EA Survey

Charitable donation (and earning-to-give) has been, and continues to be a prominent, prevalent, and impactful component of the Effective Altruism movement. The EA Survey has been distributed between 2014 and 2020, at roughly 15 month intervals. As a result, surveys were released at various points in the year, ranging from April to August, and no survey was released in 2016. In each survey we asked EAs about their charitable donations in the previous year, and their predicted donations for the year of the survey. Our work in this post/section reports on the 2020 survey (2019 giving), but our analysis extends to all the years of the EA survey.

There are 21 countries with 10 or more respondents - 17 of which are in North America, Europe, or Australasia. 92% of our respondents came from these countries. The percentage of respondents outside the top 5 countries has grown in recent years, from 22% in 2018, to 26% in 2019 and 31% in 2020. There are fewer EAs from the UK among those who joined EA more recently (in contrast to steady or growing numbers elsewhere). The largest numbers of the most highly engaged EAs come from the US (39%), followed by Europe (29%) and then the UK (21%) and the rest of the world (14%). The UK has the highest proportion of male EAs (78%), followed by the rest of Europe (73%), and then the US and the rest of the world (67-68%). Europe has the lowest average age of EAs (28.1 years), followed by the US (29.9), the UK (30.6), and then the rest of the world (31.2). Overall satisfaction with the EA community is lower in the US and UK than in other regions and countries.

In this post we describe people’s self-reported levels of engagement in EA, what activities related to effective altruism they have completed and their group membership. We also describe differences in these modes of engagement across groups (gender, race, age, time in EA etc.) and present a series of models looking at factors associated with higher engagement. This may help identify which groups are currently more engaged, which groups are likely to become more engaged and which factors may lead to EAs becoming more engaged.

We examine the cost of living in the cities with the largest numbers of EAs. Most cities with large EA populations are very expensive to live in. This may pose a barrier to EAs wishing to live and work in cities with lots of EAs

We estimate that 6.5-8.8% of EAs live in the San Francisco Bay Area and 5.3-7.3% live in London. Both are much larger than the next largest EA centre (New York). More EAs in our sample live in ‘Loxbridge’ (London, Oxford and Cambridge) than the SF Bay Area. The total percentage of EAs living in Loxbridge and the SF Bay Area combined is estimated to be between 14.5% and 19.5% (roughly 1-in-7 to 1-in-5). 50% of EAs live in the top 22 cities, 80% live in the top 100 cities out of 340 cities total. Almost a third (32%) of highly engaged EAs live in the SF Bay Area, London or Oxbridge. The share of EAs living outside the SF Bay Area, London or Oxbridge appears to be steadily growing with time.

It is uncertain how many people there in the EA community and what proportion of these the EA Survey manages to sample. We compare EA Survey numbers to other data sources and estimate that we sampled around 40% of highly engaged EAs, and fewer less engaged EAs. Based on this, we estimate there are around 2315 highly engaged EAs and 6500 (90% CI: 4700-10,000) active EAs in the community overall.

Not everyone who joins the effective altruism community stays around forever. Some people value drift, some people leave altogether, and some people continue to do EA-aligned things but choose to withdraw from the community. Better understanding how and why people leave EA is important for assessing our overall community health and impact, but getting reliable data on this can be very hard to do.

A majority of EAs feel that the EA movement is welcoming. New EAs rank the movement as more welcoming than long-time EAs. No statistically significant trends in welcomeness by race, education, or religion could be identified. Selection bias, where those who find the EA community particularly unwelcoming are systematically less likely to fill out the EA survey, makes it harder to properly interpret these results.

In this post we explore geographic differences in EA across the globe. A plurality of respondents reported being located in the United States (36.33%), followed by the UK (16.19%). It seems worthwhile to investigate if these populations are distinctly different from EAs elsewhere. This may help to point to causes or dynamics in the movement that are being missed to due to the dominance of these two nationalities.