People in rich countries are (mostly) very nativist, so I doubt this kind of think would be popular. For whatever reason, people tend to value the lives of those in their country many times more than those in other countries.

So unfortunately, buying their labor at cheap rates seems to be the best way to transfer wealth right now, at least a big scale [0].

[0] - On a smaller scale individuals can donate to charities like Against Malaria Foundation or GiveDirectly, which I highly recommend everyone does if they have excess wealth.

You are already doing that to some extent and in my opinion it has the reverse effect. That money will go to the government which is quite corrupt in these countries and will stronghold more authoritarian regimes. Child-labor is bad but it helps some families make money, and many of them break the poverty chain this way. It's not the best/most ethical way to do it, but let's not pretend that a few random folks on HN have the solutions for these third-world countries.

> in my opinion it has the reverse effect. That money will go to the government which is quite corrupt in these countries and will stronghold more authoritarian regimes.

This is not the only option, and this defeatist attitude is dangerous. There are many charities operating in third-world countries that are incredibly efficient and are delivering real impact right now. Here’s a few: https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

Now, obviously scaling it up will be difficult, but all these charities are currently cash constrained, so there’s still some room to grow, and after that point, I’m sure it’s not an intractable problem to figure out a working model.

The “corrupt government” excuse is common one to justify inaction, but given the existence of so many organizations doing good work, I don’t it’s applicable anymore.

> That would be idiotic. We are well off because we can make cheap things (including food). To make things arbitrarily more expensive would make everybody worse off.

It would make the ultra rich a tiny less richer, but hey you can't have that. There is wealth in this world so that every single kid on that planet can go to school instead of working at the factory, it's just insanely badly distributed.