Great Performance !

Levitt found that the support at the University of Chicago went beyond the scholarly. The year after he was hired, his wife gave birth to their first child, Andrew. One day, just after Andrew turned a year old, he came down with a slight fever. The doctor diagnosed an ear infection. When he started vomiting the next morning, his parents took him to the hospital. By the following day he was dead of pneumococcal meningitis.

Amidst the shock and grief, Levitt had an undergraduate class that needed teaching. It was Gary Becker—a Nobel laureate nearing his seventieth birthday—who sat in for him. Another colleague, D. Gale Johnson, sent a condolence card that so moved Levitt that he can still cite it from memory.

Levitt and Johnson, an agricultural economist in his eighties, began talking regularly. Levitt learned that Johnson’s daughter was one of the first Americans to adopt a daughter from China. Soon the Levitts began proceedings to do the same, a girl they named Amanda. In addition to Amanda, they have since had a daughter, now three, and a son, nearly one year old. But Andrew’s death has played on, in various ways. The Levitts have become close friends with the family of the little girl to whom they donated Andrew’s liver. (They also donated his heart, but that baby died.) And, not surprisingly for a scholar who pursues real-life subjects, the death also informed Levitt’s work.

He and Jeannette had joined a support group for grieving parents. Levitt was struck by how many children had drowned in swimming pools. They were the kind of deaths that don’t make the newspaper—unlike, for instance, a child who dies while playing with a gun.

Levitt got curious, and went looking for numbers that would tell the story. He wrote up the results as an OpEd for the Chicago Sun-Times. It featured the sort of plangent counterintuition for which he has become famous: “If you both own a gun and have a swimming pool in the backyard, the swimming pool is about 100 times more likely to kill a child than the gun is.”

—THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, AUGUST 3, 2003

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Taken From : FREAKONOMICS - A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything