Meet the Child Laborers Working in Bolivia’s Mines
Despite all the progress in stamping out child labor and exploitation around the globe, kids are still working in dangerous conditions. In Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, has one out of every three children working, and there is even an organization working to relax restrictions for those working under age 15:
I’d gone to Bolivia because some NGOs and activists there have been trying—seemingly against all good sense—to lower the legal working age from 14 to six years old. And this was not the doing of mine owners or far-right politicians seeking cheap labor like one might expect. Instead the idea has been floated by a group of young people ages eight to 18 called the Union of Child and Adolescent Workers (UNATSBO)—something like a pee-wee version of the AFL-CIO—who have proposed a law that aims to allow young children to legally work. Bolivia’s congress is slated to vote on a version of the law as soon as this month.
Why would an organization dedicated to fighting for the rights of young workers want to lower the legal working age? Current regulations state that youth can begin work no younger than 14, but these laws are rarely followed. Bolivia is a nation of fewer than 11 million people. This includes approximately 850,000 children who work full-time, nearly half of whom are under 14.
“They work in secrecy,” Alfredo, a 16-year-old who since the age of eight has worked as a bricklayer, construction worker, and currently as a street clown, told me when I met him at a cafe in El Alto, the teeming slum city just outside of La Paz, Bolivia’s capital.
Trials
After their twin daughters were diagnosed with Niemann-Pick Type C, a fatal genetic disease, Hugh and Chris Hempel sought experimental treatments to save their daughters’ lives. They went public with their findings and kept detailed medical records to share with researchers, assuming the role of “citizen-scientists”:
Ms. Hempel began giving cyclodextrin to the girls in early 2008. “I am posting this message to the entire world to let everyone know that Hugh and I will not sue any doctor, scientist, researcher, hospital or non-profit if anything happens to Addi and Cassi as we embark on trying experimental treatments to save them from Niemann-Pick Type C disease,” she wrote in her blog.
From the beginning, scientists said drinking cyclodextrin wasn’t likely to help because not enough of the drug could reach the brain and other organs.
In December 2008, the Hempels’ doctor applied to the Food and Drug Administration for permission to give the girls intravenous infusions. The scientists were alarmed. No one knew how cyclodextrin worked. No one knew effective dose levels. And no one was sure if it was safe.
The planned collaboration of parents and scientists was moving forward. But Chris and Hugh Hempel wanted to set the pace.
The Decline of Book Reviewing
Hardwick’s classic 1959 essay on the dismal state of book criticism. (Robert Silvers has pointed it out as an early inspiration for founding the New York Review of Books.)
For the world of books, for readers and writers, the torpor of the New York Times Book Review is more affecting. There come to mind all those high-school English teachers, those faithful librarians and booksellers, those trusting suburbanites, those bright young men and women in the provinces, all those who believe in the judgment of the Times and who need its direction. The worst result of its decline is that it acts as a sort of hidden dissuader, gently, blandly, respectfully denying whatever vivacious interest there might be in books or in literary matters generally. The flat praise and the faint dissension, the minimal style and the light little article, the absence of involvement, passion, character, eccentricity — the lack, at last, of the literary tone itself — have made the New York Times into a provincial literary journal, longer and thicker, but not much different in the end from all those small-town Sunday “Book Pages.”
What It’s Like to Fail
Excerpt from a new book by former sitcom writer David Raether, who reflects on how he went from making $300,000 a year working on Roseanne to ending up homeless:
The worst moment is the day the sheriff comes. Two armed members of the county sheriff’s department showed up with a locksmith as we were moving out. The investor stood on the opposite side of the street as we packed and loaded a moving van. She watched us load our furniture, which we put into storage because the two bedroom apartment we managed to lease with the help of a friend didn’t have room for 4,000 square feet worth of furniture. The deputies came and talked with us to make sure we really were moving out, and we felt like criminals for spending a final few hours in the house we owned for twelve years.
Auto Correct
Bilger goes inside Google’s self-driving car project: Engineers have made big leaps since the DARPA Grand Challenge nearly a decade ago, but a commercial release is still years away:
The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.
Reading List: Flannery O’Connor’s Prayer Journal
New story picks from Emily Perper, featuring VQR, The Daily Beast and The New Yorker.
The 40-Year Slump
A bleak picture of working in the United States. Meyerson points to 1974 as the pivotal year in which worker pay stopped rising in accordance with productivity, and traces all the changes have since wiped out the American middle class:
All the factors that had slowly been eroding Americans’ economic lives over the preceding three decades—globalization, deunionization, financialization, Wal-Martization, robotization, the whole megillah of nefarious –izations—have now descended en masse on the American people. Since 2000, even as the economy has grown by 18 percent, the median income of households headed by people under 65 has declined by 12.4 percent. Since 2001, employment in low-wage occupations has increased by 8.7 percent while employment in middle-wage occupations has decreased by 7.3 percent. Since 2003, the median wage has not grown at all.
What Does the Book Business Look Like on the Inside?
Memories and bad math from Menaker’s life in the publishing business, excerpted from his memoir My Mistake:
“We make about $3 for each hardcover sale, $1 for each paperback.”
“So if we sell 10,000 hardcovers, that’s $30,000.”
“Right.”
“And say 10,000 paperbacks. That’s $40,000.”
“Right—so the P-and-L probably won’t work. So we have to adjust the figures. But remember, you can’t change the returns percentage.”
“Increase the first printing to 15,000 and the second printing to 7,500?”
“That ought to do it. Isn’t this scientific?”
Wall Street Isn’t Worth It
Who’s providing the real value in our economy? Quiggin argues that we shouldn’t be ready to dismiss the idea of dramatically shrinking the financial sector, which now makes up more than 20 percent of the U.S. GDP:
I’d like to look at a specific question raised by the discussion of private returns and social value, namely: can Wall Street, in its present form, be justified? That is, does the share of income flowing to corporations and professional workers in the financial sector reflect their marginal contribution to the total value of social output, so that, if their work ceased to be done and their skills were allocated elsewhere, we would all be worse off?
I argue that society as a whole would be better off if the financial sector were smaller, and received much smaller returns. A political strategy based on cutting the financial sector down to size has more promise for the Left than any alternative approach now on offer, and is a necessary precondition for a broader attempt to make the distribution of wealth and power more equal.
The Dream Boat
Luke Mogelson and Joel Van Houdt go undercover on a boat taking refugees from Indonesia to Christmas Island in Australian territory. They find a desperate situation, and disbelief from refugees that the place they are trying to reach is not what they hope it will be:
Continuing to brave the Indian Ocean, and continuing to die, only illustrates their desperation in a new, disturbing kind of light. This is the subtext to the plight of every refugee: Whatever hardship he endures, he endures because it beats the hardship he escaped. Every story of exile implies the sadder story of a homeland.
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