I was born and raised in Iron Mountain, MI. Iron Mountain is a small town in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It is located about 100 miles north of Green Bay, WI, so, as you can imagine, most people around the area live for Green Bay Packers football games on Sunday afternoons.
I am a natural born "Yooper" (a term used to describe people from the Upper Peninsula). The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is an extremely rural and densely wooded area. The total population of the Upper Peninsula is somewhere around 500,000. Winters there often begin in early November and run through mid to late April. It's not that uncommon for there to be days in January when the temperature approaches 20 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit). Most of my family still live in the Iron Mountain area.
Growing up in this area certainly had an effect on my interests and hobbies. To this day, I love hunting (deer hunting especially), fishing, hiking, and the outdoors. Whenever I return home in the winter, I make sure to find time for some ice fishing.
I also played a lot of sports during my childhood. I played baseball through high school, and I'm an avid Chicago Cubs fan. I played soccer for many years growing up, and I ran cross country and track.
I'm still an avid runner. In fact, I've developed somewhat of an obsession for the marathon. Here are my best times at various distances:
5k: 18:17 (Race for the Cure 5k, Macon, GA, October 25, 2008)
5 mile: 32:15 (Kiwanis Memorial Day Road Race, Cordele, GA, May 29, 2006)
10k: 39:35 (Macon Labor Day Road Race, Macon, GA, September 4, 2006)
15k: 1:01:24 (Peachtree City Classic, Peachtree City, GA, October 21, 2006)
Half-Marathon: 1:26:39 (Fox Cities Half-Marathon, Appleton/Neenah, WI September 24, 2007)
Marathon: 3:11:11 (Five Points of Life Marathon, Gainesville, FL, February 18, 2007)
To fastforward this autobiography a little bit...I attended college at Northern Michigan University, which is located in Marquette, MI. Marquette is about 80 miles from Iron Mountain, so NMU was an ideal place for me to go to school while keeping in close contact with my family.
Two very fortunate events occurred during my time at NMU. In the fall semester of 1997, I took Dave Prychitko's EC101 course. Little did I know that Dave's course was going to change my life forever. I think I attended every lecture that semester. I probably annoyed the heck out of Dave during his office hours, and I couldn't read enough about economics in my spare time. I had never been so excited about ideas before this class, and that initial excitement continues to drive a lot of my work to this day.
After that first class, I took many more economics classes with Dave and other NMU faculty members. I became convinced that I wanted to pursue my interest in economics at the graduate level. I started to load my remaining semesters at NMU with a lot of math courses, and I began looking at different graduate programs.
During my last year at NMU, Dave was generous enough to hold a one-on-one reading group. Together, we read classic articles in economics, which we concluded with a spring reading of Ludwig von Mises's Human Action. The reading group officially ran for an hour and a half, but it seemed like we exceeded our scheduled time every week.
I ended up graduating from NMU in 2000 as the top graduating senior in Economics and History (a major I had been working on before my first EC101 course). In the spring of 2000, I accepted an offer to attend George Mason University. GMU seemed like an ideal place for me to go--Dave was a former alum of GMU, his best friend (Peter Boettke) would be one of my professors, and GMU had (and still has) the reputation for being the best place to study free-market, real-world economics.
Something far more important occurred during my final year at NMU, though. While working as a tutor for NMU's All Campus Tutoring Center, I met and fell in love with my wife, Anemone. Anemone was an exceptional English major at NMU, and she began working at the tutoring center around the same time as me.
Since students seldom visited us during our scheduled hours, we had plenty of time to talk and get to know each other. Time and again I was fascinated by her interest in ideas and her willingness to talk about economics!
Unfortunately, Anemone was a year behind me in school. I left for GMU in the summer of 2000, and, for the next year, we managed to maintain a long-distance relationship. In June of 2001, Anemone moved out to Virginia to be closer to me.
On June 12, 2004, Anemone and I got married at The Four Seasons Club in Pembine, WI. Even though the weather leading up to our wedding day had been cold and rainy, the weather on the day of our wedding was beautiful. The ceremony was perfect, and we had a great time at our reception.
After our wedding, we spent eleven days honeymooning in Alaska. Alaska had about 22 hours of daylight while we were there, so we were able to start hikes at 10 pm without it getting dark while we were hiking! We saw moose, grizzly bears, caribou, killer whales, porpoises, humpback whales, and a lot of other wildlife on our honeymoon.
After our honeymoon, we went to Botswana for a month in July. While most of my time was spent conducting field work that looked at how Botswana escaped the "natural resource curse," we did find time to go on a couple of safaris. We were able to see most of Africa's big game (except lions). We were even able to pet two tame cheetahs at the Mokolodi Game Reserve! For pictures of Africa, click here.
After moving away for a year, we are back in Macon, GA. I am thrilled to be back at Mercer University, where I am once again working with a great group of colleagues, friends, and students.
