I think there are essentially two different angles here: how good is the EA community at achieving its stated purpose, and how healthy are the members.
For the first one, how many people are donating at least 10% of their labour income is an obvious test. The extent to which EA research breaks new ground, vs going round in circles, would be another.
For the second presumably many standard measures of social dysfunction would be relevant—e.g. depression, crime, drug addiction, or unemployment. Conversely, we would also care about positive indicators, like professional success, having children, good family relationships, etc. However, you would presumably want to think about selection effects (does EA attract healthy people) vs treatment effects (does EA make people healthy). If we (hypothetically) made some people so depressed they rapidly drop out, our depression stats could look good, despite this being clearly bad!
Another issue is judging whether someone is a member of the community. A survey could be unrepresentative if it doesn’t reach enough people—or if it reaches only peripherally attached people.
Interesting question.
I think there are essentially two different angles here: how good is the EA community at achieving its stated purpose, and how healthy are the members.
For the first one, how many people are donating at least 10% of their labour income is an obvious test. The extent to which EA research breaks new ground, vs going round in circles, would be another.
For the second presumably many standard measures of social dysfunction would be relevant—e.g. depression, crime, drug addiction, or unemployment. Conversely, we would also care about positive indicators, like professional success, having children, good family relationships, etc. However, you would presumably want to think about selection effects (does EA attract healthy people) vs treatment effects (does EA make people healthy). If we (hypothetically) made some people so depressed they rapidly drop out, our depression stats could look good, despite this being clearly bad!
Another issue is judging whether someone is a member of the community. A survey could be unrepresentative if it doesn’t reach enough people—or if it reaches only peripherally attached people.
Some more ideas for metrics that might be useful for tracking ‘the health of the EA community’ (not sure whether they fit in the first category):
How much runway do EA orgs have?
How diverse is the ‘EA funding portfolio’? [EDIT: I’m referring here to the diversity of donors rather than the diversity of funding recipients.]