Since we didn’t gather donation data this year, in order to keep the survey shorter, we have to go back to data from earlier survey years.
In EAS 2020, we asked about current career (rather than career strategy). This is obviously appreciably different (and more vulnerable to just reflecting the fact that people in different current careers can afford to donate different amounts, rather than reflecting the different groups), but here are the results:
Here we can see that high donors are much more likely to be in for-profit (earning to give), though there is also a non-significant trend in the direction of higher donors being more likely to be in for-profit (not earning to give). A higher percentage of high donors also selected work at an EA non-profit (though the difference was small and not significant). Higher donors were less likely to select “still deciding what to pursue” and “building flexible career capital and will decide later” (compared to the lowest donors), but I imagine that this likely reflect these categories being more often selected by early career/student low-earning, low-donors.
In 2019, we asked a question which may be a more informative comparison to 2022, “If you had to guess, which broad career path(s) are you planning to follow?” (this may be somewhat less vulnerable to simply reflecting the fact that people currently in earning to give can currently donate more, but probably still reflects this to a significant degree).
Here the highest donors are more likely to select earning to give, and they are also less likely to select academia (than the lowest donors).
As with the original graphs, these differences are likely at least partly explained by other confounding variables (e.g. how long people have been in their career etc.). If we wanted to assess what is ultimately causing the differences, we’d need to examine a more complex model.
That said, while I think this is interesting, looking at total donations as an operationalization of engagement seems less informative, since although the existing measures may be slightly skewed against E2G people counting (themselves) as highly engaged (due to giving EA orgs and community buildings as exemplars of the highest level of engagement), total donations seems very skewed towards counting E2G people as highly engaged simply in virtue of them earning more than people in other roles (or people who are students/early career).
My guess is that either a more neutral measure of engagement (e.g. simple self-report of low to high engagement) or some more complex ideal measure of engagement would probably find that (rightly or wrongly) higher engagement is associated with higher interest in research / EA org research over earning to give. It’s possible that there’d be a different association with a good measure of EA dedication, which may be different from engagement (but that seems harder and more controversial to measure).
Thanks. I agree this is interesting to look at.
Since we didn’t gather donation data this year, in order to keep the survey shorter, we have to go back to data from earlier survey years.
In EAS 2020, we asked about current career (rather than career strategy). This is obviously appreciably different (and more vulnerable to just reflecting the fact that people in different current careers can afford to donate different amounts, rather than reflecting the different groups), but here are the results:
Here we can see that high donors are much more likely to be in for-profit (earning to give), though there is also a non-significant trend in the direction of higher donors being more likely to be in for-profit (not earning to give). A higher percentage of high donors also selected work at an EA non-profit (though the difference was small and not significant). Higher donors were less likely to select “still deciding what to pursue” and “building flexible career capital and will decide later” (compared to the lowest donors), but I imagine that this likely reflect these categories being more often selected by early career/student low-earning, low-donors.
In 2019, we asked a question which may be a more informative comparison to 2022, “If you had to guess, which broad career path(s) are you planning to follow?” (this may be somewhat less vulnerable to simply reflecting the fact that people currently in earning to give can currently donate more, but probably still reflects this to a significant degree).
Here the highest donors are more likely to select earning to give, and they are also less likely to select academia (than the lowest donors).
As with the original graphs, these differences are likely at least partly explained by other confounding variables (e.g. how long people have been in their career etc.). If we wanted to assess what is ultimately causing the differences, we’d need to examine a more complex model.
That said, while I think this is interesting, looking at total donations as an operationalization of engagement seems less informative, since although the existing measures may be slightly skewed against E2G people counting (themselves) as highly engaged (due to giving EA orgs and community buildings as exemplars of the highest level of engagement), total donations seems very skewed towards counting E2G people as highly engaged simply in virtue of them earning more than people in other roles (or people who are students/early career).
My guess is that either a more neutral measure of engagement (e.g. simple self-report of low to high engagement) or some more complex ideal measure of engagement would probably find that (rightly or wrongly) higher engagement is associated with higher interest in research / EA org research over earning to give. It’s possible that there’d be a different association with a good measure of EA dedication, which may be different from engagement (but that seems harder and more controversial to measure).
Wow, very detailed analysis, thank you!