A witty politician once said, "The world belongs to the old. The young ones just look better." He had a point. Power, seniority, and influence tend to come with age. Walking around the conference halls this February at EAG Global in the Bay Area, the average age seemed to be in the mid-20s or so. While youthfulness has its benefits, such as fewer family or career commitments, openness to pivoting occupation, and potentially more time for volunteering, I believe we miss out on the power, wisdom, and diversity that older participants could bring. Even people in their mid-late 40s appeared quite rare at the conference.
Why is it important to have age diversity and more older participants?
- Power and Influence: Leaders and managers are typically older than their employees. The median age in the U.S. House of Representatives is around 58. Baby Boomers (now mostly in their 60s and 70s) hold about 50% of America's wealth. I assume similar trends apply globally.
- Experience and Wisdom: Older individuals bring experience gained through years of trial and error.
- Diversity of opinions, perspectives and priorities naturally evolve with age.
The Effective Altruism movement remains notably youthful. According to the EA Survey 2020, participants had a median age of 27 (mean 29).
Why is our movement, after being around for ~15 years (depending on how you count), less appealing to older participants?
How can Effective Altruism become more attractive to older demographics?
I agree this is a potential concern.
As it happens, since 2020, the community has continued to age. As of the end of last year, it's median 31, mean 22.4, and we can see that it has steadily aged across years.
It's clear that a key contributor to our age distribution is the age at which people first get involved with EA, which is median 24, mean 26.7, but the age at which people first get involved has also increased over time.
I think people sometimes point to our outreach focusing on things like university groups to explain this pattern. But I think this is likely over-stated, as this accounts for only a small minority of our recruiting, and most of the ways people first hear about EA seems to be more passive mechanisms, not tied to direct outreach, which would be accessible to people at older ages (we'll discuss this in more detail in the 2024 iteration of this post).
That said, different age ranges do appear to have different levels of awareness of EA, with highest awareness seeming to be at the 25-34 or 35-44 age ranges. (Though our sample size is large, the number of people who we count as aware of EA are very low, so you can see these estimates are quite uncertain. Our confidence in these estimates will increase as we run more surveys). This suggests that awareness of EA may be reaching different groups unevenly, which could partly contribute to lower engagement from older age groups. But this need not be the result of differences in our outreach. It could result from different levels of interest from the different groups.
Nice! By the way, I really appreciate how consistently your team helps ground discussions like this in data. I opened this post and as I was scrolling through, I thought, "oh I bet David has already responded with something helpful." It's a great public service!