Hello Adam Smith, Hello John Nash (A Love Letter from Camp)

Teaching economic theory and lessons in courtship in between fishing and fire making.

For several summers, I lifeguarded at the local pool, but for the summer of my junior year, I was determined to ditch the park district teen gig for a corporate grown-up internship. I desired a job that would put my in-progress economics degree to good use. It was time I translated economic theory from the classroom to the real-world. It wasn’t easy, but after countless applications, interviews, and rejections, I finally landed an internship at a non-profit as the director of strategic operations and customer success, more colloquially known as a camp counselor.

Yes, the job would not be as glamorous (or profitable) as the Wall Street internships my fellow econ classmates had secured. Still, I hoped I could pick up a few accomplishments to fill out my relatively brief resume.

I had never set foot at Camp Tannadoonah before agreeing to spend ten weeks there. My first impression of the southwest Michigan site was that I had stumbled upon the set of a low budget rip-off of Friday the 13^th. It was mine and the other counselors’ job to spruce up the camp before the kids arrived so the place was less “slasher” and more “kumbaya”.

During that pre-week, I realized that I would have been much better off trading in some of those micro and macro-economic classes for basic home economic classes.

I was a useless landscaper, a pathetic arts and crafter, and a black hole of ineptitude when handed the simplest of tools. One time the counselors found me struggling for hours to drill a screw into a signpost. I complained that the power drill was broken. To my surprise, the drill had a reverse function. The only utility I provided was a laugh for the other counselors who were either life-long campers or good ol’ boys from Indiana who could take apart my car and put it back together faster than I could open the hood.

Once campers finally arrived, the camp was beautiful and welcoming, no thanks to me. I felt very anxious that the campers would sniff me out as the weak link. I wanted to be liked and figured I had an ace up my sleeve. Due to the camp’s proximity to South Bend, most campers revered Notre Dame, and I was the only Domer counselor. As I helped campers find their cabin, I called out a boy’s ND football shirt.

“You know, I go to Notre Dame,” I said with all the smugness a true Domer could muster.

“Cool, do you play football?”

Me? Play collegiate D1 football? Had the five-minute detox from their screens already made their eyesight go haywire?

“No, I don’t play football.”

“What sport do you play?”

“I don’t play any sport.”

“So…” the campers asked with all the disdain only preteens can muster “…what are you?”

“I’m a student.”

That was the wrong answer. Who knew that kids don’t care about your game theory or developing economy classes even if they did take place next door to the house that Rockne built.

Things went downhill from there. The older boy’s (age 12-13) whose cabin I was assigned to quickly learned to defer to other counselors if they needed help with anything - archery, fishing, fire making. Especially on the topic of girls, I was looked over in favor of counselors with girlfriends. They assumed my lack of one was not by choice but by ineptitude.

The topic of the opposite sex was by far their favorite topic of conversation. Morning, noon and night the boys discussed the girls as if camp was the first time they had ever encountered a female.

The campers’ lustful obsession reached a fever pitch the night before the end-of-week dance where the boys would get to visit the older girl’s cabin for the soiree. The night before the fling, the boys decided to serenade the girls with love letters.

For a while the cabin was peaceful as the boys silently crafted their perfect sonnets. The serenity was broken once a boy read over his fellow camper’s shoulder and found out that they were writing to the same girl. This started a chain reaction of each boy checking who their bunkmate’s paramour was only to realize that every single one of them had written their letter to the same Sandra Dee.

I wasn’t all that surprised as most of their conversations had revolved around “Sandra”. There had been a few times when I had to tell them to knock it off when their discussion had focused too much on her “assets”.

Shouts of “I saw her first” and “she doesn’t like you” and “we’ll see who she chooses” rang throughout the cabin. Although I had tried to avoid being involved in their preteen shenanigans, the boys were in desperate need for a qualified professor to teach them a lesson - not a lesson in love, but a lesson in economics. The boys were too focused on Adam Smith and his theory on individual ambition serving the common good. They needed to be introduced to John Nash.

“Haven’t any of you seen A Beautiful Mind?” I pleaded.

Silence.

Typical, they made time to see every Transformer flick, but God forbid they watch Ron Howard’s best picture masterpiece. It would be up to me to save the campers from disaster like Gary Sinise saving the crew of Apollo 13 in Ron Howard’s other best picture nominated classic.

If they had seen the film about the life of mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, they would have witnessed a scene that took place at a bar that was reminiscent of their current situation. In this crucial scene where John Nash dunks on Adam Smith, he posits that the optimal outcome will come from individuals doing what’s best for themselves and the group.

This illuminating scene helped to secure Oscar glory for the screenwriters, but go on any Reddit message board and you’ll find economic enthusiasts nominating the film for a Razzie award. Whether or not the film did a terrible job of showcasing what a Nash Equilibrium actually entails is far from the point. The scene did perfectly predict exactly what would happen to the boys if they did not listen to my advice.

“You will fail,” I gravely warned, “If you all ask out the same girl, you’ll block each other. She’ll say no to all of you because you were rude to her friends. Then you’ll have no chance with the other girls because they will be mad at you for your earlier diss. You will be left dancing with each other.”

I handed them blank papers and told them to write a note to their second choice. They rewrote their letters while I congratulated myself for utilizing my economics degree for good. I collected the revised letters and went out to deliver them, but first I made a pit-stop at the mess hall. There I met up with a counselor from the girl’s cabin. We raided the fridge then read through the letters.

Before you complain about invasion of privacy and first amendment rights, let me ask you this – would you trust a group of pent up thirteen-year-old boys not to write something out of pocket? There was no way us counselors were going to be culpable in helping a little skeeve. Screening the letters was a matter of protecting the camp from being held liable.

As we munched on reheated quesadillas, we read through the letters and found them all to be acceptably PG rated. However, I had to grade them an F. Not a single boy had paid heed to my advice as every letter was still addressed to Miss Sandra Dee. They all would rather assure mutual destruction rather than let a fellow camper “win”.

“These boys are idiots,” my co-counselor laughed, “Should we burn these letters?”

“No, they must learn their lesson.”

The next day before the morning flagpole salute, the boys got a special surprise visit from the girls.

“Thanks for the letters,” the girls, including Sandra Dee, chanted, “we have a message for you…”

They then proceeded to sing the Katy Perry hit “I Kissed a Girl”. It was a show of girl power and unity from all the campers except the one girl who had a boyfriend back home and felt singing the song would be a form of cheating as well as the super religious girl who believed singing the song was a sin. Ultimately, the girls delivered the boys the outcome John Nash had predicted, minus the Katy Perry tune.

That night’s dance was about as awkward as you would expect. Boys and girls stuck to their separate sides with the counselors making fools of ourselves in the middle trying to bridge the gap. Honestly, even if the boys had heeded my advice, I doubt the dance would have been any less awkward - these were preteens after all.

That one week wound up being the last time I was placed in the older boy’s cabin. It wasn’t their lack of appreciation for my free economic lessons that soured me . It was an incident that occurred one night when I awoke to a ruckus game of hot potato, only they were not throwing a potato. They were throwing a dildo. Not an actual sex toy, thank God, but the foam part of a kids crutch that they were calling a dildo.

After I yelled at them and placed the foam back on top of the crutch, one camper asked, “What’s a dildo anyway?”

A free econ lesson was one thing, but I was not getting paid enough to teach sex ed 101.

I requested a cabin transfer, and the following week was placed on the other end of the spectrum. The campers in the youngest cabin only had one girl on their mind, their mommy. Sadly, as the week wore on and the temperatures skyrocketed, the only thing on some of their minds was their mommy . Instead of writing letters, they whined and fought until I reached my breaking point. Another counselor had to tag me out before I yelled back at one incessant crier – “Join the club buddy, I miss my mommy and air conditioning too!”

Although I did not request the second transfer, the camp director made the executive decision to move me to the middle grade cabin. Third time was the charm. They were thankfully old enough to not miss home but young enough to not need gallons of AXE body spray. It helped that they were the same age as my youngest brother John so I had practice speaking their language. Most importantly though, I had learned a lesson from the prior weeks on how to get into their good graces.

“Do you play football?” they asked once they found out I went to Notre Dame.

“No,” I replied, “But I’m good friends with the football players.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, I hang out with them all the time.”

Was that true? Well, I was friends with a walk-on fifth-string.

“Do you go to the games?”

“Of course, I go to all the games. In fact, I get to watch from the sidelines instead of the stands.”

It was true that I did go to all the home games, and it was true I didn’t watch from the stands because I was usually passed out in the drunk tank.

I regaled the campers with imagined stories of playing video games and eating meals with the guys starring in ESPN highlights. I even threw in some fake stories about being besties with Taylor Swift’s brother who would take me to the concerts of their favorite musicians like LMFAO (this was 2012). Again, not a complete lie - Austin Swift did drink a beer in my dorm room one time.

I ended up not being the counselor who could build the best campfire, but I was the counselor who had the best stories to tell around the campfire. So what if the stories were fake? What can you expect from someone majoring in a fake science?