The Monkey Cage

Women have made less progress toward gender equality in the Middle East than in any other region. Many observers claim this is due to the region’s Islamic traditions. I suggest that oil, not Islam, is at fault; and that oil production also explains why women lag behind in many other countries. Oil production reduces the number of women in the labor force, which in turn reduces their political influence. As a result, oil-producing states are left with atypically strong patriarchal norms, laws, and political institutions.

That is Michael Ross in the latest American Political Science Review. The paper is here. In the statistical analyses, oil rents per capita are associated with lower female labor force participation and fewer female seats in parliament — controlling for factors such as GDP per capita, region (Middle East, etc.), the proportion of the country that is Muslim, and other demographic and institutional characteristics of states. Moreover, if one focuses only on the Middle East, these same findings hold.

See also Ross’ work on how oil contributes to civil war and other conflicts — here in the Journal of Peace Research and here in Foreign Affairs.

Posted by John Sides at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Straight from the mouth of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid:

[Hat tip to Marc Stern]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[Hat tip to Bob Goldfarb]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This piece by Felix Salmon on the problems that Gawker Media is encountering with pay-per-pageview is pretty interesting.

Golson’s take-home pay is so much larger than his base salary that his base salary ($2,500 a month) has become basically irrelevant. Instead, he’s been relying entirely on his PVR of $9.75 per thousand pageviews - a rate which has seen him taking home more than $4,000 a month so far this year. For Golson, then, his realistic base salary is in the $4,000 range - much higher than the $2,500 which Robischon is referring to. … The problem here could have been partially fixed if Robischon had decided to give Golson a more realistic base salary to begin with. But Robischon’s boss, Nick Denton, wants fixed salaries to be as low as possible: he hates it when a writer doesn’t justify his salary with pageviews, and the best way of ensuring that situation never arises is to make the fixed salaries as low as possible.

This PVR is being lowered, leading to a strong reaction from Golson and others. Salmon explains their anger in terms of psychological mechanisms such as loss aversion, which are indeed applicable. But I think that there are two other things going on, both of which have to do with the economics of piecework. And after all, paying people on the basis of the number of pageviews their articles receive is a glorified version of piecework.

Continue reading "Piecework, Political Economy and the Internet" »

Posted by Henry at 05:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)