Transcript
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Tue May 5, 2026
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Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gordney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gordney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining us today, we have Dr. Justin Clark, an art family professor of philosophy and ethics.
Also Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel chair of economics and founder of the Courtney Institute.
All right, so we decided to do a mystery show today.
It's just a mystery to me because Justin did not want to prompt me on anything what it's about.
So Justin,
what are we talking about today?
So one of my favorite authors who I make my students read is Kurt Vonnegut.
And I was, I ran across an old quote by Vonnegut when, and this is almost exactly 30 years ago, it's September of 1996.
And he was doing an interview with Inc magazine, INC magazine, which is kind of like wired, you know, and it's like a new business magazine in the, in the mid 90s.
And they asked him about the
increase in electronic communication.
And this is what he said.
He said, I work at home and if I wanted to, I could have a computer right by my bed.
And I'd never have to leave it.
But I use a typewriter and afterwards I mark up the pages with a pencil.
Then I call up this woman named Carol out in Woodstock and I say, are you still doing typing?
Sure she is.
And her husband is trying to track bluebirds out there and not having much luck.
And so we chit chat back and forth and I say, okay, I'll send you the pages.
Then I'm going down the steps and my wife calls up.
Where are you going?
And I say, well, I'm going out to buy an envelope.
And she says, you're not a poor man.
Why don't you just buy a thousand envelopes?
They'll deliver them and you can put them in the closet.
And I
say, hush.
So I go down the steps there and I go out to the newsstand across the street where they sell magazines and lottery tickets and stationery.
I have to get in line because there's a lot of people buying candy and all that sort of thing.
And I talk to them.
The woman behind the counter has a jewel between her eyes.
And when it's my turn, I ask her if there have been any big winners lately.
I get my envelope and seal it and go up to the postal convenience center down in the
block on the corner of 47th and 2nd Ave, where I'm secretly in love with the woman behind the counter.
I keep absolutely poker faced.
I never let her know how I feel about her.
One time I had my pocket picked in there, and I got to meet a cop and tell him about it.
Anyway, I addressed the envelope to Carolyn Woodstock, I stamped the envelope, I mail it in the mailbox, in front of the post office, and I go home.
And I've had a hell of a good time.
And I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around.
and don't let anybody tell you any different.
Electronic communities build nothing, you wind up with nothing.
We are dancing in.
How beautiful it is to get up and go do something.
And then parentheses it says.
Vonnegut gets up and does a little jig in the interview.
So I just wanted to throw that out there because I thought that was extremely perceptive and to be saying something like that in 1996.
And I think it puts its finger on a little bit of a problem that I think we could explore.
Yeah.
So it's kind of funny.
We were at Creighton University this last weekend.
We had that as our last podcast.
We just posted called Humanomics.
And it was very much in line with what you just described, that there's transactions.
you know, we kind of rah-rah in economics, the impersonal nature and the efficiencies that we get by not having to meet the people we deal with.
I don't know the rancher that...
made my, uh, ultimately gave me my ribeye the other night that I grilled.
And so we kind of championed that.
But then what's highlighted at this humanomics conference is exactly what Kurt was kind of saying, that the, the relational nature plays a role and can sometimes leave us a little empty as well.
So that was the first thing that I thought it was that it's very much in line with what we took, uh, students to at Creighton.
Yeah.
So I, I think I didn't want to get a lot there.
I, a lot of times we'll do sort of like inefficient.
Aaron runs so that way I could, for example, walk, drive, or I will go in and, you know, hand-to-liver something rather than mail it, even though mailing it would take a lot less time.
So that sort of thing is something I do, but it's also obviously a vanishing part of society, right?
The computer, the smartphone, these things do centralize a lot of the functions.
And to some extent, I mean, what's funny is it has also removed kind of administrative assistance in a certain sense, right?
A lot of universities get by with fewer assistant deans or assistant chairpersons and these positions than they used to because everybody has an help calendar, right?
Like you don't need someone to do your scheduling if anybody can access your calendar at all times and see when you have me and don't.
And so I guess all this to say, I think Vonnegut is right, but then the question is, well, so what now that we live in a world where that isn't a commonplace thing.
In other words, I think most people feel the opposite of Vonnegut.
Most people are happy that they get to avoid social interaction.
interaction.
Another example of this is I tend to call people on the phone when I have something that I need to talk to them about.
When I could obviously text and a lot, I know a lot of my friends feel the exact opposite.
They're like, oh, I hate it when people call me, right?
When that could just be a text message.
I feel the opposite.
I don't want to text.
I'd rather just talk to you so we can get things worked out and figured out.
So we live in a world where the farting around is Vonnegut puts it.
It doesn't really happen.
So what about that?
Is this a problem?
Is it doesn't need to be fixed if it's a problem?
I'll pass it back to you
guys.
So I commented, I think, to the presenter at the Humanomics about Amazon and DoorDash that we can now DoorDash and you can select on your DoorDash that you don't want to actually talk to the person.
So even getting food delivered, you have the leave it on the porch option.
And I guess a large percentage of people do it that way, right?
They're just totally disconnecting.
And again, not having to go to the store because Amazon can bring just about anything to your door.
And so, you know, to what extent are we missing out on something?
And I really appreciate the farting around because I have fun farting around.
But it did make me think like, is it because we're in a position to be able to fart around?
Like, I'm just thinking of somebody who's struggling paycheck, paycheck, whatever, you know, they don't.
they need to be more efficient.
And so they don't, it's almost like a luxury good, the farting around and take your time and do the transaction more in the traditional
art.
So one way to read Vonnegut, and I think, you know, a way that somebody on the left might read this is something like see economists just want to make everything efficient.
And when we maximize efficiency, we actually miss out on the farting around stuff.
And I think a way that you could
reply to that is something like what Russ is right that some people do need, you know, Amazon.
prime overnight comes really in handy if you have kids and you can't leave the house for something.
But what the rest of us are doing when we are electing to sit at home and not fart around instead is we are neglecting to realize some of the social costs of some of the behavior that we're engaging in.
And so this is kind of like, you know, you could make like an externality case or something with this.
And in particular, the thing that I have in mind is manners, where I think that
There's been a discussion that in general, public manners have gone down.
And I think that the point of public manners and of public courtesy.
and social norms is to reduce the amount of friction in interpersonal relationships and interpersonal interactions that you have with people.
And if you minimize the amount of interpersonal reactions that you have with people, then by definition, people are going to have less use for manners.
And so this isn't a muscle that gets flexed very often.
I remember listening to a comedian one time when they were talking about being at the airport and somebody, two people standing side by side on one of those moving walkways and
Um, he goes, you know, and, you know, I just walk behind them and I just kind of sigh loudly.
And my friend from, who's from New York, um, is with me and he goes, Hey, walk on the left, stand on the right.
Cause those are the manners in New York.
And the reason that we have rules like that is because he will gum things up for everybody else.
Yeah.
Um, unless you know that there are some kind of rules that we abide by.
And like when you walk around and you say,
Hey, how are you doing to somebody?
You don't want to know how they're doing.
I don't want to know how you're doing if that's how you're doing.
What I want back from you is like, good, how are you?
And what that means isn't I'm doing good.
What that means is something like, I have my stuff together enough that I'm not going to ruin whatever you're doing.
I'm not in an emergency situation.
It's also a normal person who has my act kind of together.
Yeah.
And it seems like the more we kind of seclude ourselves and, you know,
directionally aim society at the general wallification from like the movie Wally that it's not that we're actually maximizing efficiency.
We're maximizing some kind of short-term efficiency of the expense of some long-term stuff that I think we're really going to miss when we realize, oh, this bill's coming due and we've written some checks that are going to be difficult to cash.
Yeah, and I guess the part I struggle with and I think
Stephanie brought this up during it too was she likes doing Amazon.
I like staying keeping to myself so it it it facilitates my preferences even though she's the one writing on this this being a reality and maybe a potential harm to society similar to what we're talking about but you know to what extent our individual preferences being there but I think my argument would be younger people especially don't have an appreciation or an understanding of
incidental connections that can happen and how that can help your life because you accidentally ran into somebody at Walmart or farting around with the, you know, getting the envelope and stuff that there might be some real value that you can look back on and say, gosh, I was, you know, lucky that I ran into them at Walmart.
And so I think a lot of the young people when they're everything's phone driven and internet driven aren't going to learn that through experience.
Well, the same way.
Peter jump in after this.
But in the same way that we want Amazon to be there when you need the overnight thing, you also want to be able to deploy the social skills should you need to.
And so this idea that, you know, I was yet it was Julie, Stephanie, Stephanie, like I've, Stephanie's at a conference.
I'm sure that Stephanie can be, you know, a conversational person when she needs to,
it's very tempting.
if you've never exercised that muscle to never exercise it, and then you're going to be SOL, should you need to exercise it?
And so this, you know, I get it, some people like that, but you do need to be able to do this on occasion.
So making sure that you can at least fart around and should you need to fart around is something that I think we ought to be making do.
Yeah, I kind of related actually would add there's an ocean economics that Gary Becker and maybe George Sikler too.
came up with called consumption capital, which is the idea that by consuming something enough, you become kind of like good at consuming it.
And that in a sense kind of improves your taste for the thing.
And so classical music is a great example of that, right?
Nobody who turns on classical music for the first time is like, this is really good.
I don't really want to be involved.
Like, anybody nowadays who turns on classical music, it's like, it just kind of sounds like all the same, right?
Like,
You could put on anything in the classical genre and no one would be able to identify anything about it.
The people who really enjoyed it are the people who have spent a long time listening to it.
Wine tasting is a similar thing, right?
There's also acquired tastes, right?
You've heard of this before.
And so if this is true, which I think it is, I think that there is such a thing as consumption capital, I think that could also have a plan here where
the more you are getting things by ordering it and having it delivered, the better you are about sitting in your place and entertaining yourself, right?
Actually, it goes back to, I'm not a huge etymology person, but people don't think of the word amuse very much.
But of course, amuse is to think on something.
And so if you're musing, you're thinking, well, amuse, whenever you see that prefix A, that means withouts, right?
So amusements is kind of like
uh turning off your brain
right
passive that's i can't remember who wrote the book i'm using ourselves to death that was a big book i haven't heard but uh
My point here is perhaps there is consumption capital and amusements and actually you kind of maybe need to fight hard against being someone who builds up a lot of consumption capital on that because as Justin is pointing out maybe then you lose the ability to socialize.
You don't build up the consumption capital and socialization.
All right, this looks like a good spot for a break.
So we'll come back.
I want to think about will people
Eventually get to the point where they'll naturally recognize that they needed.
I think Peter was kind of touching that direction.
So let's explore a little bit more after the break.
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Okay so we're back and I left off thinking about well will people naturally recognize they need it so I think the doom and gloom that we have is thinking like oh you don't understand you know because I'm 54 and like back in my day we used to talk to people when we bought stuff and now you got this Amazon that allows you to be you know to yourself but to kind of build on Peter's point maybe that void will start to bubble up so that you're like maybe I should join a club
Maybe I should go to the bar or maybe I should invite a friend over to play a game or something like we're naturally thinking that we're going to downward spiral into this.
isolated mess mentally, but maybe some new things that are natural to us will bubble up and cause us to want to take action.
Like, I don't really like the way my life is going right now that I just passively amused myself with social media and watch Netflix and order DoorDash and not talk to a person.
Like, I don't know, what do you guys think?
Do we have some hope that direction?
Is that part of human nature or are we doomed?
No, I don't know up there.
And actually, so I'm
basically not to miss about everything in the long run, but I know I don't think there's a mechanism by which this will like self-correct.
Because as Justin pointed out, there's a coordination issue on top of everything here.
So not only are you as an individual perhaps losing the ability to go out and socialize, but other people are too if this is a problem for them.
And so not only is the staying in and not farting around thing becoming more interesting,
But the going out and farting around thing is becoming less interesting because your other friends don't know how to do it either, right?
They know how to
stay awkward on your phone.
Let's drop in in Fortnite, right?
They know how to do things that are online things with you.
And I don't think that there is, none of us do, that there's anything inherently wrong with doing things online with people.
That's not my issue.
But even, you know,
uh, those people who you could otherwise hang out with, uh, they're not gonna be like super good at the in-person interactions either.
And by the way, as people withdraw from it, the spaces for these things are also not gonna be as good, right?
In other words, if people are going to bars less, the bars are gonna suck more
or disappear.
And they suck more and more expensive, I think.
Yeah, yeah, it's starting to become a luxury good.
Yeah.
Yeah, and actually a lot of hobbies have sort of become a high barrier to entry things now, right?
Uh, so,
It's no longer that people go to bars, people go to craft beer breweries now, right?
I mean, there are still people who go to bars to get a Bud Light.
But most people who are going out to grab a beer with their friends, or a lot of people at least, are going to some place where a beer is like 15 bucks, right?
Nah, that's maybe a little bit of exaggeration.
But 10 isn't too far.
But the point is that what that is doing is it's kind of setting a barrier
already for interest into certain hobbies, interest groups.
There's like a money barrier in there to begin with.
And so, yeah, I think that you lose the spaces, you lose the things that make it enjoyable.
It's a network good.
That's one of the term I'm looking for is that socialization is a network good.
And so the more you suck at it and the more everybody else sucks at it, the less good it is.
Yeah, man, there's only work if.
a certain number of people enforce them and obey them.
Otherwise, you know, if it's just you screaming at everybody on that moving sidewalk, you're crazy.
You're the crazy person.
It reminds me of our podcast where we talked about supervillains.
Do you remember that?
Or maybe I'm crazy.
There was this idea that like you could have heroes and you can have villains and a supervillain.
And the supervillain was defined as somebody who punishes the hero and the hero was the person.
Maybe this
wasn't one of them.
No, no, it was.
Yeah, I
remember.
So the hero is the person who enforces societal norms.
the villain is the person who breaks them, and then the super villain is the person who punishes the heroes for enforcing societal norms.
And so yeah, you almost get more like super villains as everybody forgets the manners because
don't know the manners, then it's easy to be like, hey, who are you to tell him to walk on that side of the road?
Oh, that's interesting too, because it's...
being a super villain accident without even knowing it.
Yeah,
exactly.
That's
right.
Maybe you even think you're being a hero.
It's like the real manners is that we should be nice to everybody.
No, no, no, you don't know the real manners because you haven't walked outside in form.
Yeah, it's kind of like, actually, it's kind of like being like an immigrant or a visitor to a country and then like trying to enforce like your manners on them and be like, you know, going over to Europe, buying a car, starting to drive on the right side of the road and be like, hey, you're on the right side of the road, idiots.
It's like, no, actually, you're like, you haven't been here before, right?
So yeah, now the question is, where can we find optimism?
Because I think that's a tricky one.
There are some institutions that are semi impervious to this.
So I think like families are impervious to this for the most part, assuming you can form a family in the first place, which
this
would make more difficult.
They have less families.
But if you manage to get one, then that's probably more impervious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so and your families are going to have certain manners, maybe even some natural shared manners that all families would have, but definitely less connected than previously.
It's definitely a degradation of civil society.
I think ultimately is the result.
Yeah.
And it's it's something to say like this is
He was just early and he saw what was going to happen.
Bowling alone was
probably right about this time, in 95, 96.
And
it was...
That's Putnam, which was a really influential sociology paper in the textbook, arguing that fraternal...
groups have declined that that was bad.
And so maybe this just exacerbates what had been happening since the 60s.
So that would be a mark in the This Doesn't Self-Correct column, right?
Because...
Right, yeah.
So, you know, I have to go back to the old Saturday Night Live of Could It Be Satan?
I couldn't help but think of Screwtape Letters.
If you haven't read it, C.S.
Lewis, it's a brilliant book where he's basically showing how the devil
might be up to things in kind of a not so obvious way.
And I really think to the extent that we're isolating people, keeping alone, I can almost hear the junior tempter saying, well, this is what I've done.
I've got him thinking that it's good to, you know, have delivery from DoorDash and you could be more productive and have more time to work on his things.
And basically that there could be some outside forces here that are leading us to these, to this path, path of destruction, because that's what Satan does.
So I just thought I'd throw that out there kind of came to mind that they're unfortunately it's probably
plays into Peter's comment that there's no real self-correcting mechanism at play, and we might even have it stacked against us with sin working its way that direction as well.
Yeah, I think a difficulty perhaps is the returns insofar as their monetary are kind of an externality, like was mentioned earlier, and then the other returns are non-monetary, which I do think there are.
The reason I
like go about town is because it's enjoyable, right?
It's more enjoyable than taking care of the errands on my computer.
So I do encourage other people to do it, but yeah, ultimately, I think Justin, you've identified a big problem and thankfully you've given us no solution.
So I appreciate it.
I will close the day less happy than I began today.
Thank you very much.
Jokes aside,
You know, the alternative theory is that, like, this is just okay, that because people need to be outbless, therefore it's less important for them to have outmanners.
Perhaps, uh...
Online world has its own set of manners, which are more important because we're online now and therefore we should be adopting online manners instead.
I don't have much to say about that in the way of like showing it's false other than I don't like online manners, right?
Maybe that's an archaic thing, but generally people are meaner online.
They're shorter with people.
They're less willing to take timeouts.
I think because of the impersonal nature, right?
Like you don't have to go far on social media before you see
People treating each other like they never would treat each other in real life, right?
Without the skin and the having no skin in the game being online So maybe you know the counter arguments maybe internet manners actually need to dominate because we're internet people now rather than you know
Normal people but my only rejoinder that would be avatars I don't like internet manners, and I like the old manners better, and that's really all I have to say about it I I guess I couldn't falsify the other position
so I guess when I was thinking about it just now I was thinking well it actually seems like Japan might be slightly more atomized especially in terms of its young men than the United States is in that When we talk about individuals feeling
isolated and alone.
But then I was thinking, Japan, though, has a very, very distinct and strong sense of manners
and
honor.
So maybe
these things aren't going, don't always have to go together in the way that I was suggesting they did.
And that would be grounds for at least some kind of optimism or, you know, or pessimism that means that we're actually going down, we're making two mistakes at the same time.
Yeah, to some extent, I do wonder,
with respect to Japan how it seems like much of this is probably enforced at a familial level which just kind of actually fits with what I was saying earlier that families are somewhat impervious to this in other words my guess is most of these manners are taught at early ages schools too to some extent uh or maybe another example of like you haven't totally eliminated it and I don't know if that is a good thing or a bad thing because the Japanese family though may be successful at inculcating manners is not successful continuing right now there's just not many
Japanese people anymore uh the stat I always tell my students is there's more adult diapers sold in Japan than baby diapers
uh
so that's
that mature yeah yeah
literally so I I perhaps uh if you have a strong culture to begin with that you can almost have some sort of momentum carry your family's forward to continuing to teach manners but uh I do think losing civil society
ultimately maybe will kill the, I don't know, the fertile lands that's there for that in the first place, right?
Great.
You'll have manners for the last two generations.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
So I was, I don't know, like something like Pokemon Go came to mind and maybe online dating or something where it starts off, you know, with text and impersonal things, but then
turns into things people do together and so I wonder how many other innovations there could be to where there becomes a mix of physicality and the you know social media or whatever it is that you're doing the online part.
I think Pokemon Go is better than staring at your phone.
when it's not augmented virtual reality.
And I think online dating is better than dating an AI avatar, right?
But I do think that, you know, even like speed dating at a bar or whatever, that to me seems where you're actually in the presence of another human being that you have to, you know, smell.
I think that we lose some sense.
So it's better than the worst, but it's but I still think it's it's airing in a way that
I think it's a problem.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of the difficulties here is that I actually think that point somewhat reinforces Justin's point because online dating is notorious for bad manners between people.
People just like, they'll message for a few days and they'll just stop talking to the person or they'll agree to go on a date and they just won't show up.
That happened before online dating, but my understanding is it's the norm in online dating, and someone has never done online dating before.
But my understanding is you kind of expect conversations to actually end nowhere.
Or if they end somewhere, it's at least maybe a place that we wouldn't.
really considered to be good mannered places anyways, but that's a different story.
So I'll tell a couple things about marketplace.
So I'm a big Facebook marketplace buying used.
I've always been a garage sale or whatever.
I love deals.
I'm kind of a deal junkie.
And so just on Monday, I went to buy a refrigerator for this property that I'm doing.
And I get in there and it's still in their kitchen.
It's still hooked up.
And I thought, you know, a lot of times it's in the garage or whatever.
But so I ended up
spending a good hour, hour and a half, dismantling this thing, talking with this guy.
He ended up being a nice guy.
I learned he had a restaurant chain down in Texas and he moved into the neighborhood to be near his grandkids because I kind of commented like he had just bought this house, you know, that this is kind of a big house for you, just you and your retired spouse.
And I learned it was $750,000 in Leewood for a decent house, but not a mansion.
So anyway, a lot of these incidents
things that that to me make make it my life better and so but on the same front there's a lot of people with marketplace they don't know how to handle that in terms of manners not showing up not letting people know I'll be there at three o'clock and then they never tell you that they're running late and so I I think that's why I'm a five-star person like also text them you know
GPS says I'll be there at 310 or something.
I'm running a little bit behind, whatever, but it's amazing how people just ghost you and do other things on Marketplace.
I'm going to be listing that place for rent, and I know I'll deal with a lot of mismaners on that, so.
Yeah.
All right, any other little closing comments?
Let's go far around.
Yeah, let's fart around.
Continue to fart around, people.
It's fun.
So, all right, well, this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.
I'd like to thank you all for listening and please pass this along to friends and family that might like to take a listen.
Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.
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Well, happy weekend.
It's a Saturday after tax day.
We've all survived our state and federal taxes.
Now onward and upward here on KXEL, the Jacobson Group 1540, 100.5.
You're clear.
channel 50,000 watt blowtorch caraming across 20 United States and four Canadian provinces on the AM signal alone plus FM and as always you can listen live.
It is time every week the midpoint of the program for the Hames Homes interview.
We are so fortunate we've got Clint Hames from the great
multi-generational family, founded by Kurt and Norma Hames, Hames Homes, the Homes people, manufactured homes, and Clint is great to have you back on the air.
Hey, we survived tax season, now let's go and chase some good interest rates and a percolating economy and let's get into a safe, affordable, beautiful manufactured home.
Yes, yeah, we're looking forward to it.
We've already seen quite a few people coming in to visit us, bringing in their tax returns and using it for a down payment for a good manufacturing home.
Yes, you guys have done it so well for so long.
And I want you to just talk, Clint, about your location.
I just believe this is a beautiful location because you're in Southwest Cedar Rapids.
It's almost a pastoral rural setting in the background.
And yet you're literally
minutes away from all the great retail, whether it's groceries or minards, the airport is close by, the hospitals are close by, you got universities close by, you're really in the cat bird seat.
You're absolutely right, I mean we're really in the center of a lot of important things in our town.
We were on the southwest side just off Wiley Boulevard and close to Stony Point Road, so you're gonna hop on Highway 30 and head to Iowa City or you can
stay local and go to Walmart, Target, all the local shopping centers are just nearby here.
And you guys, they've got these wonderful communities, of course.
If you take a browse, I really encourage you to get out there physically like I have done and look.
at just the tremendous aesthetics there.
Summit View and Grand View.
They're neighbors and they're self-contained communities in their own way with beautiful lights and freshly paved streets, landscaping, amenities like parks.
You've even got, and it's important in this day and age, you've got storm shelters too.
Talk about some of these great amenities at your locations there at Summit View and Grand View.
Oh, happily.
I mean, we have each community has two playgrounds.
We've got a dog park here in our Grandview location.
And then top of mind right now is storm shelters.
Both communities have two storm shelters.
Whenever we even get a sniff of bad weather, those storm shelters are unlocked for folks to use.
And hopefully we don't need them, but they're here because we live in the Midwest.
And it's always at risk.
Yeah, this is really important.
You know, your process, it isn't about excluding anybody, it's just about setting clear expectations from the start.
And I think that your homeowners really appreciate Clint knowing that their neighbors have gone through the same process.
I think it creates a stronger sense of stability and pride throughout your two locations.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
I mean, and the people who live here, they appreciate it.
You know, they want to be surrounded by like-minded people.
right.
It's not about excluding people.
Um, it is just about setting that initial expectation and something that's different from us, uh, from other communities.
Um, we don't charge any application fees.
So, uh, there's, there's no money, uh, exchange or anything like that.
This is just part of protecting her
here with Clint Alderman from Hames homes.
You know, Clint, I've been out there on
various occasions to your great locations.
And I would tell you that every time I'm out there, it's clean, it's well kept.
These are respectful neighborhoods.
You've got a consistent standard that I think people can count on.
It's very predictable.
And, you know, what I also noticed when I'm out there with you guys is your team is always there.
You've got people there that make that process simple and straightforward.
You guys always are there to answer questions.
I see it help people walk through the app process and
It's really that family ethos, that culture of helpfulness, really makes the whole process easy, doesn't it?
It really
does.
I mean, we've been blessed with a lot of good people here that work in our both community offices as well as our outside community managers.
So they're helping people get signed in with the community, explaining the rules, helping out really just in a variety of different ways.
And Curtis and I are here to help people through the buying process, picking the right home, getting the right find.
financing, setting people up for success at, you know, right from the start.
Here with Clint Aldman from Hames Homes.
Clint, can you just give us just a quick tour of Summit View and Grand View?
How are they alike?
How are they different?
And the amenities that you would find in those two communities that have this beautiful pastoral setting, you see an ag background and yet you're five minutes from all the retail, the airport, the hospitals,
You guys situated in the best of both worlds, literally.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And we're both communities are within less than a quarter mile of each other, owned by the same people, or managed in the same way.
Both the communities have about 800 and some home sites.
And kind of the biggest difference is Grandview is a couple of years newer, and then we have more room for expansion over here.
So we have some streets that have bigger home sites.
Your lot rents a little bit higher, but you get a little bit more space.
A lot of the home sites have like newer, new-ish double whites.
So the homes themselves can be bigger, but both communities have playgrounds for children to play in.
The Grandview community has a dog park.
We've got walking trails in both communities, storm shelters in both communities, and a community office in each
community.
generation family-owned business.
They've been operating in Cedar Rapids, Marion since 1969.
I've known these people for half a century.
They're quality people with a Christian faith-oriented approach to business and everything.
All you have to do is look at the testimonials of their residents, you know.
Clarence and Marge Salisbury say we were indeed impressed with our dealings with the Hame staff.
Also, the crew that set up the home was efficient and polite.
There's just so many.
And if you look online, they've got some beautiful spacious homes.
Guys, I see 1,800 square foot homes.
You got some beautiful three bed, two baths going on, Clint.
We really do.
I mean, we've been
We've had a lot of traffic here recently, so a lot of our pre-owned homes have been taken up very quickly, but we've got some really nice new homes.
A new single whites, 1,200 square foot, three bedrooms, two baths, starting at 85,000.
And then they just kind of go up from there as you get more floor space from there.
And we've got a home with a double section or a grand view location, 17, almost 1,800 square foot with the two stalls.
Guys, get out there and look up.
Clint Curtis and Troy and Barb and the whole gang see how easy home ownership can be.
These are affordable manufactured homes in eastern Iowa and you know for three generations the Hames Whomps people have been providing this comfort and beauty and value to East Iowa homeowners.
Can you believe it Clint?
over 13,000 of these homes sold in this past half century.
It's amazing.
I mean, we've been we've been very blessed with with good ownership.
Kurt Norma set the set the stage from the very beginning and doing things the right way.
And, you know, that's caught on with with other other people here in eastern Iowa.
And they continue to come back and see us.
And it's fun to hear from people who come in and visit us or shopping again.
And they remember shopping or buying from Kurt Norma back in the night.
It's a very cool thing and we're very proud of what we do here.
Very much so.
We've got some of those commercials, too, that I want to submit to my Iowa Broadcast News Association group for Iowa History.
And guys, you want to go to Hames, the homeless people, where you're going to find that old-fashioned community spirit, quiet, safe neighborhoods, where folks have a quick, friendly smile and wave.
And Clint, we're going to try to get out there for a remote here in May.
And it'll be a lot of fun seeing you guys and seeing that flagpole with old glory and the Iowa Liberties, we prize rights, we maintain a blue background flag along with your POW, MIA flag.
You guys have always been so good to our veterans of our wars and defending our country.
Clint, tell our folks how they can find you guys in person with the car, by telephone,
And of course, online digitally, they need to check this out and tell them how to get there,
Clint.
Most certainly will.
And it's if you want to shop us online, it's hemeshomes.com.
Otherwise, you can reach us by phone and kind of answer any of your questions.
Here's 319-377-4863.
And if you want to come visit us here on site, it's 5410 Wabash Street, Southwest.
We're right off Stony Point Road and Wilson Avenue.
If you're coming from
Hi 151 or Wiley Boulevard right on the corner.
We have a huge beautiful billboard says Hames Holmes and next left and you just follow the directions It'll bring you right here
Clint all then we thank you because you and your family by sponsoring this program you guys have bragging rights the number one Award winner I were broadcast news association for 2025 large medium and small market radio First place
the Jacobson group here on KXEL, sponsored by Hames Homes.
Congratulations, Clint.
Thank you.
Thank you.
I appreciate it.
And guys, we'll be back after this station identification.
You're listening to KXEL, the mighty 50,000 watt North America's original blowtorch here, right out of Eastern Iowa, 1540, 100.5.
Thanks to Hames Homes, the Homes people.
Economics is the study of human choice in the world we live.
Faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
By investigating faith in economics, we can learn how they lead to human flourishing.
This is the Faith in Economics podcast, a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Welcome to our show.
My name is Russ McCullough.
and I'm the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics at Ottawa University and also the founder and director of the Gortney Institute.
And today is a special day.
We're here at Creighton University where we've brought seven different universities together with young minds and some old minds like ours to help talk about various issues.
The title of our symposium is Humanomics, Exploring Humanomics, Economics, Ethics, and the Institutions That Shape Us.
So,
That is, I'll have Dr. Michael Thomas talk a little bit more about that.
He is the Associate Professor of Economics and Finance here at Creighton.
He is also a George Mason university grad, so he's very much in the free enterprise line of thinking and freedom and liberty and all that stuff.
But really the special thing we do is bring in relationships.
And so it's very much bringing in some new aspects that many times get overlooked.
in economics.
And so Dr. Thomas, I'm going to pass it to you to introduce our other two special guests that are here.
Thank you so much.
I think we've been doing the humanomics symposium here for about six years.
And the things that we ask are, what's missing from the way we do economics?
And how can we look at places where economists did?
traditionally not looked deeper.
And that's kind of what I want to do today, what we've been doing this morning in small group breakout sessions.
And that's why we asked Dr. Mark Koyama, an economic historian at George Mason University to come and give a talk last night.
He opened our conversation last night and his work uses the tools of institutional economics to explain some of history's most persistent puzzles.
One example of this is why did medieval Europe
hold on to a religious ban on lending an interest or usury prohibitions for as long as it did, even though it constrained economic development.
So that's just an example of one topic that he's talked about last night, that he also has published research on.
And this shows what institutional analysis can do at its best, take history seriously, explain persistence in institutions without assuming
that they are necessarily efficient and to test specific claims against the evidence.
We also have Dr. Stephanie Haifle, who's a scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, whose work sits at the intersection of political economy, social theory, and economic sociology.
She's developed her conversation around authors like Eleanor Ostrom, whose institutional analysis of common pool resources
and Viviana Zelitzer's Economic Sociology of Circuits of Commerce.
And she's worked with Virgil Henry Store, and they've published a collection of essays on this topic, Living Better Together in 2023.
And so we've invited them to help us really dig deeper into places where economics, as you might learn it in an undergrad classroom, has sort of pushed these questions to the side, and we want to return to those questions and focus on them today.
All right.
Well, we'll start with Dr. Koyoma.
You wrote a book, How the World Became Rich.
What's the secret sauce?
How did the world become rich?
Great.
Happy to be here.
So there is no secret sauce.
I mean, that's one of the conclusions of our book.
What we intended to do in that book was to provide an overview of the recent up-to-date scholarship in economic history and in development economics, bring them together and trying to pass out
the factors which may or may not have been important for the origins of economic growth.
So there's a contrast between our book and many others on the market where those books are pushing a specific preferred thesis of the author.
So it might be institutions, it might be geography, it might be culture.
We teach academic history.
I've been teaching the course of academic history for more than 15 years.
And so the natural way for me to teach up is actually to present a wide array of theories and take them seriously in their own terms.
And that's.
precisely what Jared and I have set out to do.
The first part of the book actually is precisely that.
It's the role of geography, role of institutions, role of culture.
So we're really drawing on other people's scholarship as much as our own.
We're summarizing some works which I think are quite well known, like Jared Diamond's work, but other works which maybe many of you would have never have heard about had you not read them in our chapter.
And then what we did later in the book is we're like, okay, so these these theories all have evidence for them.
They internally consist, simply makes sense, but
how much explanatory power do we have when we apply them to like the particular historical question of like when why and when did economic growth take place and that why and when question has a specific answer which is we it happened in western europe and it happened predominantly in the british isles around about like the dating is going to vary people have preferred dates but roughly in late 17th to
early 19th century.
The classic dating for God's revolution is around 1750, so around about the time Adam Smith was writing the world formations, which is important in conjunction, I think.
And so when we do that, we get into the weeds a little bit more historically.
We tell a bit more of a narrative account of
precisely the types of innovations which were taking place.
That stuff is kind of standard, you know, many histories of industrial revolution tell you about spinning Jenny and so on.
But what we then do is we take the story forward.
So we think about, okay,
Growth happens in the UK.
Why does it spread to Germany and the United States as quickly as it does?
So why is growth initially being diffused?
And why is there a second industrial revolution which is focused on Germany, the US, and maybe Belgium?
And why then does it diffuse?
And why is that diffusion uneven?
And so that brings us to the present day where you have the process of development well underway in many parts of the world.
But there's still maybe a billion people living in poverty.
who've hardly been touched by this process.
So yeah, the geography part is interesting.
I think a lot of people look at Africa and it's like, well, are they just poor because they're stuck in the middle without areas to go?
And then we've got Hong Kong that has basically no natural resources.
So when you talk about spreading it from England to Germany and the spread, what was really spreading?
Was it resources or what was
spreading?
So it's predominantly ideas.
The British actually prohibit the exports of, they didn't allow engineers to leave the country and we tried to prohibit them from leaving the country, particularly we don't want them to go to France because they got taken with them like you know they're blueprints.
I mean actually they don't want the Americans to get like you know the blueprints of various kind of like you know steam engines and stuff they're building but it's the diffusion of ideas so here we're not so much we're doing our own work per se but building really on the work of John McKay recently
one Nobel Prize in economic history.
So John McKair's argument is, there has to be some explanation for the extraordinary innovation we see occurring in that part of Northwest Europe in the 18th century.
And that relies on like culture and ideas, but also on institutions.
And so when we ask like, why does it spread?
Why does, why does like the textile
technology spread to North America.
So you have textile mills in New England by the 1790s.
They're behind the British ones in terms of they're not on the cutting edge, but they have the advantage of the US, which has abundant natural resources.
So cotton textiles, the canonical industry of the first industrial revolution spreads rapidly to North America, and it spreads to some other parts of Europe.
It doesn't spread to Egypt or India.
very rapidly.
Eventually, it spreads to India, doesn't go to Egypt.
And so like, that's a puzzle.
And you've got to think about like, what are the barriers to it diffusing?
And so, you know, institutional barriers, cultural barriers, that could also be geographic barriers, you know, any seven levels of humidity and so on to spin, spin cotton.
So ideas of ultimate drive of things, but they, on their own, may not produce new goods.
You need to be embedded in an actual economy.
Transport networks need to be imposed.
And so going just
very quickly back to Sub-Saharan Africa, and the fact that if you're not on the inland river and you're not near the coast, it's going to be very difficult for you to get a textile industry going because the cheapest way to transport textiles is by sea, basically open water transport.
It's never going to be economical to fly one dollar to missions.
And so the geography is there as a constraint, but ultimately we focus on ideas and institutions, I think.
Well, let's bring Stephanie
into the picture.
Michael, what do you got for her?
Well,
Stephanie, I've got a question.
So I'm listening to this institutional account and I'm thinking, okay, it kind of makes sense.
This sounds like economics and I can see the incentive story here and individual choice.
But I don't think that's what's at the center of your work, especially when it looks at Viviana Zelitzer.
So could you tell us, like, why would we look at relationships and how does that change what we're doing as economists when we start dance?
Yeah, great.
Thank you and thanks for having me on and join all of the conversations that we're having today, thinking a lot about how all of these ideas interconnect.
And so one kind of like this idea of sort of like what's missing in economics, you can think of institutional analysis as there's new things happening there, but it's also a return to kind of a bigger picture of how people were even studying how.
the world becomes rich or why we're stagnant and poor.
Going back to Adam Smith and others, they weren't just explicitly thinking about what became defined as economics.
Over the 20th century, they looked at the political and legal frameworks, they looked at markets, they looked at ideas and culture, and so a lot of the importance of these ideas coming back.
and figuring out that it's not just one over the other, but a combination of a lot of things that are happening, I think is as much of a return to more richer and fuller economics.
I think all of that is super important for understanding how the world works.
We can think of also these big trends and where they go.
We can think of what are good institutions, how were big ideas spread.
One of the things that's always fascinated me though was
Okay, that's all very important.
And we make policy prescriptions and other things based on these results.
But how do real people everywhere actually deal with all of these things?
And how do they experience it?
You know, it's not just about being the policymaker who comes up with an idea, but how is it actually affecting people as they work on the ground?
And so what I found really enticing about the ideas of Eleanor Ostrom and Viviana Salazar was they really went back to looking at
Now, we have this understanding now, what are the actual people?
How do they interact and what do they do?
And how does that in return shape the institutions and shape our life as we go around them?
And so, one, we might have a fuller picture of what people are like.
They might have...
their utility functions and the constraints and the benefits that they have might be more complex than we might think of in some of our simple models.
But also we might have a richer story of why maybe some of our predictions don't play out as much or how we might take into account how people are interacting and how they might respond to change or evade policies or make it so that things aren't...
as they go along and so you know a couple of examples of that is you know within standard economics Eleanor Ostrom's saw this and she was definitely within the tradition of institutions and then kind of took that down to the ground to the to the bottom levels but she was looking at theories like tragedy of the commons which is
very clever.
It gets to something we've all experienced before.
We're here with a bunch of undergrad students and many of them have roommates and I'm sure your kitchens aren't the greatest in of hygiene at the moment.
But she also realized we don't, it doesn't stop there.
The tragedy of the comments has been utilized to not just say we should have private property when maybe there's not there, but also to have reasons for government intervention or regulation or things to step in.
She's like, I don't think that's really...
I think we're missing something.
And so she went around the world and saw how people devised ways to climb out of the tragedy of the commons.
And so that has a lot of lessons for how we think about policy and what we do.
For many of you, if your kitchens are in rough shape, you might have tried to figure out how to label all your food so people don't steal it or maybe have a chore wheel of what's going on.
We evolve and we change until ideas.
And so that allowed for us to think about not only how are people actually living in the world based on these ideas, but how they are also possible.
It's possible to devise our own governance mechanisms as well.
So we're not just thinking about, when we think about political economy, the rules and how we then get people under it to do what we want, but they have agency and ideas and creativity that can change what that is.
Viviana Zellazar similarly
you know said that you know the context of how we interact our relationships aren't just constraints or how we interact but they are why and they do shape how we interact in these ideas and so we might not it might take us a bit to understand why remittances are so powerful in spreading ideas and and resources back when people immigrate and move and how
you know, we might think about economic development initiatives and all of these other things.
It's super important, but the flow of remittances through personal ties is dramatically higher than the funding we spend on any of those things.
And why is that so important?
Now, of course, that means that you have to have those relations, but it also means that you might know what they need and what they want and how to interact in those ideas.
And so, you know, if somebody is really coming to
a new country for more economic opportunity, you know, should we expect them to care about care about people back home or should we expect them to do those things?
Some of the research I've been working on now is to kind of get out a sense of how maybe we think about remittances in the domestic context.
You know, people move away from their home towns.
And what does that mean?
Is it a brain drain only or is there things that are coming back?
What are our obligations and and what do we think about those ideas?
Similarly, she talks about how money
is, of course, an important medium of exchange, but it holds more power in our lives than we think about.
And how does that change the way we respond to issues and shocks and other things as well?
You know, how we categorize money who we exchange with in those ways changes the way we think about things.
And so as our market extends and we have more options, we might
pay for a bunch of things we never would have thought of in the past, right?
Like, if my mom comes to visit and she helps me clean my house, I probably don't give her a wage that might be weird.
But if I hire somebody to clean my house, that's possible.
And so we have all of those certain things, but also explains why some of that works.
Now, of course, in some areas that changes, some of Zell's work looks at, again, coming back to the college as this kind of microcosm of how to think about how we interact.
you might get thrown into a community that has vast different incomes and educational backgrounds and all those things.
How do you learn to interact as peers?
How do you deal with power dynamics that might be there?
I think what she provides is a lot of relevance and nuance that doesn't just give us a richer picture of life, but then it should hopefully make us then step back and think about, okay, when we go from understanding the big picture,
understanding the smaller picture, what does policy look like from that space rather than necessarily from stripping the humanity of how we interact?
I think maybe that answered your question.
All right.
Well, that's where we're going to wrap today.
We got lots more to talk about today.
So let's give a nice round of applause for anything so much for being here and enlightening us all.
So this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University, actually Craig University today.
I'd like to thank y'all for listening.
A five-star rating helps other people find us.
Otherwise, just pass this along to friends and family that might like to take a listen.
Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
Thanks again, guys.
Tell your friends about the podcast, kxel.com slash Jacobson, J-A-C-O-B-S-E-N.
In the meantime, listen to all the wisdom of Jeff Stein during his weekday news and commentary.
And folks, always remember and never forget to be safe, be smart, be good, be strong.
Love Jesus Christ, and God blesses everyone.
Till we meet again, have a great weekend and bye-bye!
