Superfreakonomics_ global cooling, patri - Steven D. Levitt [51]
Congress promptly passed the National Organ Transplant Act, which made it illegal “for any person to knowingly acquire, receive, or otherwise transfer any human organ for valuable consideration for use in human transplantation.”
Sure, a country like Iran might let people buy and sell human organs as if they were live chickens at a market. But surely the United States had neither the stomach nor the need for such a desperate maneuver. After all, some of the nation’s most brilliant academic researchers had scientifically established that human beings are altruistic by their very nature. Perhaps this altruism was just an ancient evolutionary leftover, like that second kidney. But who cared why it existed? The United States would lead the way, a light unto the nations, relying proudly on our innate altruism to procure enough donated kidneys to save tens of thousands of lives every year.
The Ultimatum and Dictator games inspired a boom in experimental economics, which in turn inspired a new subfield called behavioral economics. A blend of traditional economics and psychology, it sought to capture the elusive and often puzzling human motivations Gary Becker had been thinking about for decades.
With their experiments, behavioral economists continued to sully the reputation of Homo economicus. He was starting to look less self-interested every day—and if you had a problem with that conclusion, well, just look at the latest lab results on altruism, cooperation, and fairness.
One of the most prolific experimental economists among the new generation was a native of Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, named John List. He became an economist by accident and had a far less polished academic pedigree than his peers and elders. He came from a family of truckers. “My grandfather moved here from Germany, and he was a farmer,” List says. “Then he saw that truckers were making more money than he was just to take his grain to the mill, so he decided to sell everything and buy one truck.”
The Lists were a smart, hardworking, athletic family, but academics were not of paramount importance. John’s father started driving trucks when he was twelve, and John too was expected to join the family business. But he rebelled by going to college. This happened only because he earned a partial golf and academic scholarship to the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. During school breaks he’d help his father unload calf feed or haul a load of paper goods down to Chicago, three and a half hours away.
During golf practice at Stevens Point, List noticed a group of professors who had time to play golf just about every afternoon. They taught economics. That’s when List decided to become an economics professor too. (It helped that he liked the subject.)
For graduate school he chose the University of Wyoming. It was hardly a top-tier program, but even so he felt overmatched. On the first day, when students went around the classroom and gave a bit of personal background, List felt everyone staring at him when he said he’d graduated from Stevens Point. They had all gone to places like Columbia and the University of Virginia. He decided his only chance was to outwork them. Over the next few years, he wrote more papers and took more qualifying exams than anyone else—and, like many young economists, started to dabble with lab experiments.
When it was time to apply for a teaching job, List sent out 150 applications. The response was, shall we say, muted. He did land a job at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, where he took on a heavy teaching load and also coached the men’s and women’s waterskiing teams. He was a blue-collar