Child and Convict Labor

I was watching the Colbert Report last night, and one of the guests was Marc Keilburger, co-founder of Free the Children, a non-profit whose aims are to eliminate child labor in developing countries. The general topic was child labor, especially in light of a Finance Bill in the Senate introduced by Sen's Baucus and Grassley that seeks to make imports made with convict and forced child labor illegal.

I am not totally sure of all of the details involved, such as where this bill is within the Senate and what chance it has of being passed, but this would be an exceedingly important rule if it were passed. Dave Sirota, on his blog The Smirking Chimp (the hyperlink tool hasn't been working recently), provides a general analysis of child labor in terms of comparative advantage, saying that weak governments create unnatural comparative advantages by allowing cheap and child labor. I'm not sure I completely agree with his argument, but a good point nontheless.

In refrence to our talk yesterday about Wolf's labor progression, the Colbert interview reminded me that groups like Free the Children will play an integral role in improving the productivity of developing labor. One of the big problems in social science is determining how and why X->Y, and one argument is that individual actors play an important role in this equation. This theory makes sense in this context, as the subtle increases in productivity and working conditions will be important steps in the evolution of labor.