John A List on The Voltage Effect. How to make good ideas great and great ideas scale

On September 24th, the World Bank Governance Global Practice Book Talks will welcome John A. List to presente his book, The Voltage Effect. How to make good ideas great and great ideas scale. The book argues that for an idea to have a widespread impact, it must achieve 'high voltage'-the ability to be replicated at scale. The book describes how 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.

About the Book

Be it a medical breakthrough, a policy initiative, a product innovation or a social movement, translating an idea into widespread impact depends on one thing only: whether it can be replicated at scale. "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. Scalability is critical to everything from expanding a small business, to narrowing the national achievement gap, to delivering billions of doses of a vaccine, to making a new technology widely affordable-and much more.

• Arturo Herrera Gutierrez

  Global Director for Governance Global Practice

  Arturo Herrera Gutierrez is the Global Director for Governance Global Practice in the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions Practice Group (EFI) Vice Presidency.

  Mr. Herrera, a Mexican National, has extensive experience in governance, as a practitioner and from the development and academic perspectives. He joined the World Bank in 2010 as Senior Public Sector Management Specialist in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. He held various positions in the Bank including as Sector Manager in LAC, Practice Manager in Governance Global Practice for the LAC and East Asia and the Pacific regions in the Global Unit before leaving the World Bank Group in 2018.

  Between 2018 and 2021 he has held leadership positions in the Government of Mexico as Co-Head of the Finance Team in Presidential Transition Team, Deputy Finance Minister and, most recently, as Minister of Finance and Public Credit.

  As Global Director for Governance, Mr. Herrera's priorities include leading the formulation of strategy and engagement of the Bank's work on public institutions and country-level governance, especially in fragile, conflict and violent settings; maximizing the effectiveness of operational support for public financial management and public procurement; fostering excellence in the Governance Practice's work on public sector administration and operational support for legal and judicial reforms.

  Mr. Herrera has also taught Monetary and Banking and Macro and Micro Economics at both El Colegio de Mexico and New York University where he completed his doctoral studies in Economics.

• John A. List

  Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

  John A. List is the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. His research includes over 200 peer-reviewed journal articles and several published textbooks. Previous to The Voltage Effect, he co-authored the international best seller, The Why Axis, in 2013. His research focuses on combining field experiments with economic theory to deepen our understanding of the economic science. In the early 1990s, List pioneered field experiments as a methodology for testing behavioral theories and learning about behavioral principles that are shared across different domains. To obtain data for his field experiments, List has made use of several different markets, including charitable fundraising activities, the sports trading card industry, the ride-share industry, and the education sector, to highlight a few. This has lead to collaborative work with several different schools and charities, as well as firms including: Lyft, Uber, United Airlines, Virgin Airlines, Humana, Sears, Kmart, Facebook, Google, General Motors, Tinder, Citadel, Walmart, and several non-profits. John was elected a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2015. List received the 2010 Kenneth Galbraith Award, the 2008 Arrow Prize for Senior Economists for his research in behavioral economics in the field, and was the 2012 Yrjo Jahnsson Lecture Prize recipient. He is a current Editor of the Journal of Political Economy.