"Back in my day, we worked in the coal mine every morning before preschool. And we liked it!"

An excerpt from my book, a stand-alone piece of good news:

"Another benefit to globalization is the reduction in child labor, as parents become more prosperous and move away from agrarian work. In 1980, an average of 23% of ten to fourteen year old children in developing countries were working. By 2000, that number had dropped in half, to 12%. In China alone, those twenty years saw a drop from 30% of children laboring to a mere 8%. Remember, going back a century ago—let alone longer ago than that—many countries had a majority of their children out working in the fields."

It's impressive that economic growth in the past 30 years (yes, world growth from the past 30 years is still very net positive despite the current economic crisis) is perhaps even more impressive than recorded, when you factor in this removal of people from the labor force at the same time as the growth.