Book: The Voltage Effect, by John List

 List, John. 2022. The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. Currency.

This is another one of those books by people I know. John and I overlapped for a time at the University of Maryland in the early noughties, when I was in the regular economics department and he was in the Agricultural and Resource Economics department. We had a handful of quite enjoyable lunches during that time. Once I got to Michigan it was on my to-do list to try and recruit him there, but Chicago hired him before I had a chance to reach out. 

The book mashes up a memoir with discussion of some of John's work as an economist both academic and professional. I found the parts I knew the least about the most engaging, namely the origin story about how John ended up as an economist and his contributions to the various private firms for which he labored along the way. John frames all of the stories in terms of various economic and business concepts and thus as lessons illustrated or sometimes lessons learned. At the end of it all, just when (or if) John sleeps remains unclear.

If you think you would like it, you will.

I won a free signed copy of the book via a raffle sponsored by the BFI (= Becker Friedman Institute or Big Frigging Institute, as you like).