Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Running the numbers on OWS

Using some of Nate Silver's crowd size estimates as a starting point, Eric over at Classical Values got out his calculator and crunched a few numbers of his own:
OK, so there are about 15,000 in New York (all of whom cannot fit into Zuccotti park), but let’s be liberal go with the highest possible figure of 100,000 protesters.

What is that in terms of percent? The United States population is 312,441,000, so Occupy Wall Street is less than a third of one percent.

0.032006042740869475, to be exact.

Their claim of 99% seems either a bit high or a bit arrogant. Or both.
If these filthy OWS hippies really represented 99% of the country then you'd think they could manage to gather more people together than the Tea Party movement could, right?  By most accounts, there were well over 100,000 people just at the Restoring Honor rally alone.  And that was just one event... I'm sure if you added up the numbers for all the tea party events it would really put the OWS numbers to shame.  Yet the media constantly fawns over the OWS protests and denigrates the Tea Party.

Update:  Eric updated his post to point out that 0.032006042740869475 percent is actually less than one thirtieth of one percent, not just less than one third of one percent.

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