Like feudal societies, communist societies have an aristocracy composed of the communist party members.
Like feudal societies, communist societies have a population of serfs with limited or no rights and little possibility of social mobility.
Like feudal societies, communist societies are held together by brute force.
As if to prove me right, The Daily Mirror, has just released footage from North Korea’s northeast province of Ryanggang, where hundreds of children can be seen breaking and carrying rocks during construction of a local railway.
The children are eight or nine years old and work up to 10 hours a day in the heat of the blazing sun. Neither they nor their parents are compensated for this back-breaking labor.
[The image is provided courtesy of The Daily Mirror]
As the newspaper points out, these are the children of North Korea’s working class. Familiar class stratification has emerged in North Korea, with the communist party and the government employees at the top, and the underclass at the bottom.
The children of the former attend newly-constructed schools and enjoy, as much as they can in the Hermit Kingdom, a semblance of a normal life. The latter are barely surviving in a state of abject poverty and servitude. So much, then, for the communist commitment to equality.
In the Daily Mirror footage:
“In one film … a forlorn lad of around eight or nine, wearing an England football shirt, is ordered to break rocks at a cliff face. Girls pair up as they struggle to lift heavy loads into piles. One young boy winces under the strain of his work. Teachers shielding their faces from the glaring midday sun bark orders at other youngsters bent double from lugging sacks as big as their bodies. Mounds of massive sandstone broken up by the dusty child slaves can be seen piled high.” It is worth noting that child labour was once a completely unobjectionable part of human existence. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, which started in Great Britain in the late 18th century, no society thought twice of eschewing child labour. As Johan Norberg noted in his book Progress, “Prior to the mid-19th century it was common for working-class children to start working from seven years of age.”
It is, therefore, somewhat ironic that child labor should come to be so closely associated with the process of industrialization – a topic well worth exploring in greater depth below.
As the chart above illustrates, people did not write about child labor prior to the 19th century, because working children were so ubiquitous. Prior to industrialization, which massively increased productivity of the farm, there were no food “surpluses.” All of the food that the farm produced was consumed by the peasant families and their beasts of burden.
An idle child or, for that matter, an idle man, woman or donkey, was a waste of precious resources. “The survival of the family demanded that everybody contributed,” writes Norberg.
Bemoaning child labor, in other words, made about as much sense as complaining about a lack of plans for the weekend—since most people worked at least six days a week. It was industrialization that changed all that.
As farm productivity increased, people no longer had to stay on the farm and grow their food. They moved to the cities in search of a better life. At first, living conditions were dire. Medieval cities were not prepared for the influx of millions of people from the countryside. Slums arose and disease spread.
By the mid-19th century, however, living and working conditions started to improve. Economic expansion led to an increased competition for labor and wages grew. That, in turn, enabled more parents to forego their children’s labor and send them to school instead.
It is crucial to remember that it was only after a critical mass of children stopped working that people realized that life without child labor was possible. Legislation limiting child labor got more stringent as the 19th century progressed, but it was not until the Factory and Workshop Act of 1878 that the British Parliament banned labor for children less than 10 years of age and required that all children under 10 receive compulsory education.
Prosperity brought about by trade and industrialization in particular made child labor in the West obsolete.
Over the course of the 20th century, prosperity spread to other parts of the world. Today, child labor in Asia and Latin America are at an all-time low. It remains a problem in Africa, large parts of which remain stuck in the subsistence economy.
It flourishes in North Korea – a modern slave-state that, in the pursuit of communism, has returned its children to an impoverished, servile working class.
Developing Countries Have Seen Sustained Growth Since 1987
“Since the late 1980s, the classification of countries into income categories has transformed. The number of low-income countries has steadily declined, while the number of high-income countries has increased.
This shift reflects broader global economic developments, including sustained growth in many developing countries, greater integration into the global economy, and the effects of policy reforms and international organizations’ support. In 1987, 30% of reporting countries were classified as low-income and 25% as high-income countries. By 2024, these ratios shifted to 12% low-income and 40% high-income.”
Summary: For decades, experts assumed that rising prosperity inevitably led to falling birth rates, fueling concerns about population collapse in wealthy societies. But new data show that this link is weakening or even reversing, with many high-income countries now seeing higher fertility than some middle-income nations. As research reveals that wealth and fertility can rise together, policymakers have an opportunity to rethink outdated assumptions about tradeoffs between prosperity and demographic decline.
For years, it was treated as a demographic law: as countries grow wealthier, they have fewer children. Prosperity, it was believed, inevitably drove birth rates down. This assumption shaped countless forecasts about the future of the global population.
And in many wealthy countries, such as South Korea and Italy, very low fertility rates persist. But a growing body of research is challenging the idea that rising prosperity always suppresses fertility.
University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde recently observed that middle-income countries are now experiencing lower total fertility rates than many advanced economies ever have. His latest work shows that Thailand and Colombia each have fertility rates around 1.0 births per woman, which is even lower than rates in well-known low-fertility advanced economies such as Japan, Spain and Italy.
“My conjecture is that by 2060 or so, we might see rich economies as a group with higher [total fertility rates] than emerging economies,” Fernández-Villaverde predicts.
This changing relationship between prosperity and fertility is already apparent in Europe. For many years, wealthier European countries tended to have lower birth rates than poorer ones. That pattern weakened around 2017, and by 2021 it had flipped.
This change fits a broader historical pattern. Before the Industrial Revolution, wealthier families generally had more children. The idea that prosperity leads to smaller families is a modern development. Now, in many advanced economies, that trend is weakening or reversing. The way that prosperity influences fertility is changing yet again. Wealth and family size are no longer pulling in opposite directions.
This shift also calls into question long-standing assumptions about women’s income and fertility. For years, many economists thought that higher salaries discouraged women from having children by raising the opportunity cost of taking time off work. That no longer seems to hold in many countries.
In several high-income nations, rising female earnings are now associated with higher fertility. Studies in Italy and the Netherlands show that couples where both partners earn well are more likely to have children, while low-income couples are the least likely to do so. Similar findings have emerged from Sweden as well. In Norway, too, higher-earning women now tend to have more babies.
This trend is not limited to Europe. In the United States, richer families are also beginning to have more babies than poorer ones, reversing patterns observed in previous decades. A study of seven countries — including the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia — found that in every case, higher incomes for both men and women increased the chances of having a child.
This growing body of evidence challenges the assumption that prosperity causes people to have fewer children.
Still, birth rates are falling across much of the world, with many countries now below replacement level. While this trend raises serious concerns, such as the risk of an aging and less innovative population and widening gaps in public pension solvency, it is heartening that it is not driven by prosperity itself. Wealth does not automatically lead to fewer children, and theories blaming consumerism or rising living standards no longer hold up.
Although the recent shift in the relationship between prosperity and fertility is welcome, it is not yet enough to raise fertility to the replacement rate of around 2.1 children per woman — a challenging threshold to reach.
But the growing number of policymakers around the world concerned about falling fertility can consider many simple, freedom-enhancing reforms that lower barriers to raising a family, including reforms to education, housing and childcare. Still, it’s important to challenge the common assumption that prosperity inevitably leads to lower birth rates: Wealth does not always mean fewer children.
This article was published at The Hill on 6/16/2025.
“The number of ‘everyday’ millionaires — those with wealth between $1 million and $5 million — is soaring…
There were nearly 52 million ‘everyday’ millionaires in the world last year, per a recent report from UBS. That’s four times the number in 2000.
Even accounting for inflation, the number of everyday millionaires in 2024 was 2.5 times what it was in 2000. The wealth manager does not break down how many of these folks live in the U.S. But America has, by far, more millionaires than any other country in the world.
New American millionaires were minted at a rate of about 1,000 a day last year. There are nearly 24 million millionaires in the U.S., 40% of the global total, and about four times the number than runner-up China.”
Côte D’Ivoire’s Land Reforms Are Unlocking Jobs and Growth
“Secure land tenure transforms dormant assets into active capital—unlocking access to credit, encouraging investment, and spurring entrepreneurship. These are the building blocks of job creation and economic growth.
When landowners have secure property rights, they invest more in their land. Existing data shows that with secure property rights, agricultural output increases by 40% on average. Efficient land rental markets also significantly boost productivity, with up to 60% productivity gains and 25% welfare improvements for tenants…
Building on a long-term partnership with the World Bank, the Government of Côte d’Ivoire has dramatically accelerated delivery of formal land records to customary landholders in rural areas by implementing legal, regulatory, and institutional reforms and digitizing the customary rural land registration process, which is led by the Rural Land Agency (Agence Foncière Rurale – AFOR).
This has enabled a five-fold increase in the number of land certificates delivered in just five years compared to the previous 20 years.”
