Space out please: We must invest in the wisdom of crowds

livemint.com:

Democracy and markets share a belief in the ‘wisdom of crowds,’ a thesis presented well by James Surowiecki in a book by that title which offers various examples of how numerous minds put together are smarter than a few. The antithesis of it, though, glares out from every news report of a stampede. Can a clash of that crowd thesis with its antithesis yield a synthesis? Say, the ‘common sense of crowds’? The question has arisen again as India mourns the 120-plus lives lost to another crowd crush, this time in a slushy field near Hathras, Uttar Pradesh, where an estimated 250,000 devotees had turned up at a religious gathering, although local authorities said approval had been given for just 80,000.

As reports say, too many tried to converge too quickly upon the preacher who led that prayer session (for his blessings). High-toll tragedies of this kind have befallen several places of worship in the past. Recall the 2013 Ratangarh temple crush in Madhya Pradesh.

Globally, the worst stampede on record took place in Saudi Arabia during Hajj, a pilgrimage of faith, on 24 September 2015. Yet, the danger posed by crowd motion has nothing to do with religion. The same could happen in a packed hall hosting a rock show, which is why the risk of “fire" being yelled in such a space is often cited to argue why free speech mustn’t be an absolute right.

Crowd-crush mortality is a universal worry. In India, over-population is sometimes blamed for worsening our crowd risk. However, our population density is just 473 persons per square kilometre, according to 2021 World Bank data, so the crowds we see around us, especially in urban spaces, only reveal a problem of poor dispersal.