On the Objective Study of Crowd Behaviour

In this brochure Professor Penrose puts forward one novel, challenging, and highly original idea buried in a banal matrix of tedious metaphor and metalepsis about the behaviour of men in groups and their reactions to micro-organisms and viruses. Those who fail to derive any profit from the analogy between crowd diseases as Greenwood uses the term and crowd disorders as Penrose does may also miss the point which makes the publication of the essay more than worth while. True to the Galton Laboratory tradition, the author assumes that the reader, if also a mathematician, will immediately grasp the statistical theory he advances; and, if not, will be too dumb to do so. This is a pity, because a public of thoughtful people is getting more and more suspicious of statistical generalizations advanced for allegedly adequate theoretical reasons when there is, as for the so-called cube law, merely a somewhat exiguous empirical basis to support them. The Penrose square-root law has also to do with voting; and what follows is an attempt to fill in the argument which the author himself does not deign to elaborate. The elaboration is all the more pertinent because his hope that the reader "will tolerate the necessary introduction of mathematical notation" (p. 6) immediately precedes three gross errors in the formulae which follow, viz.: