Psychology & Counseling
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The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A leading economist answers one of today's trickiest questions: Why do some great ideas make it big while others fail to take off?
"Brilliant, practical, and grounded in the very latest research, this is by far the best book I've ever read on the how and why of scaling."-Angela Duckworth, CEO of Character Lab and New York Times bestselling author of Grit
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022-Men's Journal
"Scale" has become a favored buzzword in the startup world. But scale isn't just about accumulating more users or capturing more market share. It's about whether an idea that takes hold in a small group can do the same in a much larger one-whether you're growing a small business, rolling out a diversity and inclusion program, or delivering billions of doses of a vaccine.
Translating an idea into widespread impact, says University of Chicago economist John A. List, depends on one thing only: whether it can achieve "high voltage"-the ability to be replicated at scale.
In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains. You'll learn:
• How celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expanded his restaurant empire by focusing on scalable "ingredients" (until it collapsed because talent doesn't scale)
• Why the failure to detect false positives early on caused the Reagan-era drug-prevention program to backfire at scale
• How governments could deliver more services to more citizens if they focused on the last dollar spent
• How one education center leveraged positive spillovers to narrow the achievement gap across the entire community
• Why the right set of incentives, applied at scale, can boost voter turnout, increase clean energy use, encourage patients to consistently take their prescribed medication, and more.
By understanding the science of scaling, we can drive change in our schools, workplaces, communities, and society at large. Because a better world can only be built at scale.
"Brilliant, practical, and grounded in the very latest research, this is by far the best book I've ever read on the how and why of scaling."-Angela Duckworth, CEO of Character Lab and New York Times bestselling author of Grit
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022-Men's Journal
"Scale" has become a favored buzzword in the startup world. But scale isn't just about accumulating more users or capturing more market share. It's about whether an idea that takes hold in a small group can do the same in a much larger one-whether you're growing a small business, rolling out a diversity and inclusion program, or delivering billions of doses of a vaccine.
Translating an idea into widespread impact, says University of Chicago economist John A. List, depends on one thing only: whether it can achieve "high voltage"-the ability to be replicated at scale.
In The Voltage Effect, List explains that scalable ideas share a common set of attributes, while any number of attributes can doom an unscalable idea. Drawing on his original research, as well as fascinating examples from the realms of business, policymaking, education, and public health, he identifies five measurable vital signs that a scalable idea must possess, and offers proven strategies for avoiding voltage drops and engineering voltage gains. You'll learn:
• How celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expanded his restaurant empire by focusing on scalable "ingredients" (until it collapsed because talent doesn't scale)
• Why the failure to detect false positives early on caused the Reagan-era drug-prevention program to backfire at scale
• How governments could deliver more services to more citizens if they focused on the last dollar spent
• How one education center leveraged positive spillovers to narrow the achievement gap across the entire community
• Why the right set of incentives, applied at scale, can boost voter turnout, increase clean energy use, encourage patients to consistently take their prescribed medication, and more.
By understanding the science of scaling, we can drive change in our schools, workplaces, communities, and society at large. Because a better world can only be built at scale.
Editorial Reviews
Part One
CAN YOUR IDEA SCALE?
1
Dupers and False Positives
On September 14, 1986, First Lady Nancy Reagan appeared on national television to address the nation from the West Sitting Hall of the White House. She sat on a sofa next to her husband, President Ronald Reagan, and gazed into the camera. "Today there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country and no one is safe from it," she said. "Not you, not me, and certainly not our children."
This broadcast was the culmination of all the traveling the First Lady had done over the preceding five years to raise awareness among American youth about the dangers of drug use. She had become the public face of the preventative side of President Reagan's War on Drugs, and her message hinged on a catchphrase that millions of people still remember, which she employed once again that evening on television. "Not long ago, in Oakland, California," Nancy Reagan told viewers, "I was asked by a group of children what to do if they were offered drugs. And I answered, ‘Just say no.' "
Although there are different accounts of where this infamous slogan originated-with an academic study, an advertising agency, or the First Lady herself-its "stickiness," to use the parlance of marketing, was undeniable. The phrase appeared on billboards, in pop songs, and on television shows; school clubs took it as a name. And in the popular imagination it became inseparable from what government and law enforcement officials saw as the crown jewel of the Reagan-era drug prevention campaign: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E.
In 1983, Los Angeles chief of police Daryl Gates announced a shift in his department's approach to the War on Drugs: instead of busting kids in possession of illegal substances, the new focus would be on preventing those drugs from getting into their hands in the first place. This was how D.A.R.E., with its iconic logo of red letters set against a black background, was born.
D.A.R.E. was an educational program built on a theory from psychology called social inoculation, which took from epidemiology the concept of vaccination-administering a small dose of an infectious agent to induce immunity-and applied it to human behavior. The approach of the program was to bring uniformed officers into schools, where they would use role-playing and other educational techniques to inoculate kids against the temptations of drugs. It certainly sounded like a great idea, and the early research on D.A.R.E. was encouraging. As a result, the government opened its taxpayer-funded faucet, and soon the program was scaled up in middle schools and high schools across the country. Over the next twenty-four years, 43 million children from over forty countries would graduate from D.A.R.E.
There w...
CAN YOUR IDEA SCALE?
1
Dupers and False Positives
On September 14, 1986, First Lady Nancy Reagan appeared on national television to address the nation from the West Sitting Hall of the White House. She sat on a sofa next to her husband, President Ronald Reagan, and gazed into the camera. "Today there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country and no one is safe from it," she said. "Not you, not me, and certainly not our children."
This broadcast was the culmination of all the traveling the First Lady had done over the preceding five years to raise awareness among American youth about the dangers of drug use. She had become the public face of the preventative side of President Reagan's War on Drugs, and her message hinged on a catchphrase that millions of people still remember, which she employed once again that evening on television. "Not long ago, in Oakland, California," Nancy Reagan told viewers, "I was asked by a group of children what to do if they were offered drugs. And I answered, ‘Just say no.' "
Although there are different accounts of where this infamous slogan originated-with an academic study, an advertising agency, or the First Lady herself-its "stickiness," to use the parlance of marketing, was undeniable. The phrase appeared on billboards, in pop songs, and on television shows; school clubs took it as a name. And in the popular imagination it became inseparable from what government and law enforcement officials saw as the crown jewel of the Reagan-era drug prevention campaign: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E.
In 1983, Los Angeles chief of police Daryl Gates announced a shift in his department's approach to the War on Drugs: instead of busting kids in possession of illegal substances, the new focus would be on preventing those drugs from getting into their hands in the first place. This was how D.A.R.E., with its iconic logo of red letters set against a black background, was born.
D.A.R.E. was an educational program built on a theory from psychology called social inoculation, which took from epidemiology the concept of vaccination-administering a small dose of an infectious agent to induce immunity-and applied it to human behavior. The approach of the program was to bring uniformed officers into schools, where they would use role-playing and other educational techniques to inoculate kids against the temptations of drugs. It certainly sounded like a great idea, and the early research on D.A.R.E. was encouraging. As a result, the government opened its taxpayer-funded faucet, and soon the program was scaled up in middle schools and high schools across the country. Over the next twenty-four years, 43 million children from over forty countries would graduate from D.A.R.E.
There w...
Readers Top Reviews
ChasmaniaArtMaven
Regardless if you are just a student of human behavior or a business owner hoping to grow your company this book is difficult to put down. It will soon be required reading for "how to" and "how not to" scale your ideas.
EconomistChasmani
This book is very comprehensive in thinking very carefully about why companies and governments should think about the problems with scaling successful initiatives. List is an extraordinary economist, and his interesting case studies really shine through in his writing. The last section really hit home for me. Organizations need an internal culture of scientifically experimenting and scaling. Every manager and C-suite exec should read this book!
ToddEconomistChas
Lots of commonsense ideas from the author around how to scale and the pitfalls to avoid when you are trying to scale. Most I have heard about before so a little bit of rehash of other ideas. Lots of it is built off of Kahneman's and Tversky's work. His idea on optimal quitting was new to me and made a lot of sense. I thought his stories were far reaching and added interest to the points he was trying to make and in whole, it was a good background book on how to scale ideas. Probably could have been a little shorter but nonetheless, a pretty quick read.
Richard StartzTod
First off, the is just a fun read. It's so well-written and makes its points by telling stories. And while you can pick up some economics here, that's just a side effect. There ain't no "widgets," everything is illustrated with real-world experiences (and then sometimes List tells us that there happens to be an economics term for what we've just learned.) Useful for anyone who wants to run a business or make policy or raise money for the local neighborhood kids baseball team!!!
RohenRichard Star
This book is the culmination of the journey of one of the world's most prolific economists, who also happens to be one of the world's best economics teachers. Not only does the book draw on well-executed academic studies to support its claims, but it also teaches through stories from the real world that are entertaining and addicting to read. Whether you are an entrepreneur looking to scale your startup, a policymaker hoping to implement far and wide, or a student who wants to learn more about what to do (and not do) to make the world a better place, there is something in this book for you. -Rohen Shah, Former CEO of DiagKNOWstics Learning
Short Excerpt Teaser
Part One
CAN YOUR IDEA SCALE?
1
Dupers and False Positives
On September 14, 1986, First Lady Nancy Reagan appeared on national television to address the nation from the West Sitting Hall of the White House. She sat on a sofa next to her husband, President Ronald Reagan, and gazed into the camera. "Today there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country and no one is safe from it," she said. "Not you, not me, and certainly not our children."
This broadcast was the culmination of all the traveling the First Lady had done over the preceding five years to raise awareness among American youth about the dangers of drug use. She had become the public face of the preventative side of President Reagan's War on Drugs, and her message hinged on a catchphrase that millions of people still remember, which she employed once again that evening on television. "Not long ago, in Oakland, California," Nancy Reagan told viewers, "I was asked by a group of children what to do if they were offered drugs. And I answered, ‘Just say no.' "
Although there are different accounts of where this infamous slogan originated-with an academic study, an advertising agency, or the First Lady herself-its "stickiness," to use the parlance of marketing, was undeniable. The phrase appeared on billboards, in pop songs, and on television shows; school clubs took it as a name. And in the popular imagination it became inseparable from what government and law enforcement officials saw as the crown jewel of the Reagan-era drug prevention campaign: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E.
In 1983, Los Angeles chief of police Daryl Gates announced a shift in his department's approach to the War on Drugs: instead of busting kids in possession of illegal substances, the new focus would be on preventing those drugs from getting into their hands in the first place. This was how D.A.R.E., with its iconic logo of red letters set against a black background, was born.
D.A.R.E. was an educational program built on a theory from psychology called social inoculation, which took from epidemiology the concept of vaccination-administering a small dose of an infectious agent to induce immunity-and applied it to human behavior. The approach of the program was to bring uniformed officers into schools, where they would use role-playing and other educational techniques to inoculate kids against the temptations of drugs. It certainly sounded like a great idea, and the early research on D.A.R.E. was encouraging. As a result, the government opened its taxpayer-funded faucet, and soon the program was scaled up in middle schools and high schools across the country. Over the next twenty-four years, 43 million children from over forty countries would graduate from D.A.R.E.
There was only one problem: D.A.R.E. didn't actually work.
In the decades since Nancy Reagan urged the nation's youth to "just say no" to drugs, numerous studies have demonstrated that D.A.R.E. did not in fact persuade kids to just say no. It provided children with a great deal of information about drugs such as marijuana and alcohol, but it failed to produce statistically significant reductions in drug use when these same kids were presented with opportunities to use them. One study even found that the program spurred participants' curiosity about drugs and increased the likelihood of experimentation.
It is hard to overstate the cost of D.A.R.E.'s voltage drop at scale. For years, the program consumed the time and effort of thousands of teachers and law enforcement officers who were deeply invested in the well-being of our greatest natural resource: future generations. Yet all of this hard work and time, never mind taxpayer dollars, was wasted on scaling D.A.R.E. because of a fundamentally erroneous premise. Worse, it diverted support and resources away from other initiatives that might have yielded real results. Why D.A.R.E. became the disaster that it did is a textbook example of the first pitfall everyone hoping to scale an idea or enterprise must avoid: a false positive.
The Truth About False Positives
A first truth about false positives is that they can be considered as "lies," or "false alarms." At the most basic level, a false positive occurs when you interpret some piece of evidence or data as proof that something is true when in fact it isn't. For example, when I visited a high-tech plant in China that produced headsets, if a headset working properly got marked as defective due to human error, that was a false positive. When I was called for jury duty, a false positive would have occurred had we determined that an innocent suspect was guilty. False positives also show up in medicine, a phenomenon that gained attention during the...
CAN YOUR IDEA SCALE?
1
Dupers and False Positives
On September 14, 1986, First Lady Nancy Reagan appeared on national television to address the nation from the West Sitting Hall of the White House. She sat on a sofa next to her husband, President Ronald Reagan, and gazed into the camera. "Today there's a drug and alcohol abuse epidemic in this country and no one is safe from it," she said. "Not you, not me, and certainly not our children."
This broadcast was the culmination of all the traveling the First Lady had done over the preceding five years to raise awareness among American youth about the dangers of drug use. She had become the public face of the preventative side of President Reagan's War on Drugs, and her message hinged on a catchphrase that millions of people still remember, which she employed once again that evening on television. "Not long ago, in Oakland, California," Nancy Reagan told viewers, "I was asked by a group of children what to do if they were offered drugs. And I answered, ‘Just say no.' "
Although there are different accounts of where this infamous slogan originated-with an academic study, an advertising agency, or the First Lady herself-its "stickiness," to use the parlance of marketing, was undeniable. The phrase appeared on billboards, in pop songs, and on television shows; school clubs took it as a name. And in the popular imagination it became inseparable from what government and law enforcement officials saw as the crown jewel of the Reagan-era drug prevention campaign: Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or D.A.R.E.
In 1983, Los Angeles chief of police Daryl Gates announced a shift in his department's approach to the War on Drugs: instead of busting kids in possession of illegal substances, the new focus would be on preventing those drugs from getting into their hands in the first place. This was how D.A.R.E., with its iconic logo of red letters set against a black background, was born.
D.A.R.E. was an educational program built on a theory from psychology called social inoculation, which took from epidemiology the concept of vaccination-administering a small dose of an infectious agent to induce immunity-and applied it to human behavior. The approach of the program was to bring uniformed officers into schools, where they would use role-playing and other educational techniques to inoculate kids against the temptations of drugs. It certainly sounded like a great idea, and the early research on D.A.R.E. was encouraging. As a result, the government opened its taxpayer-funded faucet, and soon the program was scaled up in middle schools and high schools across the country. Over the next twenty-four years, 43 million children from over forty countries would graduate from D.A.R.E.
There was only one problem: D.A.R.E. didn't actually work.
In the decades since Nancy Reagan urged the nation's youth to "just say no" to drugs, numerous studies have demonstrated that D.A.R.E. did not in fact persuade kids to just say no. It provided children with a great deal of information about drugs such as marijuana and alcohol, but it failed to produce statistically significant reductions in drug use when these same kids were presented with opportunities to use them. One study even found that the program spurred participants' curiosity about drugs and increased the likelihood of experimentation.
It is hard to overstate the cost of D.A.R.E.'s voltage drop at scale. For years, the program consumed the time and effort of thousands of teachers and law enforcement officers who were deeply invested in the well-being of our greatest natural resource: future generations. Yet all of this hard work and time, never mind taxpayer dollars, was wasted on scaling D.A.R.E. because of a fundamentally erroneous premise. Worse, it diverted support and resources away from other initiatives that might have yielded real results. Why D.A.R.E. became the disaster that it did is a textbook example of the first pitfall everyone hoping to scale an idea or enterprise must avoid: a false positive.
The Truth About False Positives
A first truth about false positives is that they can be considered as "lies," or "false alarms." At the most basic level, a false positive occurs when you interpret some piece of evidence or data as proof that something is true when in fact it isn't. For example, when I visited a high-tech plant in China that produced headsets, if a headset working properly got marked as defective due to human error, that was a false positive. When I was called for jury duty, a false positive would have occurred had we determined that an innocent suspect was guilty. False positives also show up in medicine, a phenomenon that gained attention during the...
