A tournament labor market is one where a lot of people compete for a small number of very rewarding jobs. Acting is obviously one of those businesses, with hundreds of thousands of hopefuls aspiring to be one of a few dozen megastars. The music business is a similar story. And so, increasingly, is journalism, because the Internet has destroyed the advertising model that used to support large numbers of ink-stained wretches laboring in the middle of the fame-and-pay scale.

Tournament markets are especially fertile environments for abuse because the gap between making it and not is so wide. When success or failure is close to a binary, there’s a strong incentive for workers to grit their teeth and endure vile abuse, if doing so makes them 1 percent more likely to win the tournament. And when they refuse to grin and bear it, replacing them is terribly easy, so companies have little incentive to crack down on heavyweights who abuse the more junior help.

Indeed, the idea that liberal-dominated industries are uniquely prone to abuse because of their politics may have the causation exactly backward: Working in an abuse-prone industry seems likely, all else being equal, to drive you toward left-wing politics, as you seek a counterweight to the near-totalitarian power of your bosses.