After Egypt, Who's Next?

Two weeks ago, I had posted on my Facebook wall a link to Dr. James Hamilton's blog post, Geopolitical Unrest and World Oil Markets. In that post Dr. Hamilton (of the University of California, San Diego) showed that there is a possible inverse relationship between a country's oil production and that country's political instability. Meaning, those countries with low levels of oil production were among the first to revolt, whereas countries with high oil production have shown greater stability. The implication is that the lack of petrodollars had not provided enough of a political safety net for the governments to cover their weak economies.

Hamilton's brief analysis covers (in the order of increasing oil production as a percentage of the world total) Lebanon (0.0%), Tunisia (0.1%), Yemen (0.3%), Sudan (0.6%), Egypt (0.8%), Libya (2.1%), Algeria (2.5%), Iraq (2.7%), Iran (4.9%), and Saudi Arabia (11.7%).

Now, if Hamilton's thesis is correct, then Egypt appears to be the last of the "low-hanging fruit" to have undergone political unrest. Theoretically, then, Libya and/or Algeria should be the next to revolt.

The potential problem with this analysis is that it doesn't explain all of the recent events in the Middle East and North Africa or the lack thereof. For example, Lebanon and Sudan have had long-standing government instability; that they should be undergoing problems now (such as the collapse of the government in Lebanon or the recent referendum in Sudan to split the country into two) are not terribly surprising given these countries' histories.

Likewise, I suspect that some countries that should have gone into turmoil may have had their chance but won't either because their societies are too stable (Morocco? Oman?) or because the state's security apparatus is too strong (Syria?).

What the professor also didn't mention was that Iran, which is second only to Saudi Arabia in oil production, already had its instability in the Green Movement protests of June 2009 that were quashed. I'm not expecting another major uprising in Iran (a la Tahrir Square) anytime soon.

What I think the protests really point out is that standards of living matter. Even more so than a lack of democracy, the economic corruption that pervades certain countries' economies is ultimately the straw that breaks the camel's back, so to speak. I say this with not only the Arab revolts currently going on in mind, but also the dissolution of the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989, which underwent similar revolutions for similar reasons. Republicans in the United States, who seem hell bent on trying to lower American standards of living, should take note of the potential consequences for their actions.

The Economist: Arming Up

This was a very interesting (if extremely short) article in The Economist about military spending per capita:

Israel spends most on defense relative to its population, shelling out over $2,300 a person, over $300 more than America. Small and rich countries, and notably Gulf states, feature prominently by this measure. Saudi Arabia ranks ninth in absolute spending, but sixth by population. China has increased spending by 10% to $85 billion to become the world's second largest spender. But it is still dwarfed by America, whose outlay of $607 billion is higher than that of the next 14 biggest spenders combined.

That Singapore comes in at #4 is a little surprising (I would have expected it to be a little lower down on the list), but I'm not surprised that it and some of the other small countries (Bahrain, Brunei, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia) are there: all have valuable assets (mostly oil, and a very modern economy in Singapore) that would make nice war prizes for neighboring countries (witness Iraq's attempted grab of Kuwait back in 1990). Israel's there for the obvious reason (let's not forget that much of that military spending goes for the occupation and oppression of the West Bank and Gaza). The bigger surprise for me is the listing of some of the European countries: Denmark, Greece, Norway and the Netherlands. Is it because the cost of participating in NATO is that high or because owning the best military hardware is that expensive?

Stupid Sara

Sometimes non-Muslims are so blinded by their hatred for Islam that they blame Islam for things our religion has nothing to do with. Consider the post Islam's War on Women by one Sara Coslett. Sara had noticed some demographic statistics for certain Middle Eastern countries that show a sex ratio favoring men:

I wonder how is it [sic] that in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar the ratio of men to women is greater than 2/1, in Kuwait 1.5/1, Bahrain 1.34/1, Oman 1.26/1, and Saudi Arabia 1.22/1.

These particular ratios are for the population as a whole but, Sara, taking them at face value, doesn't dig deep enough. Instead, she comes up with two pathetic reasons for the skewed sex ratios:

Two possibilities come to mind. First, Muslim countries are notorious for practicing female infanticide.

Except, this isn't true. If Sara had said India or China are notorious for practicing female infanticide, I'd have quickly agreed with her. The problem is, the countries Sara highlighted don't have very high abortion rates to begin with. According to Johnston's Archive, which tracks historical abortion statistics, we find that the abortion percentage for all residents, in and out of the country, were extremely low for the six countries in question. While not all countries have a full listing for their statistics, the abortion percentage for Qatar was 1.3% in 2004, 0.05% for Kuwait in 2001, and 0.07% for Bahrain in 2004. The abortion ratio wasn't available for either the UAE or Saudi Arabia; however, the total number of abortions in 2006 for both countries among residents was 63 and 5, respectively. Note that all of those abortions were obtained overseas, meaning no abortions were performed among residents at all inside those countries. (No statistics are available for Oman.) With numbers so low, there's no reason to believe abortion is a cause for the skewed sex ratio.

In fact, it is not. If we next look at the CIA's World Factbook, we can look at the sex ratio at birth. Here, we find that for Bahrain, there were 1.03 boys born for every girl (2007 est.), 1.04 boys for every girl in Kuwait (2007 est.), and 1.05 boys for every girl in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE (2007 est.). Compare this to India (1.12 boys per girl; 2007 est.) and China (1.11 boys per girl, 2007 est.), and you see that Sara's argument with regard to female infanticide holds no water.

Sara's other argument is even more absurd:

The other possible reason for such a disparity between males and females is that census counters do not include females when polling the population. We know that Muslims regard women as property, so like a slave, they would not be considered a human and thus not counted.

Even if one were to accept Sara's argument at face value, the fact of the matter is that other sources, such as the World Factbook would provide fairly realistic estimates for the male-female population (see the "Age Structure" statistic).

Of course, there's one possibility that Sara hadn't considered, and that's immigration. Looking at NationMaster statistics, we see that immigrants make up the following percentages of the national population: Bahrain - 40.66%, Kuwait - 65.83%, Oman - 24.45%, Qatar - 78.34%, Saudi Arabia - 27.51%, and the UAE - 70.85%. And, as any expat will tell you, the vast majority of all expats are men. It's not surprising, then, that the sex ratio in the six Middle Eastern countries Sara highlighted should favor men: they're the ones who moved to these countries in search of work.

But Sara would rather blame Islam; that way she doesn't have to think too deeply about why things are the way they are:

It is obvious to me Islam has declared war on its female population.

Stupid Sara.

Update: Since writing this post last night, Sara has re-written her original post, plus written another. The problem is, while Sara realized that she made a mistake after reading my post, she compounded the original error by falling on another bogus claim:

Clearly something tragic is happening to females after age 15. Therefore, instead of two possibilities I realized there was a third - honor killings.

Most of the remainder of the re-written first post is merely a rehash of her original post. The second post, Erratum: Islam's War on Women is a strange mish-mash of retractions, corrections, and old allegations. On the one hand, she admits to forgetting about the impact of immigrants into the six countries she originally highlighted. She also admits that she was wrong "...in my assumptions that the Muslim practice of honor killings and a disregard for women as people..." However, she also makes some odd statements, such as:

Surprisingly I noticed Mr. JDsg did not refute or even mention anything about honor killings.

What Sara disregarded was the fact that she had not written anything about honor killings in her original post. What was there to refute or mention? Even so, honor killings is not going to be a high enough number to explain the skewed sex ratios. Honor killings do, of course, happen, but the number of killings committed is not going to be that high. This is merely Sara grasping at another straw.

Sara concluded her new post by writing:

While population data is a poor example for Islam’s War on Women, the war does continue.

That's it, Sara, keep beating your dead horse. You've been wrong in just about all your other "reasonings." Show us how more wrong you can be.

Update #2: Looked at Sara's blog once more, just to see if she had followed up on the comments I had made there the other day. No, she hasn't responded, and she's shut off her comments once again to only those who have "registered" (the usual cowardly BS tactic used by right-wing blogs who don't want to hear that the emperor wears no clothes.)