I was surprised I couldn't find a graph like this already on the forum, so I made one and thought I would share it:
The data is from the 2022 EA survey,[1] and here is my sheet.
The main surprising thing to me is that English-speaking countries are less dominant than I expected, in this per capita framing. My vague sense was that the EA community was notably more popular in the Anglosphere than even in other rich countries, but eyeballing this data makes me think I was wrong: Northern/Western Europe seems to have quite comparable rates of EAs.
And what on earth is happening in Estonia? Perhaps some Estonian EAs can tell us all what you are doing that works so well!
- ^
Maybe there are quite different response rates by country, and this could explain some of the variance but I assume there isn't a large or systematic effect here.
This is great! I think the survey team didn't do a per capita visualisation because response rates will probably vary a lot between countries for reasons other than the number of EAs per capita.
To provide another data point, @Alix Pham from EA Switzerland put together a sheet with attendees per capita for EAG London this year and just now I made a quick chart.
Obviously, due to the location of the event, some countries will be over-represented and others under-represented, but I think it might be a more accurate representation of per capita rates in Europe (with the exception of the UK).
NB some of these countries have a very low number of attendees, e.g. Iceland only had one attendee. I made the below to visualise this.
Nice! Yes good idea to use EAG data - I wonder if it would interact with which countries have an EAGx of their own, e.g. are some people in Germany or Netherlands or wherever else less likely to come to EAG when they know they can go to a conference domestically later in the year? Perhaps it would only be a small effect.
I was fairly heavily involved in community building in Estonia until 2022, we also don't know what we did right, sorry. @RichardAnnilo is the guy who's mainly responsible for this is, what do you have to say for yourself?
I think this method of presenting the data makes the countries not present much less salient (e.g. Portugal, Denmark, Ireland) so there mere fact that there are a lot of countries in Europe means they will tend to fill up the chart. To test this hypothesis I think you'd want to compute a single % for continental europe to compare to a single Anglo number.
Estonia clearly a massive standout though!
I agree with that.
Also, notice that the top countries are pretty small. That may be because random factors/shocks may be more likely to push the average up or down for small countries. Cf:
The classic fact about variance in small populations, from the start of "thinking fast and slow". Love it!
True!
Of course if we had all the data we could run a fancier statistical test. I suppose my observation is limited to the fact that the English-speaking vs European ranges seem similar rather than e.g. all the Anglosphere countries being distinctly higher than all the European countries.
You could do a funnel type plot where your y-axis is EAs/capita and your x-axis is 1/sqrt(population), which is sort of what you'd expect the standard deviation to look like.
OK this is what we get, using the 25 EAs cutoff for the red line.
Yeah, I made a quick chart comparing anglosphere vs non-anglosphere
Nice, yes very different in this framing! Possibly the more interesting comparison to me would be not Anglosphere vs rest-of-world but rather Anglosphere vs Western Europe, or OECD countries or something. Also depending on how we compute the averages (country-scaled or population-weighted) results could be quite different.
I had the same thought! If I haven't messed something up:
Matches my impression, thanks for making the chart!
True, I don't have access to the raw data sadly, only to the data from the EA Survey forum post which has a minimum number of EAs cutoff.
You could produce conservative and aggressive versions by assuming either =0 or =(cutoff-1) for the missing values and then plot the range, maybe it will be tight.
sure, for e.g. China or any large-ish country this works, but as soon as population <1 million or so the range would be very wide - e.g. Iceland presumably has some EA presence but it would be strange to put it at the top without knowing the actual data. If I wanted to spend more time on this I think just asking for the raw data would be best (I am unsure if they would give it to me, and I haven't tried).
Estonia doesn’t surprise me. It’s very tech-heavy and EA skews heavily to tech people
Cool that you did this, Oscar! What made you make this?
It seems like, regarding EA engagement, there’s a significant impact in well-organized city groups in smaller countries, leading to a concentrated effect. I read up a bit on EA Estonia/Estonia as a result of this post (didn't know much about them before this!), and they’re a relatively small country with concentrated efforts in key urban centers (Tallinn, the capital; Tartu, a university city). The synergy between the two seems to have the potential to create a concentrated and cohesive national EA network. The idea of cohesive communities <> smaller countries makes sense too.
Also, I imagine smaller countries with single/few concentrated influential unis/intellectual hubs can lead to higher EA visibility/network cohesivity/potential EA engagement. E.g. Estonia with University of Tartu? New Zealand and University of Auckland? Switzerland and ETH Zurich? Norway and University of Oslo? (People with more knowledge here, please correct me if I'm wrong!)
FWIW I think the Norwegian main talent pipeline is from Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), e.g. see this post, rather than University of Oslo. The community there has been going strong there for 10 years.
Yeah this sounds right to me -- I suspect in many cases a high number will be a result of a few awesome and motivated organizers in that particular country.
If I was on the CEA community-building team, I would be using data to try and identify top local EA organizers, then interview them and try to figure out what they are doing which works so well, then put together a guide based on that.
Thanks, I just found myself thinking 'Australia seems to be a large net exporter of EAs', being in that category myself, so then went looking for data on where EAs are from or live now. That's a reasonable hypothesis, and is perhaps consistent with the fact that there is more variance in EA-ness of smaller countries. I am guessing there isn't a particularly deep reason Estonia has more EAs than Latvia and Lithuania, for instance, and just for historically contingent reasons there happened to be some good organisers in Estonia a while ago? Overall I suppose I don't want to infer too much from this data, but indeed it is interesting to theorise, we would just need more/better information to test various explanatory hypotheses.
Ah okie cool, and yeah for sure!
My sense is that what's happening here is that small countries have more cohesive communities, and therefore a larger % of the EA community answers the survey.
I don't think one can infer that without having the whole distribution across different countries. It may just be that small countries have greater variance. (Though I don't know what principle the author used for excluding certain countries.)
Another point regarding small countries. Imagine, hypothetically, that EA Estonia and EA Poland are on an identical membership growth curve. Perhaps EAGx attendance is about the same, and is growing at a rate of, say, 10% per year in both countries. Intuitively that could suggest comparable levels of cultural affinity for EA. However, since Poland has a population which is 28x as large, it ends up looking very different in OP's chart.
Speaking of growth, it would be interesting to see a plot for percent annual growth by country as well. Would Estonia's growth number be high, indicating cultural affinity? Or would its growth number be low, indicating saturation?
Perhaps the reason the Anglosphere has so many EAs is just because so many EA materials are in English. Might be interesting to compare the early growth curve in Anglosphere countries vs emerging EA countries. It would be super cool if we are on track to become a more global movement!