The concept of an "oil curse" has been widely debated in the literature. Two clear camps have emerged: (1) those that favor the basic hypothesis or a modified version thereof, and (2) those that find little generalizable empirical evidence for the negative impacts of oil and gas development on the political, socio-economic, and/or environmental trajectories of oil and gas producing nations relative to their non-oil and gas producing counterparts. Overall, we find no significant evidence to support a generalizable concept of an oil curse. In general, our results do not seek to dismiss concerns regarding the potential impacts of oil and gas development on some regions, but rather to illustrate that any such impacts do not appear to be universal in either their direction or magnitude. Similar to what other groups have found, we see evidence that - in some cases - increased oil and gas development appears to correlate with improved socio-economic indicators. In other cases, the evidence is ambiguous at best in light of the large numbers of confounding variables that are effectively impossible to rigorously account for in order to obtain clear and unequivocal negative causal mechanisms between oil and gas development and the status of a society.