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> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. Do you think children did not work in colonial America? o

> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip. Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work. There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.

throwway120385 1mo ago
No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  Both happened at the time it became uneconomic to employ children, and productivity was sufficient that people didn't have to work that many hours. Why do you suppose there was an exemption for farm work? It's because children were needed to bring in the harvest. Children are lousy workers. What jobs in your workplace do you think they could do? None in any place I've worked.
  - tombert 1mo ago
    > None in any place I've worked. Oh, well, if you don't think that children would be good at making compilers then child labor must not have been a problem. I guess you have a point.
    - WalterBright 1mo ago
      Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back. In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost. Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
      - tombert 1mo ago
        No, I was making fun of the fact that you haven't seen something and you act like this is compelling evidence of anything.
        WalterBright 1mo ago
        If you can find a dip in productivity after the laws were passed, you'd have a case.
  - Timon3 1mo ago
    Then why are there so many signs of increasing child labor in the US? Why are Republicans rolling back protections? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-protections-republicans https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-... Note that the article only measures violations of child labor laws, i.e. there are (presumably many times more) children working without violating the laws. Why are people deliberately employing lousy workers? Why are business owners lobbying to allow these lousy workers to work more hours?
nrr 1mo ago
> When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours. I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend. > The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
- WalterBright 1mo ago
  Rising productivity replaces workers all the time, starting with the least productive workers - children. Why is that so hard to believe? For example, the first steam engine employed a boy to run up and down a ladder turning a valve at each end of the piston stroke. The boy, being lazy, devised a beam that would automatically move the valves, and went to sleep. The steam engine owner saw that, deployed the beam, and fired the boy. > This shows necessity but not sufficiency. Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. This means, as productivity rises, wages increase. As wages increase, workers will realize they no longer have to work 100 hours/week to make a living, and will refuse to work those hours. (You see this in non-union shops all the time.) The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
  - nrr 1mo ago
    > Why is that so hard to believe? Economics isn't a game of make believe for me. I have professional standards to uphold, and this is probably where my actuarial background makes me uncomfortable with the argument as posed. Supply, demand, and marginal productivity are great and useful components of an economic model, but I cannot take their relationships as they appear in a freshman micro/macro sequence to be axiomatic of an empirical system. I cannot infer that the resulting equilibrium must occur in the real world. In actuarial work, a model's assumptions are not observations. If I posit, what, a hazard function or assumptions about the independence of variables or a particular claim distribution, I can't treat the consequences of those assumptions as empirical facts about the financial portfolio; instead, I have to establish that the model adequately represents (and simplifies) the phenomenon I'm modeling. > Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. I'd apply the same standard here. This is a model specification, not an observed law of nature. We can express labor demand as a relationship to marginal productivity under certain assumptions. Neither of these alone establishes sufficiency for an increase in productivity to result in an increase in workers' wages, let alone that it must result in shorter working hours. My remark about necessity holds within the proposed mechanism though. If marginal productivity is the mechanism by which wages rise and worked hours fall, increased productivity is necessary before wages can increase and worked hours can decrease. > (You see this in non-union shops all the time.) "All the time" is a frequency claim. Where's the data? > The unions only accomplished what was inevitable. This is a counterfactual claim. In undertaking economic analysis of such a claim, I must specify the market structure, identify the constraints and frictions, and establish that the model's assumptions are sufficiently good approximations of the historical labor market. I must also try to estimate the causal effect of unions, which amounts, more or less, to constructing the counterfactual labor market in which they did not exist.

throwway120385 1mo ago

No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.

WalterBright 1mo ago
Both happened at the time it became uneconomic to employ children, and productivity was sufficient that people didn't have to work that many hours. Why do you suppose there was an exemption for farm work? It's because children were needed to bring in the harvest. Children are lousy workers. What jobs in your workplace do you think they could do? None in any place I've worked.
- tombert 1mo ago
  > None in any place I've worked. Oh, well, if you don't think that children would be good at making compilers then child labor must not have been a problem. I guess you have a point.
  - WalterBright 1mo ago
    Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back. In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost. Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
    - tombert 1mo ago
      No, I was making fun of the fact that you haven't seen something and you act like this is compelling evidence of anything.
      - WalterBright 1mo ago
        If you can find a dip in productivity after the laws were passed, you'd have a case.
- Timon3 1mo ago
  Then why are there so many signs of increasing child labor in the US? Why are Republicans rolling back protections? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-protections-republicans https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-... Note that the article only measures violations of child labor laws, i.e. there are (presumably many times more) children working without violating the laws. Why are people deliberately employing lousy workers? Why are business owners lobbying to allow these lousy workers to work more hours?

nrr 1mo ago

> When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours. I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend. > The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked. This shows necessity but not sufficiency.

WalterBright 1mo ago
Rising productivity replaces workers all the time, starting with the least productive workers - children. Why is that so hard to believe? For example, the first steam engine employed a boy to run up and down a ladder turning a valve at each end of the piston stroke. The boy, being lazy, devised a beam that would automatically move the valves, and went to sleep. The steam engine owner saw that, deployed the beam, and fired the boy. > This shows necessity but not sufficiency. Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. This means, as productivity rises, wages increase. As wages increase, workers will realize they no longer have to work 100 hours/week to make a living, and will refuse to work those hours. (You see this in non-union shops all the time.) The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
- nrr 1mo ago
  > Why is that so hard to believe? Economics isn't a game of make believe for me. I have professional standards to uphold, and this is probably where my actuarial background makes me uncomfortable with the argument as posed. Supply, demand, and marginal productivity are great and useful components of an economic model, but I cannot take their relationships as they appear in a freshman micro/macro sequence to be axiomatic of an empirical system. I cannot infer that the resulting equilibrium must occur in the real world. In actuarial work, a model's assumptions are not observations. If I posit, what, a hazard function or assumptions about the independence of variables or a particular claim distribution, I can't treat the consequences of those assumptions as empirical facts about the financial portfolio; instead, I have to establish that the model adequately represents (and simplifies) the phenomenon I'm modeling. > Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. I'd apply the same standard here. This is a model specification, not an observed law of nature. We can express labor demand as a relationship to marginal productivity under certain assumptions. Neither of these alone establishes sufficiency for an increase in productivity to result in an increase in workers' wages, let alone that it must result in shorter working hours. My remark about necessity holds within the proposed mechanism though. If marginal productivity is the mechanism by which wages rise and worked hours fall, increased productivity is necessary before wages can increase and worked hours can decrease. > (You see this in non-union shops all the time.) "All the time" is a frequency claim. Where's the data? > The unions only accomplished what was inevitable. This is a counterfactual claim. In undertaking economic analysis of such a claim, I must specify the market structure, identify the constraints and frictions, and establish that the model's assumptions are sufficiently good approximations of the historical labor market. I must also try to estimate the causal effect of unions, which amounts, more or less, to constructing the counterfactual labor market in which they did not exist.