Lately the esteemed website OurWorldinData has been getting more and more obnoxious in their alarmist climate commentary. And while the numbers illustrating actual human progress amid the rhetorical gloom are still there if you know where to look, we foresee a day when the data are gone (lest you see it and start engaging in thoughtcrime) and all you get are headlines like “Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels.” But for now we can still find our way to Cheerful Charts like this week’s which shows rates of child labour over the years. For most of human history, kids had to work to help fend off immediate starvation, whatever toll it took in the long run or even right away. But as you can see the fraction of children toiling in the workplace has fallen steadily, especially in developed countries. Now if we could just get them to clean their rooms.

The chart legend is a bit obscure. But the first brown line is for England for children 10-14, runs for 60 years starting in 1851 and shows a drop from 28% in Charles’ Dickens’ day to 14% in 1910. The second brown line, the US for kids 10-13, runs from 1890 to 1930 and the drop is from 12% to 2.5%. The green line shows Italy (10-14) dropping from 64% in 1881 to 3.6% in 1961. And the other lines show two estimates of the world average, the purple one starting at 28% in 1950 and ending at 11% in 2012 for children 10-14 and the red most recent one for those 5-17.

Those rates are still higher than they should be. But they’re moving in the right direction. And clearly machinery powered by fossil fuels that saves labour by making adults more productive allows children to be in school instead of in the cobalt mines.