Have you also analysed what countries have the highest percentage of EAs relative to their population?
You seem to focus mostly on total numbers—I’d be curious to see if the UK/US dominance is less pronounced when taking this into consideration. I’d be especially interested in which countries “punch above their weight[1]” (Switzerland?) and which do not (China? India?). This would also be interesting for smaller (cities) or bigger units of analysis (geographic regions).
Yes, we might do a separate post about EAs per capita across years. But, as we’ve commented previously, the metric risks being very noisy. So, when you are looking at the countries with the highest EAs per capita, within any single year, you will often see some smaller countries appear to be enormous over-performers, and then not the next, when there’s only 1 or 2 respondents difference either way.
For example, here are the countries in the top 10 across years, excluding the most recent year (this is from an earlier private report we did).
As you can see, there’s some consistency, but also a lot that would likely be misleading if you only looked within a given year’s data. Many of these countries go from literally ‘top 10 EAs per capita’ one year to 0 EAs the next.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that simply excluding smaller countries would be a valid approach. This would lose important data and potentially unfairly exclude smaller countries that are consistently over (or under) performing. And it would potentially distort the true relationship between different predictors and EAs per capita, when we’re trying to interpret the pattern of results.
Below, I’ve shown the rank-order correlations between EAs per capita across years, which are reasonably strong- there is some real consistency, as I noted above- but not amazing, as we see in my plot above.
I think, on the whole, simply looking at the highest EAs per capita countries within a given year is a risky endeavour for the reasons above, and it’s better to look at patterns across years and across the full range of countries.
Very interesting!
Have you also analysed what countries have the highest percentage of EAs relative to their population?
You seem to focus mostly on total numbers—I’d be curious to see if the UK/US dominance is less pronounced when taking this into consideration. I’d be especially interested in which countries “punch above their weight[1]” (Switzerland?) and which do not (China? India?). This would also be interesting for smaller (cities) or bigger units of analysis (geographic regions).
There might be a few outliers that are caused by extremely low population sizes but I still expect this to be useful data.
Thanks!
Yes, we might do a separate post about EAs per capita across years. But, as we’ve commented previously, the metric risks being very noisy. So, when you are looking at the countries with the highest EAs per capita, within any single year, you will often see some smaller countries appear to be enormous over-performers, and then not the next, when there’s only 1 or 2 respondents difference either way.
For example, here are the countries in the top 10 across years, excluding the most recent year (this is from an earlier private report we did).
As you can see, there’s some consistency, but also a lot that would likely be misleading if you only looked within a given year’s data. Many of these countries go from literally ‘top 10 EAs per capita’ one year to 0 EAs the next.
Seems like this should be solvable by just having some minimum number of EAs in that country to be included? Perhaps 5 or 10 or so.
I updated my previous sheet from that post with the new data. Here is 2024′s graph:
And here is the rank-order mapping from 2024:2022. Seems fairly stable!
(Countries in red were not listed in the 2022 data I have access to.)
Thanks Oscar!
Unfortunately, I don’t think that simply excluding smaller countries would be a valid approach. This would lose important data and potentially unfairly exclude smaller countries that are consistently over (or under) performing. And it would potentially distort the true relationship between different predictors and EAs per capita, when we’re trying to interpret the pattern of results.
Below, I’ve shown the rank-order correlations between EAs per capita across years, which are reasonably strong- there is some real consistency, as I noted above- but not amazing, as we see in my plot above.
I think, on the whole, simply looking at the highest EAs per capita countries within a given year is a risky endeavour for the reasons above, and it’s better to look at patterns across years and across the full range of countries.
Ah yes, this is sort of what I expected. Thanks for sharing!
My guess is Estonia looks particularly good by this metric (population just over 1 million but 1.9% of survey respondents)