This is a good idea. But to do this requires some heavy-duty questionnaire/survey science done by some heavy weight personae in that science - or lest we run into the usual bickering about the method used and the results gets discredited.
I can't muster enough interest in this to go beyond a mere graphing of my own observations and turning that into a blog post and the subsequent link whoring here.
If this is enough to inspire someone with more interest in this, then that's neat
BTW; How does your own observations compare to mine?
Yeah, I have too much going on to have real value trying to gain the expertise or assemble the people to do something like this, and honestly am not sure how to objectively quantify the variables. But saying that, a well done study would be invaluable to people coming out and looking at getting in to understand what has historically happened. What percentage of people doing what type of activity, staff, auditing, training, etc. stay in for what amount of time, how many drift off, how many are declared. There is some excellent raw and slightly processed data out there already, but it hasn't been compiled into a concise form, quite a large project already.
Your estimates seem to be plausible, but again, they miss concepts personally important to me in what I am looking at today. For example, you credit Scientology with helping you overcome certain fears, such as private speaking. It could well be that Communication drills and/or auditing or grades or whatever actually did help you over come. But did maturity help? or age? or was it a phase? Or simply getting into the business world and gradually building something ... did that gradual increase in scope of influence help too?
Positive, negative and neutral are too simplistic terms for me to accurately be interested in trying to duplicate. Lets take negative, is it negative because harm was done, and no good, and what type of harm. Or was it neutral in harm, just a waste of time, years and money ... making it negative. Were people less able to function in society after Scientology? Relationships? Children? Family? Again, neutral or positive, was this life itself, or were any gains appropriate to be assigned to participation with the philosophy?
I have seen people that were financially successful in Scientology because they got lucky or played follow the leader and rode on an economic bubble or anomaly, real estate boom for example, mortgages, title re-conveyance, things like that. When the market changed or crashed some were and others weren't able to find something else to do to make a good living, couldn't learn, couldn't adapt, failed miserably, and wound up out of Scientology because they no longer could pay. Other people manage to make lots of money for the bridge, but have lives in shambles.
Another factor I find fascinating right now is personal responsibility in success and failure. Does Scientology in fact remove personal responsibility, assigning responsibility to the organization or philosophy, or phenomena like PTS, case, BTs or whatever?
The whole subject, to me, is so complex as to make embrasive snapshots that are highly accurate or broad reaching very difficult, yet those coming out and society in general wants little snippets to grab onto.