Josh Graff Zivin's Research Featured in Slate Magazine
Positive Black Swans
05/17/2011
Tim Harford,
Slate Magazine
Mario Capecchi's earliest memory is of German officers knocking on the door of his mother's chalet in the Italian Alps and arresting her. They sent her to a concentration camp, probably Dachau. Mario, who had been taught to speak both Italian and German, understood exactly what was being said by the SS officers. He was 3½.
Mario's mother, Lucy, was a poet and an antifascist campaigner who had refused to marry his abusive father, Luciano, an officer in Mussolini's air force. One can only imagine the scandal in prewar, Catholic, fascist Italy. Expecting trouble, Lucy had made preparations by selling many of her possessions and entrusting the proceeds to a local peasant family. When she disappeared, the family took Mario in. For a time he lived like an Italian farmer's son, learning rural life at an apron hem.
After a year, his mother's money appears to have run out. Mario left the village. He remembers a brief time living with his father and deciding he would rather live on the streets: "Amidst all of the horrors of war, perhaps the most difficult for me to accept as a child was having a father who was brutal to me." Luciano was killed shortly afterward in aerial combat.
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Josh Graff Zivin is Associate Professor of International Relations and Pacific Studies and Affiliated Faculty of Economics. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and Research Director for International Environmental and Health Studies at the Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC).
