The topic of child labor evokes strong emotions and old stereotypes, such as the chimney sweeps of Dickensian London. The good news is that nowadays child labor can be more pleasant and more rewarding. The bad news is that the question of how to protect working children is more complicated. A lot of children are grossly underpaid — not necessarily by the master sweep, but by their parents.
Increasingly more children, by which I mean minors below the legal working age, are producing content as online influencers. A lot of Instagram or YouTube or TikTok accounts feature such children, and they can be cute, endearing or (depending on your mood) annoying — as well as profitable. By one estimate, the most successful children working in this area — called “kidfluencers” — can generate more than US$20 million a year in revenue.
Their work might be a far cry from the labor of the chimney sweeps, but work it is, at least as the concept is understood in the US circa 2023. These children are under pressure, whether from their parents or from their algorithms, to produce content on a regular basis. Being a child social media star also involves a potential loss of privacy and a reframing of one’s image with one’s peers, which might be either positive or negative. These children can also be quite young. One star of a YouTube channel with more than 35 million subscribers, which started out as a toy-review site, was seven years old in the channel’s early days.
Legally, these children have no claim to the income their sites generate. Thankfully, many parents are loving and generous.
However, not all are so. There is no data on how social media earnings are distributed within the family, but the long history of child movie and TV stars indicates that many receive little or nothing.
Enter the state of Illinois, where a recently passed law gives successful child social media stars a right to some percentage of the earnings they generate, to be held in a trust in their name until they turn 18. Such legislation has precedent. In the early days of Hollywood, California passed the Coogan Act, which gives child actors a right to a certain percentage of earnings, which employers have to place in trust accounts. New York has passed similar legislation.
The social media case is tougher to enforce, because the parents themselves are often the de facto employer and there is no contract specifying the terms. How would the relative contribution of the child to the family income be assessed? Time spent on screen? Cuteness? What if the social media presence leads to a book contract or a podcast?
Regardless, the law sends a clear signal that children do have some rights to generated income, and grown children can sue their parents if the money is not passed along.
Labor markets work best when there is a clearly defined notion of consent, but that is hard to come by when children perform services for their parents. What if a child expresses a desire to quit performing on social media and the parents respond that such income is needed to send the kid to college or pay for the family home? On what basis could the child’s response be considered as fair, well-informed and not under duress? It is neither practical nor desirable for the state to insert itself into family decisionmaking on a regular basis.
Given these problems, it is probably wise to pare back expectations of what “kidfluencer” legislation can accomplish. At the same time, it is probably better to do something rather than nothing, if only for symbolic reasons and because this sector of the economy is likely to grow.
At the margin, more protection for children’s rights might also boost child labor supply, and in a beneficial way. When I was 12 years old, I started winning money in chess tournaments and my parents let me keep all of it. A year later, I was giving chess lessons and being paid for it. Not only was I earning money from my labor, but I like to think I helped other players get better and maybe earn some money themselves.
In retrospect, I am glad I acquired those skills and experiences, but not all cases of “child labor,” if I may use that phrase, are so positive. For every kid — and family — who tries to earn early income, many more would fail and be left with nothing.
It is of course possible that granting kids greater legal rights to income might encourage more children to seek to become social media stars. On balance, I am okay with that outcome, but it is by no means an easy call.
Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. He is the coauthor of Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) were born under the sign of Gemini. Geminis are known for their intelligence, creativity, adaptability and flexibility. It is unlikely, then, that the trade conflict between the US and China would escalate into a catastrophic collision. It is more probable that both sides would seek a way to de-escalate, paving the way for a Trump-Xi summit that allows the global economy some breathing room. Practically speaking, China and the US have vulnerabilities, and a prolonged trade war would be damaging for both. In the US, the electoral system means that public opinion
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
RSS