Limits to Scalability – Voltage Drops

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Scalability – Voltage Drops

Voltage Drop is a useful term and analogy to the problems of scaling ideas or change in any environment. Voltage drop refers to how electrical current can decrease across distance it travels. Obviously, something we want to avoid – so if applied to ideas or change it means that the potency of this decreases the further it travels. This would be in contrast to it magnifying or increasing like a virus – the well-known effect of going viral.

If we imagine an electrical circuit and this branching off into the distance and at each branch the current becomes weaker and as the distance increase it also becomes weaker. This is a voltage drop. The concept of voltage drop was proposed in this form by John A. List in his 2022 book The Voltage Effect.

In summary he proposes five main reasons for voltage drops and we have expanded these (to clearly separate some concepts):

1. False positives: The inference problem
2. Representativeness of the population
3. Representativeness of the situation
4. Unintended consequences and negative spillovers
5. The supply side of scaling
6. The Equilibrium Effect

© leading brains 2022

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