A New Blog for a New Day

As some of you will know and others will not, this is not my first foray into the strange ritual of posting my thoughts on the internet in the phenomenon we know as blogging (fun fact; did you know that the original term to describe this sort of correspondence was a web-log?). I haven’t written an entry in my previous blog (http://4-3-2-5-tp.blogspot.com/) in over a year and a half and even then, I was only writing sporadically; far less frequently than I had several years ago. What was the point of this hiatus? Well, it’s rather simple.

However, my coursework is nearing an end for the immediate future and I’ve been thinking about diving back into blogging for quite some time now. At long last; here I am. The next obvious question becomes; why did I name this particular blog what I did?

… ECONOMIST

Well, first and foremost, the reason why I have some time opening up soon is I’ll be graduating with a Bachelor’s in economics very soon. Despite taking several classes in econ in my first foray into college, I never gave it its due and it never stuck. I rediscovered it several years ago and have been going down this path ever since.

SUPER HEAVYWEIGHT…

The other thing that I got involved in just over a year ago is CrossFit. Before I got any further, I’m not going to engage the trolls and I’m not going to lend the impressive volume of my voice to the defense of the fitness phenomenon. I like it, I don’t care if you like it or not, yes, I’ll talk to you about it if you want but no, it does not dominate my conversations (just ask people who talk to me; far more often than not, they are the ones to ask me about it rather than me bringing it up). A byproduct of this affiliation is that I became acquainted with the Olympic style lifts; the snatch and the clean and jerk. Over time as I became more and more proficient at these lifts, I began to like them more and more. Eventually, I decided that I would like to focus more on these lifts and even become competitive. I recently competed in my first event and absolutely loved it; I’m already registered for another and more will certainly be coming in the near future.

For those of you that know me, the rest of this blog’s title has probably become apparent. For those of you who don’t, I stand 6’3” and weigh about 255-260 pounds. The cutoff between the second highest weight class (the heavyweights) and the highest (the super heavyweights) is 105 kilograms, or 231.9 pounds. Given that I would have to lost a considerable amount of weight and with it, some muscle, it makes far more sense for me to compete in the 105+ kg category rather than try to maintain a weight under 105 kilograms at my height.

THE BLOG

What am I going to be writing about and in what format? As you may be able to surmise, Olympic weightlifting and economics will feature prominently. As readers of Circle Change can attest, I am a fan of many other sports and from time to time will write about most of them. I am also very opinionated (aren’t we all, deep down?) and sometimes I find it very hard to keep my mouth shut on the politics of the day.

One thing that I’m very interested to try are economic research projects. I’m currently in the middle of one for my final class before receiving my degree and I’ve enjoyed the process quite a bit. From time to time in this space, I’ll present something akin to a project, though far less formal and not constrained by the traditional format of such pieces. For instance, I may not look for any previous literature on topics I research and I most definitely will not keep to APA style of formatting. I will, however, cite my sources in some way, shape, or form. I’m not reinventing the wheel and I don’t claim to be.

Other than that, I might keep you updated on my own weightlifting competitions or on anything else that pops into my head… it’s a blog, after all. To whet your appetite, the first project that I’ve already started compiling my data for is going to look at the performance of the US economy and comparing it to the controlling party in the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House.

WHAT ARE THOSE PICTURES ON THE LEFT?

Simply put, these are the giants of the two fields that come together in this blog. The top four are all weightlifters from the super heavyweight class that at one time or another have held world records. The bottom three are some of the best known economists ever to grace the field. If I ever amount to a fraction of what these men have meant to their respective fields, I’ll have accomplished great things.

The first is Vasily Alekseyev, a Russian weightlifter who is often considered one of the greatest weightlifters in the Olympic lifts, regardless of weight class. On top of winning the gold medal at both the 1972 and 1976 Olympic Games, Alekseyev also won 8 consecutive world championships (1970-1977). In addition to becoming the first man ever to clean and jerk over 500 pounds, he set a total of 80 world records over the course of his career.

Leonid Taranenko won gold at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow and likely would have repeated his title in 1984 were it not for the Soviet boycott of the Los Angeles games. He set 21 world records over the course of his career, including the highest clean and jerk (266 kilograms) and total (475 kilograms) ever lifted by a man in competition a full 8 years after his gold medal performance. Taranenko’s records are no longer considered official because the weight classes were reorganized three times over the past twenty years.

Iranian lifter Hossein Reza Zadeh was the first non-Soviet to win the gold medal in the super heavyweight division since 1960 when he accomplished that feat in Sydney in 2000. In those games, he set the Olympic record in the snatch (212.5 kg) and the world record in the total (472.5 kg). In 2003, he set the world record in the snatch (213 kg) and then followed up by setting the world record in the clean and jerk in Athens (263.5 kg) and winning a second gold medal. His records in the clean and jerk and the total stand to this day.

Behdad Salimi (also an Iranian) made headlines by setting the world record in the snatch (214 kg) at the age of 20 at the 2010 World Championships in Paris. He later won the gold medal at London in 2012 and his record snatch stands to this day.

Shifting to the economists, Adam Smith is the father of economics and his theories form the basis for all free market economics. His “invisible hand of the market” theory applies today as much as it did at the time.

Karl Marx is most famous for writing the The Communist Manifesto but one of his other works, Das Kapital (Capital) was arguably more influential. Capital explored the relationships between labor and capital and focused on the exploitation of labor. While the Manifesto has inspired countless revolutionaries over the years, his predictions, which he felt would be the natural end product of capitalism, were really only seen once, in the Russian Revolution of 1917.

John Maynard Keynes quite simply changed the face of economics with his theories during the Great Depression. In more recent years, he has become the darling of many liberal politicians because in a nutshell, he said that if an economy is stagnating and the private sector is not providing the investment to move the economy forward, the government can step in and provide that boost. What those same liberals often leave out, however, is that Keynes always said that once private sector investment picks up, government spending should be curtailed and some semblance of fiscal balance should be restored.

There, more information about those seven people than you wanted and certainly more than you will remember. Nevertheless, in one way or another, they have all inspired me in my journey to reach the ground at my feet and continue to inspire me as I go along this path.

I sincerely hope you’ll check in on me occasionally and if you feel so inclined, leave me your own thoughts regarding mine.

Thanks for reading.