Now It's 400,000 Climate Marchers? Puh-leeze...

Okay, I'm going to keep this short.

I thought I was done with the topic last night when I posted a piece here pegging the crowd in yesterday's nifty People's Climate March at over 100,000, a very impressive turnout, and explaining how that figure was arrived at. Toward the end, I criticized an estimate attributed to March organizers of 310,000.

I woke up to discover my blogpost had generated a certain amount of interest and a bunch of Facebook comments They were even mainly favorable.

I also found that the organizers had jacked their "official" count up to 400,000. I thought, that’s just silly. Maybe they're counting all the folks who took part in demos around the world, like this one in Tromsø, Norway that my friend Jon-arne sent me shots of.

Nope, according to the NY Times. "Organizers, using data provided by 35 crowd spotters and analyzed by a mathematician from Carnegie Mellon University, estimated that 311,000 people marched the route." So far, no indication of whether the unnamed numbers cruncher also bumped her figures up by 89,000 overnight.

400,000 "marched the route"? A convenient number, on account of the March took just a hair over 4 hours to pass our vantage point on 53^rd and 6^th. So call it 100,000 people an hour. That works out to--lessee, strike the last zeroes—1,666 people passing a given point every single minute that the March lasted. This simply did not happen. If you weren't there, look at the photos on the front cover of today's Times or browse around on Flickr. That kind of density isn't there, even if all the people had been sprinting. Which they weren't.

So what? It feels good to see Fox News saying 400,000 marched, right? (Of course I don't believe what they say about anything else, but still...) Where's the downside of inflating crowd figures, some friends ask. For a more rounded argument about this, check my blogpost from last year, "Let's Stop Inflating Crowd Counts, Eh?"

In practical terms, I'm inclined to think the blowback comes almost immediately. We want to take the momentum, the high spirits and determination of the People's Climate March and convert it into continued action. Of course only a certain percentage of those who marched will go home and plan local protests or build groups or  promote petitions or lobby Congresscritters or register green voters or sabotage pipelines anyhow. But it's not hard to predict with a high degree of precision how many of the 275,000 phantom marchers will be galvanized into action. That is bound to dishearten not only the people who make up the base of the movement, but even those organizers and leaders who go for the okey-doke. 

 It's Amilcar Cabral time again: 

Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories.

Read more!

Once More on Counting Crowds at Demos

[UPDATE: This caused some controversy when it was first posted, so I wrote a shorter--and crankier--follow-up piece a day later, which has a few additional thoughts.]

What a splendid march!

Props first of all to the 100,000 plus people who came to NYC from around the US (hello, South Dakota Quakers!) and around the world to stand up against the carbon-burning—and not coincidentally, capitalist--economy that is destroying the habitability of the planet for an awful lot of the present biosphere, including humans. You tended a tad toward the white end of the spectrum to be sure and were perhaps a bit naive, but you were young, you were jazzed and you were mighty imaginative in your posters and costumes and slogans.

Props too to the organizers who turned out all these folks on a very tight time-line, who made excellent use of the Internet and social media to build the protest, and who organized a very smoothly run march.

But let's face facts, nobody is much interested my review of the People's Climate March. What you want to know from me is how many people were there. I will give you two answers:

1. There were well over 100,000 people, likely a bit upwards of 120,000 in the march.

2. No way in hell were there 310,000 people on that march.

Read more!

Let's Stop Inflating Crowd Counts, Eh?

People, we have got to stop exaggerating the numbers who attend demonstrations. Yesterday's Climate Change rally in Washington, DC has finally got me off my ass to write about the subject. I regret this, because the demo itself was a splendid event, full of promise for a new stage in the movement to stop the trashing of the environment by rampant capitalism.

But, and this is a big but, when folks from the bus from the Bronx I came down on made our way to the Washington Monument, next to the rally site, someone on the excellent big screen was announcing that there were 40,000 people present. Looking down toward the actual stage from the elevation of the monument's knoll, I figured the crowd might have hit 10 thou. Might. A couple of other old Washington demo hands I spoke with also scoffed at the "official" count.

Half an hour later, after thousands more people had arrived, rally MC Rev. Lennox Yearwood was saying 35,000, strongly suggesting that folks were pulling these numbers out of their butts. 

 So I did what I tend to do at most demonstrations I attend, and have done for many years. I counted the house.

Obviously this is easier at a demo of a few hundred or even a few thousand, but the organizers made it fairly easy. With a lot of marshals at hand, the rally finally poured onto Constitution and headed west in an orderly way to start the long trek around the White House and back to the monument. I mounted the back of a bench just ahead of the front of the march giving me a slightly elevated view of the crowded avenue as the protesters arrived and passed by.

(A brief note on methodology: for a march of up to a thousand or so, I count by fives, making a line on a piece of paper every hundred and the traditional cross slash to mark 500. Five is an easy number for the eye to group. For a march of this size and density, I count by 20s, which obviously leaves room for a wider margin of error. As I hit 100, I pick out a couple obvious signs or protesters to serve as place holders, so I can look down and make my little slash, and pick up right where I left off. Even when people ask me, I don't try to total up the count to that point. I save that to the end.)

When the last marchers had passed by, I looked back at the rally site and found that it had been completely emptied by the march. Then I added up my numbers.

16,200

Okay, that's rough, I freely admit. Let's say I was off by 25%. That still means I am going to call bullshit on any figure under 12,000 or over 20,000. And by the time I got home from Washington, late evening, Facebook friends and Left websites were proclaiming "more than 50,000."

So What?

Why does it matter? The media lowballs our numbers as a matter of course, Why shouldn't we inflate them?

First, let's ask who we are fooling?

The enemy? They have helicopters and video cameras in the buildings along the line of march, and people, professionals, whose damn job it is to evaluate the size (and demographic composition and militancy and political stance) of marches.

Ourselves? Well, maybe, although cynical movement veterans know to discount unrealistic crowd estimates. There's something called the S.F. Constant used for numbers from one demonstration-prone left party—multiply their figure by .37 to get a realistic number (and I've found it works surprisingly well at demos I've counted.)

But to the extent that we do succeed in fooling ourselves, we are hurting ourselves. Mao Zedong, a guy who knew something about strategy, was fond of quoting military theorist Sun Tzu, who wrote circa 500 BCE:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

Overestimating our accomplishments and the numbers we can mobilize today sets us up for defeat and disillusionment tomorrow, or perhaps the next day.

Maybe, though, we are trying to impress and encourage people who are new to the struggle, like many yesterday who were at their first large demonstration, maybe their first march ever, period, Even here, puffing up our numbers is a bad way to go. Having attended, for instance, a small protest numbering several dozen, people reading a subsequent web-posting or an article in a left newspaper claiming several hundred are going to expect they are in the presence of bullshitters.

Even in a larger crowd, like the Climate Change rally, some people will find inflated statistics suspicious. This is the US—many people have gone to games or shows in arenas which seat 50,000 people, and they might just notice the discrepancy between the numbers there and the numbers standing at the foot of the Washington Monument yesterday.

And fudging numbers can carry a bigger penalty. Our bus captain, Dan, made a very good point on the ride back to the Bronx, when we were discussing this. Global warming, climate change is a complex phenomenon, which can sometimes be confirmed by direct personal experience. Really understanding it, however, requires understanding some science, math-based science. If people think we lie about one set of numbers, why wouldn't they mistrust what we have to say about another?

I've used terms here like overestimate, fudge, inflate, but I will leave the last word, a blunt one, to African agronomist and revolutionary leader, the late Amilcar Cabral.

Tell no lies. Claim no easy victories.

Read more!