Imagine you’re like me, and you want to write. Maybe you harbour some aspirations to work for a legacy news organisation. You’re graduating this year, so it’s time to start applying! Let’s imagine you’re in the US (because this is where we have some good stats).
Over the last decade, America has lost 26,000 journalism jobs. Digitization and the death of local papers has decimated the industry. So, that’s not particularly encouraging. But wait. Every year for that decade, 50,000 students have graduated from journalism school. In the last decade America has minted 500,000 new journalists, at exactly the same time as the entire industry has lost 26,000 jobs. Not only are the people whose jobs no longer exist competing for the remaining few spots, but journalism is an industry that can be done by a whole range of graduates. A geographer is just as likely to be a good journalist as a journalism school graduate. A physics major might be better on a science beat. Let alone the importance of having people who haven’t graduated from college having access to the profession so that members of the non-credentialed working class are also represented in the press corps.
Crunch the numbers and you realise that it is statistically impossible for a journalism school graduate to get a job.
But a few do. And they’re highly visible thanks to social media. So schools keep churning out journalism grads. The cycle continues.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I wrote about similar dynamics in the context of modelling for Guernica. This semester I wasn’t teaching so instead I was a research assistant for Professor Chris McKenna at the Said Business School at Oxford, working on a case study for the Global History of Capitalism project.
In the case study we look at Mecca. It is a spiritual duty for every able bodied Muslim who is capable to go to Mecca once in their lifetime for the Hajj pilgrimage, which happens once a year. In the past it was usual for no more than 60,000 pilgrims a year to go on the Hajj, a journey which typically took weeks of arduous trekking through the desert on camelback. Pilgrims risked being attacked by Bedouins, contracting diseases like cholera or dying from the harsh conditions of the desert. On top of that, saving for the Hajj was incredibly difficult. It is forbidden by sharia law to collect interest on savings (known as riba) so traditional banks and financial instruments did not exist throughout the Islamic world in the way they have elsewhere. Most pilgrims would sell a portion of their assets (like livestock or their homes) or would physically save their money. In Malaysia it was common for people to hide money in bamboo buried under their houses. There was a tension for the vast majority of Muslims, between being old enough to have the money to undertake the Hajj, and being young enough to survive the gruelling journey.
A lot has changed. Today international travel has made the Hajj accessible to the entire Islamic world. There are daily flights to Jedda, and a short bus ride to Mecca. You no longer have to risk your life in the desert. Islamic financial instruments that don’t collect riba and are thus sharia compliant have made saving for Hajj a reality for many. Suddenly the number of people who qualify as able bodied and capable has massively expanded. At the same time, the global population of Muslims is rapidly increasing. It is roughly 1.8 billion today, and is set to hit 2.7 billion by 2050. Now, so many people want to undertake the Hajj that Saudi Arabia, who is in charge of Mecca, have had to put quotas on the number of visitors. It is capped at roughly 2.5mn people a year (when not in a global pandemic).
Mecca has changed to match this need. The third largest building in the world is the Mecca clock tower, a gaudy skyscraper that looms over the grand mosque and looks vaguely like Big Ben (it was built by the Bin Ladens, as with much else of Mecca’s large developments). As one real estate buyer, Mohamed Saed al-Jahni, told the BBC, “I have been investing in this sector for 35 years. I remember when I first sold a metre of land in Mecca for just 15 rials ($3). Now it has reached 80,000 rials ($22,000)."
A key ritual during the Hajj is the stoning of the devil. During the Hajj, pilgrims must strike one of the three jamrat with seven pebbles. In the subsequent days they must return and stone each of the pillars, with pebbles no greater than the size of a chickpea. Pilgrims collect at least 49 such pebbles, keeping them in a small pouch as they perform their other religious duties. Throwing the stones symbolises the actions of Ibrahim when he faced the trial of sacrificing his son, Ismail upon the commandment of Allah. The pillars represent each of the three places that the devil tried to dissuade Ibrahim from carrying out Allah’s will.
By the 1950s, the volume of pebbles thrown at the pillars was already becoming a logistical concern. The government constructed small walls surrounding the pillars that could act as basins to capture the falling stones, easily removable once the pilgrims had finished their rites and departed.
By the 1960s, a simple one-story bridge had been built around the pillars. This allowed the crowd to stone the devil from ground level or the bridge, increasing the capacity such that a hundred thousand pilgrims could move through the area each hour. But by 2012 the Hajj saw its highest number of pilgrims ever––over three million.
With this number of pilgrims, the Jamart becomes more than a logistical challenge. It becomes a bottleneck. There are now four levels of bridges to accommodate the pilgrims, with a fifth level planned that will accommodate up to 400,000 pilgrims an hour. Conveyor belts now replace the concrete basins. They whisk away up to fifty million pebbles a day, depositing them in dump trucks which drive them back out to the plains so they can be re-used again the next year.
In 2015 a crush at the Jamart killed an estimated 2,500 pilgrims. It was the largest crowd crush in history. It is sadly not uncommon for tens or hundreds of people to die each year during the Hajj. In 1990, 1,426 pilgrims were crushed to death in a tunnel that connects Mecca with the Mina valley. In 1994, at least 270 pilgrims were crushed during the stoning of the devil. In 1998, also at the Jamrat, 118 were killed. 2001 saw 35 killed, 2003 saw 14. In 2004 a further 251 were crushed to death during the ritual.
The crushes at Mecca are a devastating example of a global reality. Scarcity in a time of abundance. At the same time as more and more people have the means to enact their dreams, the finite nature of the objects of their desire makes them increasingly scarce. There is only one Mecca. There is only one hajj.
In higher education this is why you have the college admissions scandal (can’t recommend this documentary highly enough). Or why the parents of elite prep schools in America are going crazy (see this incredible Atlantic article). You can’t clone Harvard (or can you?).
It’s also why people are feeling so broken. It’s not that the kids in elite private schools don’t work hard. Or that the people who pour their life savings into going to Mecca don’t suffer on a waitlist (in Indonesia the wait is roughly 12 years). Or that journalism grads don’t have solid portfolios and good ideas. It’s just that the odds are increasingly impossible. For everything.
Let alone those who aren’t even offered the opportunity in the first place. What about the vast populations who are shut out due to systemic racism, chronic underfunding of social services in communities of colour, and the vast disparity in outcomes in emerging market economies still hampered by the legacy of centuries of colonialism? Everything is a gamble now, and they don’t even get the chance to pull the lever.
In China there is a term for this that I look at in my thesis. Involution 内卷化. An involution is a process in which additional input does not produce greater output (Ji 2020). Like turning a wheel in mud. This term was first coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1963) in his work on Javanese agriculture to explain why this agrarian society had not developed. Despite the agricultural economy becoming more sophisticated this simply led to more labourers tilling the fields. In the end, they ate all the extra output they were creating. As Xiang Biao has said of the term, “involution is not just about fierce competition, it also expresses a sense of competing for nothing.”