John liszt is an economist at the university of chicago. He was inspired to think about scaling problems by a lot of research that he and other academics produce often fails to translate into the widespread gains they envisioned. The first secret is use incentives that can scale. This one uses a pair of incentives that most of us would like to avoid. We spent most of the first part of this episode talking about failures, so let's start getting into solutions.
In a new book called The Voltage Effect, the economist John List — who has already revolutionized how his profession does research — is trying to start a scaling revolution. In this installment of the Freakonomics Radio Book Club, List teaches us how to avoid false positives, how to know whether a given success is due to the chef or the ingredients, and how to practice “optimal quitting.”