Hello Mother, Hello Father*: Summer Camp 2012

|Peter Boettke|

I have been continuously attending summer camps since 1973, when I attended my first weeklong basketball camp.  I first attended basketball camp, then worked basketball camp, then worked tennis camp, then attended economics camp, then worked economics camp.  Since 1990, I have worked at least 1 summer camp for economics every summer, and some summers I have worked 3 or 4.  This week is actually my second week-long camp this summer, and I will work a 3rd one at FEE in August.

I just checked into my dorm room for IHS's Scholarship and a Free Society at Towson University.  I will post some reactions through the week.

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*For the young guns, that is a title to a song about summer camp made famous in the 1960s.

Comments

[Don Boudreaux]

The artist who recorded that song is Allan Sherman.

[J Oxman]

I thought the title was "Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah"

[Mario Rizzo]

When I was a kid I went to summer camp once and got beaten up by some bad boys. They were no doubt proto-Keynesians.

[Rafe Champion]

Mario, life at camp is tough for small nerdish kids with funny names. Especially if they are proto-Austrians:)

[Rafe Champion]

Mario probably didn’t notice that the young Keynesians were getting grief from the proto-rational expectations boys who were in trouble with the young heterodoxers. Nobody liked the young GET nerds and you should have seen the young monetarists going at it with the proto-Keynesians on the grass behind the toilet block.

Hopefully the young Austrians get more respect at summer camp these days given that the Austrians gave a credible account of the GFC and also in view of the way that Barry Smith has demonstrated that you don’t need that divisive strong apriorism to do Austrian economics.

But the bottom line is that Mario should have hung out with some tough proto-Austrian jocks like Pete Boettke and Pete Klein.

[Yumiko]

5 years ago today i was in the middle of my boot camp expireence. I can not remember a single letter that took greater than a week to get to me. Somtimes it was about 4 days. Heres some food for thought on the subject. Say you get a letter to the post office at the last pick up time (maybe they picked up early, so it will be morning before it even gets in the postal system). The distance from Chicago will be a factor, letters from indiana will definately get in faster than those from LA, if you are not in a major city, add an additional day. Then it goes to Chicago, then to the city of Great Lakes, IL's post office. Once it gets there it goes to boot camp, where Postal clerks at boot camp must go through all the letters and divide them up divisions, after that they have to go to the different ships or barracks buildings. THEN once they get there they get divided up between divisions, where divisional petty officers (recruits who are assigned to deal with the mail) must go through the letters and divide them out to the recruits. So if you are close, it may take about 6-7 days. If you are writing from a distant small city, I could see it taking 2 weeks at the absolute most. As for mail going out, when I went through (i believe this is how it still works) mail only went out on sundays (some people had hook ups where they could sneak mail to those mail petty officers and get them to a mail box, but its usually not worth all the backdoor workings). Most out going mail will reach its destination by that weekend, my parents usually got my mail at the latest by wednesday or thursday. I hope this helps!