John August List

He was born in Madison on September 25, 1968, and raised in Sun Prairie, the son of a truck driver and a secretary. He cut grass and shoveled snow for a dollar or two, walked to the PDQ for gum and cards, and by the mid-1980s was buying, selling, and testing pitches at weekend card shows. He graduated from Sun Prairie High School in 1987, went to UW–Stevens Point on a partial golf scholarship, discovered he would not make the Tour, and discovered economics instead.

A University of Wyoming Ph.D. in 1996 led to posts at Central Florida, Arizona, and Maryland, and, since 2005, the University of Chicago. He pioneered randomized trials in actual markets—work George Akerlof and others have called revolutionary—served as a senior economist on President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers in 2002–03, and later became the first chief economist at Uber, then held the same role at Lyft and Walmart, turning millions of real trips into data.

He still tells the card-table story. Textbooks in 1987 said you could not run a clean experiment in the messy world; the Sun Prairie kid kept doing it anyway. Madison is the birthplace; Sun Prairie is the raise and the high school.