Yes, I'm Alive
Because of a brain defect, I'm unable to spend my time surfing the Web and writing blog posts and still get any real work done. Lately I've been opting for the latter, mostly intellectually stimulating but financially impoverishing research on economic sociology (for a Boston Globe Ideas section piece) and "modern with curves" design (for a Slate slideshow essay), plus a little bit of glamour research squeezed in on the side.
I also wrote my NYT column, which looks at interesting research on child labor in developing countries. Here's the beginning:
WHEN Americans think about child labor in poor countries, they rarely picture girls fetching water or boys tending livestock. Yet most of the 211 million children, ages 5 to 14, who work worldwide are not in factories. They are working in agriculture - from 92 percent in Vietnam to 63 percent in Guatemala - and most are not paid directly.
"Contrary to popular perception in high-income countries, most working children are employed by their parents rather than in manufacturing establishments or other forms of wage employment," two Dartmouth economists, Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, wrote in "Child Labor in the Global Economy," published in the Winter 2005 Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Their article surveys what is known about child labor. Research over the past several years, by these economists and others, has begun to erode some popular beliefs about why children work, what they do and when they are likely to leave work for school.