It seems to me that younger people/students (<40 years) are overrepresented in EA circles. Older people (40 and over) may be overlooked. Is this true? If so, how can this be changed?
My assumption is that there may be a significant untapped potential for positive impact within/from the more senior (possibly especially near-retirement age and over) segments of the population of the Netherlands, where I am based, but elsewhere in the world, too. For instance in the form of:
- A group of people with great expertise, who would like to remain active post-retirement, and who desire to make a positive impact. These people could be great mentors, helpers, or even initiators of new, effective, impactful organizations; possible new career EAs.
- A possible surplus of funds/means/time held onto by people who may be willing to donate to causes if the causes are deemed worthy, i.e. effective; they are possible new donors.
Would you say assumptions are right or wrong? Why? How should I go about testing them? If my assumptions are correct, is it possible to reach these people, for instance through intro courses or workshops? Have other people played with this idea before? Questions have been asked in a similar thinking direction, yet they have not entirely touched upon this.
For a possible experiment, I would let myself be inspired by the work that CEA, GWWC, and the Tien Procent Club have done. My working title for this is Senior Impact Society. I would love to hear your opinion on this!
Yes, older people are somewhat overlooked. While there are some efforts to reach out to specific older individuals or to certain types/categories of older people (such as very high net worth individuals or family offices), in general people who discover EA after university are discovering EA 'on their own,' not through the types of more formalized 'recruitment efforts' that happen at some universities. I do think that there is a lot of experience and knowledge that we are missing out on.
While I do see the downsides of this, I don't necessarily think that it is the wrong choice. It might be; I'm not sure. Setting aside by own biases in favor of older people, a few things strike me as pragmatic reasons to deprioritize/overlook older people to some extent.[1]
So while I don't like it very much, I do think there are pretty understandable factors that make this a reasonable decision. But if you could get a GWWC style advertisement in the AARP magazine to convince senior citizens to funnel their charity dollars toward more impactful charity and to spend some of their free time mentoring junior people, I'd be a fan. I'd love to see EA meetups where most of the people are ages 30 to 60, and where we can all be at home in in bed before 10pm.[3]
Although we could certainly discuss to what extend would be ideal. Maybe devoting 30% of community building efforts/resources to older wouldn't be a good choice, but what about 0.5%, or what about 3%? I don't have an answer for this. I haven't done the thinking nor the number crunching to figure out what makes sense.
I think of paved roads as an analogy: my grandparents lived in a rural area with no paved roads. The road they lived on was dirt and gravel. They got electricity and plumbing later than most other places, too. The local government decided it simply wasn't worth it to spend all that money and effort to pave one or two miles of road for so few people. Those resources could be better spent elsewhere.
For anyone not familiar, there is a stereotype/cliché of older people going to sleep early, and I'm sort of teasing about that.
Thanks for your perspective! Yes for being home in bed by 10 PM, haha! I'd still love to find the exceptions to your (justified) generalizations on old people, so if you'd like, I can keep you in the loop on possible developments surrounding my experiment/test run.