# Call for Constructive Responses To the Jobless Economy **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 21, 2004, 5:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517 "2004-03-21T05:30:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 3:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/41 "2004-03-24T03:19:40Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > The world average income is slightly over $8,000 per year. That’s for all countries. The poverty line in the U.S. is what, double the world average income? There is no poverty in the United States that can compare to the poorest places on Earth. Even in the desperately poor areas in the Appalachians incomes are usually measured in thousands of dollars per year. Is there a cite for the $8k figure? I’m actually surprised it’s that high. Also, it’s important to distinguish between “purchasing power parity” measurements and straight excahnge rate calculations. Not that any of that would change any of the conclusions in your post, but I’m just curious about the actual details of the numbers. ---
**Author:** ![pantom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/34f0e0/32.png) [@pantom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pantom)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/42 "2004-03-24T03:25:50Z")
Where my parents came from was Third World at the time, not the US. So what the conditions were here or in Canada is meaningless. ---
**Author:** ![pantom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/34f0e0/32.png) [@pantom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pantom)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/43 "2004-03-24T03:30:44Z")
That’s point A. Point B is that the factory wouldn’t close: it would simply hire adults, for more pay. Or another factory would open that would do the same. Just because your average factory owner doesn’t want to pay more than whatever he’s paying now doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t pay more if conditions forced him into it. Most businesses don’t export; they’re local. That includes manufacturing. So if a country puts child labor laws into place, it will have the effect of raising wages and raising the standard of living in the country in question. History shows this. To argue otherwise is to make up fairy tales in the face of hard evidence. The history of the US clearly shows this, as does the history of Western Europe. We’re not that far away from when these things were taken for granted here. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/44 "2004-03-24T03:37:40Z")
That’s a ballpark number - I don’t know what the average is today, but it’s around that number. Remember, I emphasized that this is the average of all countries in the world - and the first world countries push that average up a lot. The average income in the 3rd world is about 1/10 of that. Here’s a good reference on world incomes from [The World Bank](http://www.worldbank.org/depweb/english/modules/economic/gnp/index.html). It gives per-capita income both in absolute dollars and in purchasing power, as of 1998. Ethiopia has a GDP per-capita of $100 per year, which translates into a purchasing power of $566 per year. Note that’s the GDP per capita, not what the poorest in Ethiopia have. Take out the government bureaucrats, and the very tiny middle class, and the per-capita income of the rest of the people is measured in pennies per day. It is against this desperate poverty that we have to measure things like worker safety rules, environmental regulations and ‘sweat shop wages’. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 3:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/45 "2004-03-24T03:45:35Z")
> [@](#): > > Point B is that the factory wouldn’t close: it would simply hire adults, for more pay. Or another factory would open that would do the same. > Just because your average factory owner doesn’t want to pay more than whatever he’s paying now doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t pay more if conditions forced him into it. Most businesses don’t export; they’re local. That includes manufacturing. So if a country puts child labor laws into place, it will have the effect of raising wages and raising the standard of living in the country in question. You think you can raise the standard of living in a country by _fiat_? That’s magical thinking. People in these countries don’t make 30 cents per hour because some fatcat is keeping them down - they make 30 cents per hour because that is all they are worth. Businesses that set up shop in these countries have to build their own roads, protect their people from bandits, run the risk of the government expropriating their investment, create their own power, maintain their own equipment (or fly trades in at very high cost), etc. Then, since there is no local market for these goods, they have to ship them out of country to the market, at added cost. In a modern factory, labor is only a small part of the cost. It takes a HUGE amount of savings in labor before it makes sense to build a multi-million dollar factory in some war ravaged hellhole. If you forced businesses to pay these people even half of what U.S. minimum wage workers earn, those businesses would fold up and go away overnight. Cheap labor is the ONLY advantage these countries have to offer the world. Take it away from them, and you doom them to perpetual poverty. On the other hand, if you allow factories to set up there and put people to work for 30 cents an hour, and people start making five times what they do now, the standard of living will start to rise. And the infrastructure will start to grow. As the infrastructure improves and the people become more educated, the marginal cost of opening factories will go down, and this will attract more investment. That will lead to wage pressure, and wages will start to rise. THAT is how you improve a country and lift people out of poverty. It takes time, hard work, investment, and risk. It’s not done with the stroke of a pen. ---
**Author:** ![pantom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/34f0e0/32.png) [@pantom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pantom)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 3:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/46 "2004-03-24T03:51:06Z")
You’ve got it backwards. There’s plenty of development money around, and lots has been spent. Most of it is misspent, though, which is why that factory owner of which you speak has to spend so much of his time thinking about stuff he shouldn’t have to. Governments spend on boondoggles like huge dams, or on their military, or just on secret Swiss bank accounts. In China, after half a century of communist rule, the farmers still have to pay to send their kids to school, and rural children are discriminated against in the university admissions process (all of this is in the Nature article I linked to). So yes, the citizens may not have any other choice. But it’s not because of any inherent poverty; it’s because the people who govern them are too busy lining their own pockets or seeking after glory to give a damn. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/47 "2004-03-24T03:58:05Z")
> [@pantom](#): > > Governments spend on boondoggles like huge dams, or on their military, or just on secret Swiss bank accounts. In China, after half a century of communist rule, the farmers still have to pay to send their kids to school, and rural children are discriminated against in the university admissions process (all of this is in the Nature article I linked to). So what? Do you think gov’t boondoggle spending is limited to non-Western countries? Are you proposing that businesses should be forbiden to do business in China or that they should have some extra-legal restrictions placed on them by the US (ie, higher min wage than required by China) if they do? ---
**Author:** ![pantom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/34f0e0/32.png) [@pantom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pantom)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/48 "2004-03-24T04:01:06Z")
No. Just saying that child labor is wrong, and counterproductive. This shouldn’t be hard to figure out. ---
**Author:** ![iamme99](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/57b2e6/32.png) [@iamme99](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iamme99)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/49 "2004-03-24T04:12:08Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > The world average income is slightly over $8,000 per year. That’s for all countries. The poverty line in the U.S. is what, double the world average income? There is no poverty in the United States that can compare to the poorest places on Earth. Even in the desperately poor areas in the Appalachians incomes are usually measured in thousands of dollars per year. > > In contrast, have a look at [this map.](http://www.worldbank.org/poverty/wdrpoverty/report/map.pdf) The countries in white represent the 3rd world, and they have an average income of $755 per year, or less. In the poorest countries, the average per capita income is in the neighborhood of $200 per year. > > Think about that. Less than $20 per month. To feed a family and ‘house’ it ( a ‘house’ may be a mud hut, or even just some old wooden scraps with plastic bags tied to it to keep a bit of the wind and rain out). And you wonder why these kids need to work for a living? Why don’t they go to school? A single textbook is a month’s wages for the family. A pencil would be worth a day’s food ration. And there are no teachers, because the teachers have either left the country, been killed, or they are starving along with everyone else. I do agree with you that there are many places in the world where people live in abject poverty, particularly when compared to a 1st world country. But there are an awful lot of people living in poverty right now in the USA, while corporations pay low taxes, while executives make millions of dollars and as a country, while we waste billions of dollars on attacking other countries. Here’s a statistic on [Child Proverty](http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_chi_pov&int=-1) (Definition: ““Child poverty”” index is defined as the share of the children living in the households with income below 50% of the national median) from Unicef. Note that Mexico is ranked #1 in the world and the USA is #2! And here’s a statistic on [Population Below Poverty Line](http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_pop_bel_pov_lin&int=-1) from the CIA Factbook of 2003. I think that trying to compare absolute dollar levels for other countries is not a valid metric. Where incomes are lower, costs to live are lower. Costs to buy food, rent/buy housing, etc. are lower. Where we might pay $0.99 for a lb. of green peppers, in a poorer country, that cost might be $0.05. Also, people are able to grow some of their own food in very poor countries and if they have grown excess food, could barter it. As to “mud houses”, such a house might be considered very nice when the rest of the neighborhood consisted of say, straw houses. It’s all relative, right? ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/50 "2004-03-24T04:18:05Z")
> [@pantom](#): > > No. Just saying that child labor is wrong, and counterproductive. This shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Not in the poorest of the poor nations. You seem to be assuming that if the child is not working, he’s in school. The countries we’re talking about don’t have schools for them to go to. And it’s not as if the parents send their kids to work and then sit around playing cards all day. Chances are, the whole family works in the factory if they can, or the parents are engaged in some other productive activity. ---
**Author:** ![pantom](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/34f0e0/32.png) [@pantom](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pantom)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 4:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/51 "2004-03-24T04:23:23Z")
Not arguing with you there. Just saying that it’s wrong, and can be corrected, given a government that is looking out for its people, instead of itself. The money is there if the government in question wants to finance an education system for its children. That they don’t want to, and can find a thousand excuses to hide behind, is not surprising, but it’s not excusable either. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/52 "2004-03-24T04:35:50Z")
**iamme99** said: > [@](#): > > Here’s a statistic on Child Proverty (Definition: ““Child poverty”” index is defined as the share of the children living in the households with income below 50% of the national median) from Unicef. Note that Mexico is ranked #1 in the world and the USA is #2! The reason for your statistic is in the paragraph above - Let’s use the 1998 data. 50% below the national median income in the United States in 1998 would put any child who lives in a family that earns less than $15,000 a year in ‘poverty’. Now let’s put that in perspective. The average income for ALL Canadians in the same year was $19,600. That means children in ‘poverty’ in the United States were only slightly worse off than the average child in Canada. A child in ‘poverty’ in the United States, by your definition above, is better off than the average child in Greece, Portugal, Spain, New Zealand, and in fact better off than the average child in all but 20 of 151 countries the world bank lists. That children of families who earn $15,000 a year in the U.S. would be considered to be in ‘poverty’ is not a measure of how bad children in the U.S. have it, but of how immensely wealthy the U.S. is compared to the vast bulk of the world. As I said before, the ‘poverty’ level in the U.S. is about twice the world average income. As for whether money buys more in other countries, sure. That’s why the world bank lists purchasing power parity numbers along with raw income. By that standard, a person in ‘poverty’ in the U.S. has a PPP of $14,120. In comparison, the average person in New Zealand has a PPP of $16,084. The average in Greece, $13,994. In Haiti, $1,379. About 1/10 of the ‘poverty’ level in the U.S., even in terms of purchasing power. ---
**Author:** ![desdinova](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/8baadc/32.png) [@desdinova](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/desdinova)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 5:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/53 "2004-03-24T05:44:11Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > The reason for your statistic is in the paragraph above - Let’s use the 1998 data. 50% below the national median income in the United States in 1998 would put any child who lives in a family that earns less than $15,000 a year in ‘poverty’. > > Now let’s put that in perspective. The average income for ALL Canadians in the same year was $19,600. That means children in ‘poverty’ in the United States were only slightly worse off than the average child in Canada. A child in ‘poverty’ in the United States, by your definition above, is better off than the average child in Greece, Portugal, Spain, New Zealand, and in fact better off than the average child in all but 20 of 151 countries the world bank lists. The poverty definition he quoted is any child who is a member of a household earning less than 50% of the nation’s median household income. Household income, at least in the United States, is defined as gross income for the entire household from all sources. A couple with the husband earning $40,000 and the wife earning $45,000 is a household earning $85,000. The median of that statistic is, well, the median of course. That number is then divided precisely by two. The number you’re comparing it to in Canada is actually per capita GNP at exchange rate (rather than purchasing power parity) levels. That’s simply GNP, multiplied by exchange rate, divided by the entire population of the country (man, woman, child, prisoners, other institutionalized persons etc). For obvious reasons, GNP per capita and median household income _ **absolutely, positively, cannot be directly compared.** _ I look at median household incomes and per capita incomes (strictly speaking, not the same as GNP but highly related through the National Income Accounts Identity) day in, day out in my job, and median household incomes will range anywhere from 1.5 to 2.2 times the level of per capita income, depending on local household sizes and other variables. I think a more accurate comparison between incidences of child poverty, in regard to overall standard of living, would probably show the difference between Canada and the U.S. is not quite as long as your numbers suggest but still favor the United States in all likelihood. Still, your points still stand and are quite important: compared to the United States, the vast majority of the rest of the world is dirt poor. And because of this, measuring poverty in relation to the rest of the country’s populace is only half the story… a child in a household earning less than 50% of the median in the United States is living the life of a prince compared to the same child in the same statistic in Bangladesh. Frankly, the rest of this thread is also filled with conclusions derived from bad data, but it would take me a solid week to properly sort it all out and explain what’s wrong with it. How about this, can we at least all agree that we shouldn’t be booting children out of factories unless there is a superior alternative available to them? I don’t think I’ve ever heard “let’s force the Third World to adopt Western child labor laws, **after** we’ve set up some sort of universal public education system and ensured no of them will starve to death as a consequence.” ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 1:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/54 "2004-03-24T13:05:56Z")
I haven’t given out any of my solutions yet, which seems unfair, so here goes: Let’s stop thinking of unemployed people created by the jobless economy as a problem and start thinking of them as what they are: an unexploited resource that it would be very much to our advantage (and theirs) to exploit. For example, look at who’s getting outsourced nowadays: programmers, call center workers and engineers. People who know how to design and make things, and people who know how to sell things. Meanwhile, our economy is lagging because we aren’t coming up with new things to sell that Everyone Must Have. Y’know, I see a certain synergy there. And I’m not at all surprised to see it. Capitalism relies on having a certain number of people unemployed, and in times of economic downturn, it’s not at all unusual to find that a lot of them are really very useful people. Free marketers like to deal with this by getting all solemn and sincere and saying it’s a shame but it works a lot better than anything else we’ve ever come up with. And they’re right. But there’s no reason we can’t try to come up with something still better, and I think I have an idea along those lines. Free marketers think of periods of unemployment as regulators for the engine of the free market – the widespread poverty, loss of economic opportunity and general shittiness generated by recessions and such cause people and businesses to cast about desperately for new solutions that will bring in money. Eventually, they find some, the new solutions are widely adapted, they generate growth in the economy as ancillary businesses spring up to serve them, and as existing businesses find ways to latch on to their success. I’ve got nothing against this process except that it’s dreadfully stupid, wasteful, inefficient and badly thought out, as well as extremely hard on human beings on the bottom of the economic ladder. It’s also hard on the aspirations of everybody who’s not already at the top. I propose that we deal with this problem by expanding the role of government (oh, I can hear the conservativs and libertarians crying over this one, but really, at some point you gotta do SOMETHING about these problems, otherwise someone else WILL and they’ll eat your lunch big time) to function as a real regulator for the marketplace, aggressively dealing with the downturns by using the increased unemployed to stimulate new industry. Here’s how it might work: there’s a government agency whose function is to organize unemployed people into corporations whose job it is to create new products, services, etc., to stimulate the economy. People in these corporations would be paid at the extreme low end of the salary scale for comparable work in the private sector, with CEO caps being pegged to some reasonable multiple of an entry-level workers’ salary. In short, people working for such corps will be essentially employed. They will also be given shares in the corporation, which they will not be at liberty to sell until the government agency releases the corporation into the private sector. This will only occur if the corporation actually produces a product or service that makes enough income to render its support by the government agency unneccesary. At that point, its ties to the government agency are severed and it becomes independent, except that the government agency retains a percentage of shares in the company (the profits from the shares will be used to fund the agency, hopefully rendering it self-funding at some point). The agency would accept proposals for corporations from unemployed people to render a service or product, and if those services or products might possibly work out in the marketplace, they fund them. Also the government might have a number of “favored” products or services that deal with current issues society faces – say, oil-free energy sources, low-cost housing, cheap transportation, cheap, sturdy Spanish/English translators, whatever, that would be more likely to get funded than a brand new perfume or taco stand. This is of course what the private sector does, but there would be a difference: the government would loan money to people that banks wouldn’t normally even CONSIDER (i.e., people who actually need money) and it would be loaning money at a time when traditional sources generally dry up big time. The government would monitor the corp’s progress on a yearly basis and if no progress toward profitability is observed, it would fold them. Cook the books and go to jail would be the rule for THESE corporations (hey, it might even catch on in the private sector one day). This would have several beneficent effects: 1. The government would be employing people rather than just putting them on the dole 2. Some useful products and services could conceivably arise from such an agency 3. The new businesses generated by the agency would, if successful, hire more people once they went out on their onw, further strengthening the economy. Naturally, outsourcing would be verboten to them while they were on government funding, though when they go private, they’d be free to operate by the same rules as privately funded biz. 4. The ability to obtain funds for new businesses during an economic downturns would shorten the length of the downturn, as the new businesses brought the economy back to strength Even those businesses that weren’t successful might still provide innovation – you’d have people thinking about ways to solve important social problems, and a solution that didn’t work in the government biz might be more successful elsewhere. Free marketers should absolutely LOVE this idea, because it doesn’t affect the free market engine, except in a benevolent way. I await joyful huzzahs from all. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/55 "2004-03-24T13:12:55Z")
> [@Shalmanese](#): > > Interestingly enough, a recent Scientific American article shows that it’s possible to draw a S/D curve in which the child labour causes two equilibrium points in the market; One with low wages for all and child labour, and one with higher wages and no child labour. It can be shown that through _careful_ and _judicious_ use of legislation, a country and shift from the scenario with child labour to the obviously more prefereable one without while not losing any economic productivity. > > This doesn’t have much to do with the debate at hand but I just thought it was an interesting thing to throw into the discussion. Good point, Shalmanese, one which seems to negate the claims of all the posts which follow, which support the case for allowing child labor. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 1:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/56 "2004-03-24T13:21:58Z")
> [@msmith537](#): > > I would rather the government purchase goods and services for the lowest price, regardless of where they originate, and pass the tax savings onto us. Helps you, but has only a vague secondary benefit for the unemployed, compared to the strong positive benefit to be had from government jobs and purchasing. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 1:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/57 "2004-03-24T13:26:52Z")
> [@Johnny L.A.](#): > > I **Education** > If we are to be re-educated to do other jobs than those that went overseas, then we should have access to that education. An unemployed person often cannot afford tuition. Further, they may lose some or all of their unemployment compensation if they return to school because they are “not available to work”. And, IMO, retraining a programmer to become a short-order cook does not count. If we are replacing jobs, then we need to replace them with equivalent jobs. I think it is poor resource-management to put a person who has demonstrated higher skills into an unskilled position. People who _choose_ to look for an unskilled position, or a position that requires fewer skills than they possess are often told they are “over-qualified”. Good summary of the problem, but I don’t know how we could afford to train and maintain unemployed people for a number of years. Wouldn’t this be very expensive? ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 1:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/58 "2004-03-24T13:32:51Z")
[QUOTE=Shalmanese] [QUOTE=Evil Captor] All for it. Even the most ardent free-market capitalists tend to gag on slave labor. Let’s keep the race to the bottom from hitting the absolute bottom. > [@](#): > > No, actually some ardent free-market capitalists accept that, while child labour does indeed suck the big one; unless a credible alternative can be presented, child labour is indeed the lesser of two evils. > > In fact, we believe that the way to end child labour is to trade _more_ with those countries so that we can pus their GDP up high enough to stop this practise. All a trade sanction is going to do to these countries is to make the families even poorer, neccesitating even more child labour just to survive. I must confess to a certain amount of cynicism WRT this solution. Slavery tends to hang on so long as it’s economically viable – once it’s established, it doesn’t tend to go away as soon as people have the chance to get rid of it. What I think is that if we trade more with these countries, the guys at the top will happily accept our trade, continue to employ children and virtual slaves, and pocket even more profits for themselves. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 1:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/59 "2004-03-24T13:36:06Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > To reply to the OP:Second, think about a WPA type of program, providing short term support for infrastructure and education projects. See my proposed solution. It’s a sort of WPA, but tries to take advantage of the nature of the capitalist economy to get a similar effect with a steadily shrinking expense for the government. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [March 24, 2004, 1:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517/60 "2004-03-24T13:39:27Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > The point **js\_Africanus** is making is very important, because understanding why there is child labor also helps one to understand why there aren’t better environmental controls, worker safety rules, and other things that people like. > > It’s not because some arbitrary pig-headed government decided to exploit the people. It’s not because parents in these countries hate their kids or want to live next to polluted factories. It’s not even because big evil American companies set up shop to ‘exploit’ them. Sure, it’s because the piggish scum who run the countries think of their poor countrymen and their kids as nothing more than slaves. They’ll take the profits, but the poor won’t see a dime more than the scum can get away from paying. We don’t need to be subsidizing such scum. I’ll pay a quarter more for my undies, if I think it means kids aren’t being forced to work. And I GUARANTEE you that as soon as the pigscum see the factories going to countries that don’t allow child labor, they’ll get religion, oh, yes they will. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/call-for-constructive-responses-to-the-jobless-economy/235517.md?page=4)