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Economics professor Eric Edmonds continued to deliver his economic analysis of the causes of child labor Wednesday evening when the power shut down across campus, not disappointing the audience of about 40 students and community members who gathered in the Rockefeller Center.
Drawing on his experience as an economic adviser to Vietnam in the 1990s, Edmonds divided his lecture, entitled "Child Labor in the Global Economy," into four basic categories starting with a definition of "child labor," a term, he said, that carries both political and practical meanings.
Edmonds warned the audience about believing media portrayals of child labor, too many of which focus on sensational stories about shackled children forced to work in factories while ignoring the more common issue of rural child labor, where poor families need children to work on family farms.
"The newspaper images that we see of kids chained in factories are urban images," he said.