Bibliographic record
Abstract
I develop a theory of technical progress that uncovers sufficient conditions for opposition to the adoption of child labor laws to disappear over time. The supply of child labor comes exclusively from unskilled parents, because of their inability to help their children benefit from formal education, while its demand originates from capitalists-the firms' owners. Because child labor crowds out adult employment, there are always social pressures to ban it. However, such pressures are met by capitalists' opposition. Capitalist oppose the adoption of a ban on child labor because such a ban reduces opportunities for earning a high return on capital. Technical progress, induced by skill accumulation, improves the earning prospects of firms hiring adult workers only, while it reduces those of firms hiring children only. As a result, more capitalists are drawn into the adult labor market, and industrial opposition to a ban on child labor eventually vanishes over time. Provided child labor exhibits skill-enhancing learning-by-doing, policy action to speed up the emergence of child labor laws should therefore focus on education reforms that raise the quality of education school-goers receive, and on political reforms that raise the cost of lobbying legislators against adopting a ban on child labor. However, in countries where child labor provides little or no opportunities for learning-by-doing, no law will emerge unless appropriately targeted poverty alleviation mechanisms are designed, in order to induce unskilled parents to allocate a positive fraction of child's time to schooling.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".