When I was fourteen I met a man with a talent for restoring a sense of fairness to a society with vast and growing inequalities in wealth. His name wa

Extreme Wealth Is Bad for Everyone—Especially the Wealthy

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2024-11-13 03:30:15

When I was fourteen I met a man with a talent for restoring a sense of fairness to a society with vast and growing inequalities in wealth. His name was Jack Kenney and he’d created a tennis camp, called Tamarack, in the mountains of northern New Hampshire. The kids who went to the Tamarack Tennis Camp mostly came from well-to-do East Coast families, but the camp itself didn’t feel like a rich person’s place: it wasn’t unusual for the local health inspectors to warn the camp about its conditions, or for the mother of some Boston Brahmin dropping her child off, and seeing where he would sleep and eat for the next month, to burst into tears. Kenney himself had enjoyed a brief, exotic career as a professional tennis player—he’d even played a doubles match on ice with Fred Perry—but he was pushing sixty and had long since abandoned whatever interest he’d had in fame and fortune. He ran his tennis camp less as a factory for future champions than as an antidote to American materialism—and also to the idea that a person could be at once successful and selfish. (You can still hear his quixotic suspicion of conventional success echoed in his grandson, the Olympic champion Bode Miller, who grew up on the campsite.) 

Jack Kenney’s assault on teenaged American inequality began at breakfast the first morning. The bell clanged early, and the kids all rolled out of their old stained bunk beds, scratched their fresh mosquito bites, and crawled to the dining hall. On each table were small boxes of cereal, enough for each kid to have one box, but not enough that everyone could have the brand of cereal he wanted. There were Fruit Loops and Cheerios, but also more than a few boxes of the deadly dark bran stuff consumed willingly only by old people suffering from constipation. On the second morning, when the breakfast bell clanged, a mad footrace ensued. Kids sprung from their bunks and shot from cabins in the New Hampshire woods to the dining hall. The winners got the Fruit Loops, the losers a laxative. By the third morning, it was clear that, in the race to the Fruit Loops, some kids had a natural advantage. They were bigger and faster; or their cabins were closer to the dining hall; or they just had that special knack some people have for getting whatever they want. Some kids would always get the Fruit Loops, and others would always get the laxative. Life was now officially unfair.

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