John List, Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, first came to the University of Chicago in 2003 to give a lecture about his research on discrimination. It was a talk he had given at numerous other institutions to great acclaim, so List was mildly surprised when a man wearing a hospital gown came into the seminar room and asked a question List had never heard before. The man continued asking tough questions until the end of the lecture. List departed thinking his talk had been a failure.
Later he received an email from UChicago economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker, AM’53, PhD’55, telling List how much he had enjoyed it. Becker had read List’s paper in advance and, in the final phases of cancer treatment, checked himself out of the hospital to attend. Partly because of that experience, when List was offered a job at UChicago in 2005, “it was a really easy decision,” he says.
List is best known for his use of field experiments in his research: these are real-world experiments, often involving massive datasets. If you have voted in one of the last two presidential elections, taken an Uber or Lyft in the last decade, flown United Airlines, or used Facebook or Instagram, “you’ve been one of my experimental subjects,” List says. “The world is my lab.”
The world is my lab
His books for popular audiences include The Why Axis: Hidden Motives and the Undiscovered Economics of Everyday Life (2013, coauthored with Uri Gneezy), which details field experiments in education, government policy, corporate social responsibility, and more, and The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale (2022), about the challenges of scaling (expanding or spreading) small, innovative programs. “Scalable ideas are all alike,” List writes, while “every unscalable idea is unscalable in its own way.”
List is a passionate advocate for the value of “thinking like an economist,” as he phrases it. In 2017 he and Steven Levitt, William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, codesigned a popular College course for nonmajors called Economics for Everyone. A free video version of the course aimed at high school students followed in 2024; the lectures are available in Spanish as well as English. List was also one of the driving forces behind the business economics major at UChicago. Launched in 2018, it is now one of the most popular majors in the College.
In addition to his teaching at UChicago, List serves as chief economist at Walmart, a company with 2.1 million employees globally: “The largest private employer in the world,” he says. “So now I have a good sandbox in labor economics.”
At Walmart he is part of Project Gigaton, which is focused on reducing CO2 emissions from the company’s supply chain by 2030. Walmart’s supply chain emits about a gigaton of CO2 per year, List says, while the entire US economy emits six. If List can help such a large company make substantial cuts to its CO2 emissions, “we can take a big bite out of the climate change problem,” he says. “That’s a project I’m very proud of.”