I guess today, John List is an economics professor, a friend, and a colleague at the University

of Chicago.

And of all my peers, John is the one who has most greatly influenced the way I think about

the world.

So I took my knowledge from the baseball card market and said, look, I've been doing

these field experiments, I think we should do that rather than lab experiments.

And every professor at Wyoming basically said, if you want to use data from outside

the lab, do things like what Steve Levitt or Leashinfelter, Alan Krueger, and Josh

Angister doing, that's what people do who are doing empiricism, and I said no.

I think that we should be doing field experiments.

Welcome to People I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

The use of randomized experiments in economics has exploded in the last 25 years, and John

deserves more credit for that than anyone else.

But how he did it, that's the really remarkable thing, it's the story of a complete outsider,

a renegade thinker whose ideas and personality were so powerful that they couldn't be defeated.

If I was suspected that the fact that you had such a different set of interesting experiences

has contributed to the incredible originality that you brought to economics.

And your path has not been an easy one.

I mean, we're in a field in which pedigrees are extremely important.

Almost everyone teaching at the top economics departments has a resume filled with places

like Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, but when I look at your resume, I find University

of Wisconsin, Steven's point, University of Wyoming, the University of Central Florida.

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