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School seems useful for basic training and for socializing folks into industrial workplaces. But how much schooling do we need – closer to eight or to sixteen years? You might think the more school option has clearly proven its superiority by now. But it wasn’t exactly a fair fight – we forbade kids to work, and then required them to school.
Watching some young girls sitting for hours in front of a grocery store selling girl scout cookies recently, I wondered, “Why isn’t this child labor?” People often talk as they feel revulsion at the image of a miserable child, working at some hard tedious job, and so they are glad child labor laws prohibit such cruel scenarios. But in fact our society is full of kids working away at hard and/or tedious jobs.
Kids work hard at school, housework, sports, practicing music, supporting clubs, etc. and none of this cruelty is prevented by “child labor” laws. Such laws only prevent getting paid to work; they don’t even stop kids interning for free. If child labor laws come from our revulsion at miserable kids, why are there no laws preventing tiger moms from making their kids practice music for hours straight without a bathroom break, or against parents who make their older kids work full time taking care of younger kids? If job safety is our worry, why not just regulate that more directly?
The history of child labor law is closely associated with unions seeking less competition for adult labor. Like minimum lot sizes for houses, child labor laws also helped to keep out poor folks. And today self-righteous indication about foreign child labor supports protectionism, to keep out foreign products that compete with local firms. Alas, keeping poor kids from working for money not only unfairly biases the work vs. school competition, it needlessly impoverishes poor kids and their families.
While we claim to care so so much about kids forced to do hard and tedious tasks, we only actually prevent doing such tasks for money – many kids around us end up doing such tasks anyway, just not for money, and we hardly care. And yet somehow we’ve used all this to tell ourselves how morally superior we are to the cruel poor folk who might even consider having their kids “work.” Hypocrisy can be amazingly shallow.
Added 9a: Art Carden argues similarly.
Added 6Apr: I devote a whole post to responding to comments.
Child Labor Hypocrisy
As time has gone by and as I have reviewed my life in light of later experiences, I have grown increasingly sceptical to school (not learning, mind you, but specifically school). Among the observations I have made:
o School carries an immense opportunity cost for both the individual students and society as a whole. Indeed, in my own case, I would even have learned more (nevermind had more fun or more time for other interests) without school, because school took time away from my private reading and thinking.
o Most time spent in school is eventually wasted, due to reasons like inefficient teaching methods, attempted one-size-fits-everyone teaching, and a misfocus on data over knowledge and knowledge over understanding. (I stress that I mean true understanding, not the kind of hogwash ``understanding'' I have seen in some examples of e.g. modern math education.)
o A very sizeable portion of the population is over-schooled compared to what they need later in life, themselves want, and (sometimes) are able to at all handle. Notably, the idea that more schooling automatically makes someone a correspondingly better thinker, better able to handle his life, whatnot, appears to be a great misconception, with inborn intelligence having a far greater impact (including indirect roads like ability and interest in learning).
o School is in many ways a protected environment that delays the students maturity (in at least some areas) by not exposing them to many ``real-life'' experiences. I am currently leaning towards the idea that earlier actual working experiences would be beneficial to most children. (I stress that I am not talking about 8 y.o. chimney sweapers, but teenagers doing ordinary work on an entry-level.)
Let me add to my explanation. I think that Robin assumes that the economy is in some sort of Pareto optimum such that to improve things there needs to be more labor added to the economy and not just redistribution. Under that scenario, adding the labor of children would provide a net benefit to the economy.
The example I used of health insurance companies demonstrates that the economy is not in any sort of Pareto optimum. Adding administrative workers to the health insurance company increases their ability to dump clients who will cost them profit. There is no net gain of welfare in the economy, there is a net loss. Health insurance premiums are used for administration to increase health insurance industry profits, not to provide health care. The cost of health care of the people who are dumped is either paid by someone else, or by the person with lower health.
Much of the current problem with the economy is in the inefficiency of labor utilization. Many people are underemployed. There are the unemployed, but there are also those who are working at jobs that they are overqualified for, they could be doing something that is more difficult that would provide a greater benefit, but they can't because of inefficiencies in labor utilization. There are also those who are overemployed, those doing things for which they are not qualified and which they screw up and cause damage and net loss to the economy. The people buying and selling CDSs who tanked the economy come to mind.