence the decision in a family that gives no voice to the child. Richard Sutch