KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – September 13, 2025

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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 Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.

Welcome to our show today.

My name is Peter Jacobson.

I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today, we have Dr. Justin Clark, an art family professor of philosophy.

And I thanks Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel chair of economics and founder of the Courtney Institute.

All right.

So today we want to talk about minimalism and design.

And so I am not minimalizing on my new garage project.

So I don't know where Peter is going to take us on this journey, but.

I'm building a garage and I wanted to make it aesthetically blend into my house.

So I'm spending a lot more money than what I could do if I just built like a pull barn or something or something more simplistic.

And so I don't know if that's where he's taking us or not, but that was what came to mind when he brought up the topic for me.

So Peter, where do you want to go with this?

Yeah.

So I mean, the thing that made this jump into my head was.

Well, actually, there are a couple things, but the inciting incident was mainly the Cracker Barrel fiasco.

And so, for those, you know, we're talking at the end of August here.

For those of you who aren't familiar, maybe the news stories passed by now, Cracker Barrel updated their logo.

It was more minimalistic.

They took out the image of the guy and the barrel, and it was just like a yellow sign with the words Cracker Barrel on it, and that was all there was to it.

A lot of companies have done this.

They've taken their more intricate designs, and they've made them like very simple instead.

And this isn't just a principle you see in graphic design and logos, but it's something that you see with respect to housing, too.

Back when we talked about suburbia in our suburbs podcast, we all agreed that the suburbs are good and necessary.

The only thing I just like about the suburbs I've seen in the podcast is I don't like the sameness of the houses.

And I think that the design, another way to put this is I think the design of those houses tends to be minimalistic.

But I don't think that's a feature of the suburbs.

As I've thought about it more, what I've realized is any new house that's built right now, that's not like a McMansion, is being built in that style, whether it's in a suburb or not.

So if like a new house gets put up in Ottawa, it tends to be a very boring looking house at the end of the day is what I'm talking about.

And so if you go to some of the houses in Ottawa, some of the old well maintained houses, every doorway has some kind of arch with an intricate design in the woodwork.

You know, you've got built-in cabinets all over the place.

There's just little details kind of all over these old houses.

And you would never see anything like that in a like a new built standard house unless you're someone like Russ and you're trying to like accomplish something to make it aesthetically pleasing, blend in with the house and all that.

Like any other like new house build you're gonna see, what is it?

It's gonna have fake wood floors.

It's gonna have gray or white walls, usually, you know, gray kitchen, the countertops, some kind of granite, that's it.

And so I'm not saying that this is evil or bad, I get that, you know, saving money, sometimes a good thing, but I think it says something about society that we don't care about detail in the way that we used to, so.

Yeah, Killin' Beige was the...

tan that I used in all of our rental properties and I really actually like it it's in my house actually so it's just but it is kind of a beige goes with anything type of thing and so well what about the poor people I think you don't care about poor people

You got me.

No, I have to think of economies of scale, right?

So a lot of times those houses and their simplicity that all look the same or something because a house builder is able to do them at a lesser cost and therefore leads to a lesser price.

So sometimes low income housing or lower income housing, I think that's a consideration that goes into it.

It's not just because we're

boring or

just about housing.

Maybe that would make sense.

But it doesn't make sense as an explanation for why the amount of automobiles that are just white, black, gray or clay colored has exploded.

You don't see many brightly colored automobiles anymore.

If you look at pictures of a parking lot from 1986 versus now, there's a huge

difference.

It's the way that, you know, it

corporate logos, like what Peter started this out with.

If you look at the way the Google logo has changed, all these logos, you know, every single logo, they often drop the serifs on their text, so the text becomes planar.

It's a kind of...

Borgification and blandification of everything.

Yeah.

Think of the, again, the original Windows logo, which was kind of like a wavy flag shape, four different colors.

Now the Windows logo I've got on the back of my computer here, it's four squares with no color.

The only way you could make it more boring is removing three of the squares.

There's only three steps left until it's as boring as possible.

And I would also add too,

I think Russ has something in his point there, but it's important to remember that when people were building these more intricate houses, they were poorer than they are now.

So that's one thing.

That's a good

point.

The median person today is much richer than even like a wealthy person a hundred years ago, and a lot of times how these details would be added is they would be added over time.

That's how it happens.

And so for example, if you look at like the cathedrals in Europe that are huge and very detailed, they didn't start that way.

They would build like the shell of the church first, like they would build what was absolutely necessary to have church there.

And as they went, they would build up more and more of kind of the towers, the extra stuff, the details.

And so.

I agree that there is a value in being able to build basically a plain box for cheap, right?

There's a lot of those houses in this town.

There's one builder who puts them up specifically.

And I think that's valuable.

But there is a question of like, why aren't we making our plain boxes look nicer over time?

Like, why do they stay plain boxes for 30 years?

And like Justin said, you know, why is it in corporate America?

You know, is this a problem?

Maybe it's just like, I should just shut up.

Maybe aesthetics don't matter that much.

But

maybe somebody's trying to take us over like corporatism socialists This is the numbing of our minds that but but why do we have a proclivity to?

Desire that like why don't we fight back are we already lemmings I guess is the question right and we have the artsy-fartsy people that they tend to be the I'm gonna do my own thing But are they becoming less and less and why is I think what you're questioning is is mainstream America not

pushing back for a reason.

Well, I think that brings us to the Cracker Barrel example, because that's kind of interesting, is that Cracker Barrel changes its logo.

For most people, the existence of a man and a barrel on a sign is not going to affect their dining experience very much in like some sort of objective, like obvious, like measurable, we could say measurable sense.

It doesn't seem like that should make any difference, but there's massive outrage and actually Cracker Barrel stock dipped like

two, three, four, I can't remember, a large percent the day after they unveiled the new logo.

It's like really did Cracker Varyl as a company?

Did its assets lose, you

know,

one-twentieth of their value because their new sign is uglier?

And so what I think that signals is like people do in a way care about this, that maybe it's been sidelined for a while, maybe for some reason people have like just been willing to kind of let these things fall by the wayside.

But it kind of seems like people are starting to care about it again.

Whenever these companies change their logos or they use really simplistic art designs, if you've ever seen the company designs that make people look really ugly and they're blob-ish, like the cartoon people that half the companies use now.

Like people get mad about that on the internet.

It's like, why does this look so ugly?

Like why wouldn't you make it look good instead of making it look like bad and boring?

So I don't know.

You know, I'm not sure exactly where we go with the conversation.

You know, is this a problem?

Is it being solved?

Like what does the Cracker Barrel situation teach us?

I don't know.

I think the Cracker Barrel one is the same as the Bud Light one where nobody is going to get angry if White Claw does a thing with Dylan Mulvaney, right?

Who was the

Trans person but light did their marketing issue with which blew up blood light.

Yeah Nobody would have cared if that was white claw doing it I think nobody cares when Google's if Google's logo goes gray next week No, I don't think people will care that much but cracker barrel was like the kind of kitschy homey

for lack of a

better word like

lower middle class, even if you would

ask

somebody what the political profile of Cracker Barrel was, it would be on the right or side of the spectrum rather than the left.

And it's this encroachment of what I think people see as a kind of urban or modern.

It's the encroachment on specific kind of

things that are supposed to be kind of like homebases of the alternate culture.

That's why Bud Light blew up.

It was like, no, Bud Light is $17

for a 30

pack.

Yeah, Midwestern beer.

Yeah.

Bud Light is for people who need to drink a 30 pack before they walk into Cracker Barrel.

We might start getting some hate mail there.

So yeah, I think it's more like

there's these cultural totems that get touched.

And then it's like, wait, why is, why is cracker bell going the same direction that Google is?

Yeah, I think we during kind of the, oh, let's just say more woke times here.

You saw a lot of corporations that, oh, that must be what we need to do.

If that's, you know, I just saw it as out of touch CEOs and upper

corporate people going with the flow.

They just think, oh, that's what we need to do and not really doing maybe some harder investigative work on what their clients are, who they are, all that type of stuff.

And then also with the stock going down, I kind of wonder if maybe a little bit of that.

My observation during the years of business in real estate was that when companies started running like

a bunch of specials and trying to make changes, they were doing that because business was going down and they were like, oh, we better change something.

And so I think the changing of the logo maybe could have, in some investors' eyes, said, oh, something must be up with Gregor Bler.

They're an institution.

Why are they changing their logo?

They must be, you know, maybe the stock's going to go down in the future or something.

It was kind of a signal of that.

Yeah, I think you do your own something there, but both of you are really.

My view on the Cracker Barrel logo situation is that there are certain things that could be like Canary in the coal mine for certain other things.

And so if all the people who go to Cracker Barrel sort of like the old man with the barrel ass that I can, by the way, they're talking about remodeling the inside of the restaurants to to be basically simpler and less like.

And they have remodeled some of them already.

And there's no they haven't decided to stop that.

And so they they have pulled back on the logo.

they have decided they're going to change back the logo, but they haven't changed back the remodel.

And so I kind of think the whole like, you know, why is the stock dropping so much if the like the food's the same, right?

You think people like would still go to crack barrel, even if the sign is worse than it used to be.

I think it's because a lot of companies over the last five to 10 years have made this sort of Bud Light mistake that Justin's talking about, where they have seemed to say for some reason,

We think the customers are wrong actually and we're going to keep doing this and we're going to prove that we're right and the customers are wrong.

But as anybody who has looked at the world, a capitalist country for more than five years knows, the phrase, the customers are always right.

It doesn't apply to individual situations, but it does apply to the whole.

You can't tell customers over and over, no, your idea is bad, we're going to do our idea instead.

and then like just expect them to hop on board like you know there's occasionally surprises like that where it works but a lot of times it's just like a refusal to accept that the board made a bad decision and the customers don't like it right and so I think the logo is a bellwether for that if they're going to do that with the logo then they're probably going to do that with the corporate donations and the menu and

all these

other things right if you're willing to say no we don't really trust you to have an opinion about the logos and

Well, maybe the customer doesn't have that much to say, and if the customer doesn't have that much to say, they're not going to go there.

But again, the broader question is, why is that Google one this direction, now everybody else goes this direction?

The simple explanation is that it's just cheaper to have non-detailed logos.

Maybe it's easier to design plastic signs without the guy in the barrel.

I think that's understandable.

I don't think that's true though because again same reason I mentioned with the houses earlier is it's relatively cheaper to do that like you know making a plastic sign is relatively cheaper than it's ever been.

I would imagine.

So I think that this ultimately is like a big cultural question is why have we moved to a culture that for a long time it seems like was less concerned about the details because there wasn't always this pushback when people got like no one was upset when

Google changed from their kind of funny looking letters with different colors to like their current, you know, Google logo, which is just like it wrote it out, you know, some kid in their handwriting assignment wrote Google.

Yeah.

So

I don't.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good spot for a break.

And when we come back, I'm going to tell the story of the young bucks and the old codgers that I think might play into the answers here.

So we'll be back in just a bit.

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You should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.

This spring, Ottawa University is organizing a PPE league competition for politics, philosophy, and economics.

Students in this competition will compete leveraging the ideas of philosophy, politics, and economics in various events.

If you're a professor or an advisor of college students and you're interested in your school competing in PPE league this spring, contact Peter, Justin, or Russ today.

By 2030, the Gortney Institute will be known for its alumni, supporters, and participants who incorporate economic understanding with their faith in their careers, vocations, communities, and personal lives.

We have some great programming going on for high school students.

We have an online microeconomics class.

Yes, you can earn college credit for $200 by taking an online class.

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If you'd like to consider some events for your high school students or that class, please contact Justin, Peter or Russ today.

Okay, so we're back and I had an old banker that sat down with us prior to the financial crisis and he had a lot of gray hair and so

he kind of told the story of why the bank was being more aggressive even though it kind of goes against maybe some general principles and his comment was you know some of the people at the bank have never been through a recession and so this was on one of our long runs during the 80s and then well this would have been more in the 90s and 2000s prior to the 2008 financial crisis

you know I lived through the savings and loan crisis of 1984 and so they had a different perception of how to do lending and so this is where I came up with the he was an old codger and but then you got the young buck so as the CEOs and other bankers move into higher level positions they end up having hiring up

New people out of college, and then they start to become more seasoned.

Maybe when they're in their 30s, they're like, come on, old codger.

Get with the times.

We've got to keep up with the banks.

There's these new mortgage instruments that we can use, and we could be doing some lending.

And they're like, well, you never lived through the savings and loan crisis.

And so they kind of had this internal struggle between the old codgers and the young bucks.

And eventually, if there's other market forces at hand, the young bucks start to gain ground and they start to do, you know, more and more risky type of stuff.

So I think there's something here maybe with the Cracker Bear 2 that they have some people that are maybe in their 30s and 40s and that that's the younger crowd and they're like, we got to be more contemporary with our logo.

We look so old that looks like it was from 1970s and they're like,

Yeah, this is the 1970s.

I like our logo.

I bet our people like it.

And so then the young bucks start to gain ground on the old codgers and somehow in their board meeting it gets passed without necessarily having a good thumb on the pulse of their act of their clients who might not want that to happen.

So I think some of that goes on in corporate America in a variety of ways too.

That kind of the evolution of the firm and the corporate, the corporation as more seasoned people get up and then new people come in

And they want to see something they want to make it theirs.

I agree.

I think that's the pathway through this through which this functions.

It is still a question of why don't the younger people want more or an eight logo?

It's like why is it that the old logo is the more complex one in the you know new and to some extent like maybe maybe it is just random right maybe just like taste change.

There's no clear explanatory thing behind it and that's possible.

I know Justin has a theory.

I'm gonna put forward my theory kind of as quickly as I can.

It has to do with the, in France, a few years ago Notre Dame caught on fire, the cathedral, and they were rebuilding it and they decided to basically rebuild Notre Dame as it was, which I think was the right decision.

There were some crazy plans to put in like a glass dome on top.

It's like, no, please don't.

But so they rebuilt it how it was, and one of the, this is a story that I heard, I don't know to what extent it's true, but it makes sense to me.

One of the stories that I heard about this is...

They were doing work on top of one of the towers on the external side of the tower and there were some detailing on a part of the tower that was just not visible from the ground.

And so a lot of the builders are like, why would we ever detail this thing that nobody's ever gonna see?

And apparently the answer that was given to them is we're building this for God, not for people.

It kind of reminded me of Walter Williams always presented this puzzle to people in class that if people are always trying to maximize their benefit,

Why would they ever build a bridge that's going to last beyond their current generation?

And she wasn't a fan of like altruistic explanations.

And so, you know, trying to give me like altruism.

But I do think to some extent, when you have a religious moral society, to the extent that you think your actions have eternal consequences or are going to be considered in an eternal light, there is a sort of thing that pushes you.

to be more of a perfectionist or more exact or more focused on beauty when you're creating something, right?

If the thing is going to be gone in 30 years, who cares if there was any detail on it?

But if it's something that you're going to have an account of into eternity, which is how Christians actually view all work, I think, that when you give yourself an account before God, I think you're going to give yourself an account of everything you've done, including your work.

Makes a lot of sense to try to make something as beautiful as possible if that's the case.

Oh God, I have another maybe exam portal.

I'll

sneak in a Bible verse because I was do everything to the glory of God.

I just did a quick

kill.

So first Corinthians 1031 encourages believers to live their entire lives from eating, uh, eating to make, to major decisions in a way that reflects the character of him and brings praise.

I guess I thought I was reading a Bible verse.

Sorry.

The

first far

was.

Yeah.

That's what I thought.

Do

everything to the glory of God.

Yeah.

Oh, that's right.

There's the Bible.

So just

I actually quoted the Bible without reading it.

So right.

where I think this actually needs more explanation and what I think might go a little bit toward explaining it is like what Peter hinted at why are the young bucks moving towards simplicity but also not towards blandness or towards sameness like

if

you look at the way if you look at a new build of and you're not sure what's going in but they're building something on a corner near you it's going to be some kind of

restaurant, service, something, whatever.

In the old days, you would see the frames go up and go, that's going to be a pizza hut.

I know because that's how pizza huts look.

When I grew up to Taco Bell in my town, I had a bell in it.

It looked like the old California mission style.

McDonald's had arches that were huge.

Now, you cannot tell the difference between a McDonald's and a Starbucks.

or a jack-in-the-box, or whatever, they all look exactly the same.

McDonald's are brown now.

Brown is not one of McDonald's colors.

Exception being water burgers.

Big orange, big logo.

Yeah.

They're a standoff.

All In-N-Out is, all In-N-Out's look the same,

right?

That was two of

them.

But if you look at, like, what, I think McDonald's is...

Oh yeah, no, you're right.

The Starbucks McDonald's and Starbucks look identical.

And I was thinking about it because I was like, okay, well, wait a minute, I drive a white truck.

Why do I like, why do I like a white truck?

And if I bought another truck, I would buy another white truck.

And the reason I like white trucks is because white trucks are, for better or worse, like very often tradesmen trucks.

And police, I think, are less likely to pull you over in a white truck rather than a brightly colored truck.

Because police...

think of themselves as members of the working class and that's just a

I've been watching a time show so I thought

you're casing joints with your wife because it blends in with the work but um if that's the reason I like the white truck because it kind of blends in it seems like that might be the explanation for why people drive less

It's a way of blending in fashion.

Logos aren't as huge anymore.

A lot of people wear plain, plainer clothes, I think.

Not Russ, of course.

His shirt is so loud I can barely talk over it.

And I think maybe part of this has to do with the fact that after the rise of social media, one of the worst things that can happen to you is like being singled out.

as an individual online and just being like mob.

It's much safer to be part of just to be just a bland part of the whole and go where the crowd goes.

This is, you know, this is would be in effect of tall poppy syndrome would be this idea.

Okay, well, I don't want to do anything.

I don't want that.

You know, what was the name of that Tom Wolf book, the candy colored cream color,

you

know, about the Congress, you know.

I don't want a car that says there goes Justin Clark every time I'm driving it with, you know, a unique horn or whatever.

I just want to blend in because I don't want to be picked out.

And I think that if that's correct, that what you would expect to see is this kind of move towards blandness.

The 80s, the 80s have young bucks coming up too.

What the young bucks were telling you to do is wear brightly colored shirts and feather your hair or whatever, which is different.

And I think.

It's different in a way that signals like this desire to conform rather than on the margins at least a desire to kind of stick out as an individual.

What do you think's behind that then?

Because you mentioned like the internet, you know, mobbing people, like that could be an explanation.

It's like, not only do people get mobbed, but people also get made fun of on the internet, right?

Like someone will be wearing a ridiculous outfit and someone will take a picture of them and like post it on like Twitter and be like, what is this guy?

What are his shoes?

Look at his shoes, right?

Like is that what's going on there?

Is there something behind it?

Like that's more is it?

you know, maybe we're in a more authoritarian society and so like we have people with eyes everywhere.

That's a culture that is looking for scapegoats all the time.

Then anything that makes you like particularly unique can be

looking for scapegoats and have the ability to exploit them with their phones or whatever to you.

So that having that tool is a fundamental change from 20, 30 years ago, I guess.

Yeah, I think so.

I do

I would add maybe the wealth dimension there.

So it or maybe not wealth but equality dimension really is honestly what we're talking about because we were talking about how people were poorer when they were adding details to their house back then but the the uniform measure was that like everybody was still adding details right like even if you go back into an old small house you're gonna see the detailed archways and all this stuff still.

But nowadays people aren't doing that and so if you

add a bunch of detail to your house, it signals something about your relative status, right?

And so, if you have an extremely detailed interior and someone comes to visit, it says, I am relatively more wealthy, even if that's not true, than most of the people who are around me.

Again, if you're in a new house, because you're taking time to do something and spend money on something that nobody else is, right?

Details are considered sort of like the last piece of the house.

And so maybe there's something there where like wealth inequality, even though it's gotten better over the last hundred years, maybe it's become more of a salient issue.

And so for the same reason as we've been talking about, people are afraid to like stand out as like the guy in the friend group who has the really detailed house.

Because that's the same as being like the richest guy in the friend group.

Again, even if that's not true.

And you probably don't want to be your least successful, you know, material member of your friends group.

But you also don't want to be way richer than everyone either, I don't think.

Like, there's something, you know, incohesive in today's world of being too wealthy.

And so, I don't know.

Maybe that's part of it.

Maybe it's not.

I don't know.

Well, what my explanation doesn't touch and what would be an argument against it is the brutalism and architecture started way before any of the stuff that I'm talking about.

It didn't

even

happen before the 80s.

Yeah.

You know, so is it

like different causes and all these different domains.

I don't know.

So that's a counter example to me.

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So first of all, I thought people drove white cars because they stay cleaner.

He doesn't show the dirt as much, but that doesn't explain the black cars because it was

the

opposite.

No, white cars are pretty good.

Yeah, they don't show the dirt as much.

So that's what

I always had.

I just leave the dirt on my car and then they can't see anymore.

I'm shocked you don't know when a car would stay.

I've been to a car wash before.

Yeah, good one.

How much of this is people trying to avoid conflict?

Like, I think there's more of that now, like, you be you, and I'll be you, and let's not fight about each other, you know, just...

And I think that's a natural human thing.

I just don't know if that's grown more with the lately culturally that of avoiding conflict and maybe it ties into the phones and that's part of the conflict.

Like I don't want to raise a ruckus because I'm going to be filmed and it's going to go all over the internet.

Sort of.

But the kind of a unifying issue of all these recent explanations is that in terms of like ornate design and architecture, which again, maybe as Jess pointed out, maybe these are just different things that are happening in different fields.

But I would think that it was more important to avoid conflict a hundred years ago.

Like you didn't want to be a pariah in your town a hundred years ago and nowadays like that people don't even worry about that anymore, right?

Like what would that even mean?

And you know a hundred years ago people you couldn't have stuck out for having an ornate design on a doorway a hundred years ago because everybody did, right?

And so like

It seems like there is something about just caring about the minor things that's just not there anymore.

Apart from this uniformity desire, apart from conflict avoidance, apart from wealth signaling, it just seems like the taste, if products reflect taste, which I think we're starting to see that maybe they don't completely, seems like the taste is more minimalistic.

And I have friends who really love minimalism, by the way.

I have friends who are into graphic design and they're like, oh, I'm so glad that, you know,

These companies have started making all their logos the same color blue.

I don't

know.

Interesting though that it's your friends that are into graphic design.

The people who are designing the things are apparently not on the same page as the rest

of us.

What you said about just now and about Notre Dame reminded me of the old, was it Van Halen, their writer where they said they didn't want any green M&Ms in their bowl.

and everyone for like decades was like this is this

is

sanity and then you talked to them and they said no we were touring with the largest mobile electrical unit that anyone had ever played music with before if wires were in the wrong spot somebody could easily die

We put no green M&M's in our rider so that we knew if we saw a green M&M, somebody was not paying attention to our list of instructions.

And so we knew that we needed to go double check all of the wiring that they had set up.

And it seems to me that like that's another role that ornate-ness can play.

It's like, it's a signal that it wasn't, I mean, like the reason maybe you want

the pillars on Notre Dame to have ornate things at the top is because only somebody who really knows what they're doing can do that kind of stuff.

So I wonder how much of this is a swing.

And my question is, will we ever get back to having more?

Do you think it could gravitate that way?

And one of my thoughts were maybe AI would actually help do that.

Like you could more easily, you don't have to use your brain quite as much.

Of course, if AI is feeding off all the other bland stuff, I don't know if it'll get creative or not.

But I was just thinking,

Maybe it'll be less costly to become more detailed, I guess.

And maybe that'll make it easier to swing back that direction, or I think it leads with people, unfortunately, but it's just thought I

had.

Yeah, so I'm gonna say yes and no to answer that question.

I think it will swing back in like a literal objective sense.

And so the reason I think that is that there are a lot of people, and I'm gonna get into this in a second, especially in the political right who are young,

who are consciously aware of the fact that our societies become less ornate and they don't like that.

They see that as a symptom of modernism.

And so I think those people are intentionally going to live in a way that corrects that.

And so in a sense, we'll swing back.

But in another sense, that's not actually swinging back.

If you are intentionally reintroducing, you know, ornate things into society, that's different than ornate things being the natural outgrowth of society, I think.

And so, there's a sense in which I think it will return, but there's also a sense in which whatever we had that caused that in the first place has not and will not come back.

At least, you know, it hasn't.

And so far, this is going to be a potential decision, I don't think.

we can say that it will come back.

So yeah, maybe it's like the answer to the second part.

Like maybe the original thing that caused us to want to design things in like a very intricate way.

Maybe that will someday naturally arise, but it's not right now.

What's arising right now is like the intentional desire to move away from modernism.

So moving away from modern simplistic design is different than just having more innate design, right?

It's like a counter reaction rather than a natural outgrowth.

So yes and no.

That's my answer.

I can see also like AI making it cheaper to customize pre-fab, you know,

in a

sense,

a fab

stuff.

Making your AI 3D printing put together, right?

Yeah.

And then the retort, there is something like, yeah, but then, I mean, then you're just kind of like, how, I really kind of honestly different is that.

And then you could go like, well,

Justin you were just yelling about people having different car in different colored cars It seems like maybe if you go back a hundred year or you know a hundred years people would say You know we used to have all these different kind of forms of transportation People were you know the streets were filled with people walking and carriages and so-and-so and then you know flash forward to 1958 and everyone's in a car That was the move towards Borgification you

60 years later complaining that the cars are all the same color.

The horses have left the barn a long time ago.

So, I don't know, maybe not.

How much of our trendsetters are diffused now, too?

I think back to some...

movie star, rock star, so feel around or somebody that would impact.

They were wearing something outlandish or detailed or beautiful and then that would kind of set the trend whereas now you've got millions of influencers and it's a lot more diffused I think.

I don't know if the internet contributes to that a little bit.

Yeah, I don't know how to answer that question because one funny thing is that despite the general attitude of like society towards more simplistic design there are still at places where like really complex intricate designs are leveraged and so like I think of like you know when celebrities have like

those charity dinners and they'll come out in the ridiculously looking clothes.

Now you can say a lot of things about those clothes and the dresses and all of them, but one thing you can't say is they're not simplistic, right?

They're not, you know, except they'll maybe when they work trash bags, like I know that happens sometimes, but you know, sometimes they have these ridiculous looking but still very intricate things.

And so, you know, I don't know that like we can blame like thought leaders.

I think this is a spontaneous phenomena.

If we talk about, you know,

Austrian economics, we talk about spontaneous order.

That's the results that comes about by human action, but not human design.

I don't think there's a guy out there who's like, it's time to remove the beauty from architecture.

And I don't think maybe people have thought that before, but there's never been a guy who's been doing that and is like leading the charge and he's led to what we have today.

Again, that doesn't mean no one has ever thought those words and tried to make it happen.

But

I think whatever is going on is a little bit beyond like this conscious like leadership sort of thing.

And I'm not

saying that's what you're saying.

You weren't saying that.

You know, does the decentralization contribute?

I don't know.

But I think what's really leading it is whatever is influencing the influencers, right?

So you made me think of a devil versus God thing since you brought up bringing glory to God would lead to the making things more beautiful.

Is it

Whenever we get into these cultural things and spontaneous, you know, how much of that is the devil working to make things bland so that we're shifting away from God?

It could be, we want to get into that type of influence.

It could be all part of that big picture.

Yeah, I think if anybody wants to think about this, seriously, they should read the third of C.S.

Lewis's Space Trilogy, which you can read independently, or you can read as part of the trilogy.

Read the trilogy,

it's awesome.

There's a great scene where he goes into a room, and everything is just a little askew, and every painting is just a little wrong.

actually one of the funny things is the hands have too many fingers, right, on all the paintings.

You're remembering details I didn't remember.

Little details, like the nose is slightly off center for a person's face.

So I do think actually that is silly as it might sound to some listeners.

I think aesthetics matter.

I think there is a standard for beauty.

I think some things are objectively more beautiful than other things.

And so insofar as minimalism takes us away from beauty, which I don't always think it does.

I think sometimes minimalism can be beautiful.

Sure.

But it isn't always more beautiful than, you know, I don't think removing all the details from Notre Dame would make it a better building.

And so in so far as it is, yeah, I'd see that as a part of the long-term spiritual battle.

I think that also, if you want to think about this as a spontaneous phenomenon, then as the world becomes more interconnected and as there's no such thing...

as much anymore as like West Coast culture versus East Coast culture or whatever.

You see these trends all over at the same time that lends to the perception that, oh my gosh, everything is borgifying right now.

When it may be the same dynamic was taking place in the past, but due to the fact that there wasn't as much communication that just wasn't happening

in the same direction and in the same

places

at the

same times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's a good

point.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good space to wrap.

And so I'd like to thank you all for listening.

This has been a production of the Wharton Institute here at Ottawa University.

And please feel free to pass this along to your friends and family.

A five-star rating helps other people find us.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

But Peter said one more thing.

If you want to fix this problem, add a small detail to your house.

Oh, good.

Yeah.

That sounds like a good spot to wrap.

Thanks.

Music playing

John Jacobson taking this break in action to do our business highlight superstar of the week track like we hear on KXEL on the Jacobson report on a warm September Saturday the Hawkeyes kicking it off again here later and it's so great to have Barbara Hames Bryant the matriarch of Hames Homes affordable beautiful safe

manufactured homes and you hear that Neil Diamond instrumental in the background.

This is a multi-generational family business that Barbara, when you teed it up with your great father and mother, Kurt and Norma Hames, I was a young buck, not even a teenager.

I was a fourth grader and I heard that Neil Diamond music and I knew it was a Kurt and Norma Hames commercial on then W.

M-T-2 now, K-G-A-N.

Boy, those were the days, Barbara.

Oh, I remember them well.

I'm about the same age as you, John.

So I was a kid when all that started.

I got teased mercilessly from my classmates about, oh, is that your common dad on TV?

Oh, really?

Do you live in one of those homes?

I'm like, no, just for sale.

Well, you know what?

They would be proud of you because it is bigger and better.

than ever.

We have evolved a long way from what then erstwhile terms were called mobile homes.

beginning in the earliest days in a trailer format, if you would.

These now are spacious, high quality.

They're so high quality, we were talking before the going on air barber.

Those structures did the best during the trade show five years ago.

They withstood the trade show better than most conventional buildings.

None of our homes tipped over as predicted by the National Weather Service.

Our mobile homes were not damaged or destroyed.

They did have some shingle and siding damage, same as everybody else, but they all stayed absolutely upright and fixed to their foundation.

Barbara, you've got two beautiful communities down there in not far from the

Southeast Iowa Airport there in Cedar Rapids, not far from retail and restaurants, but yet in a pastoral setting there in Southwest Cedar Rapids, really beautiful.

ag land in the background.

You have these two beautiful communities, Summit View and Grand View.

I've been to both.

They both have their wonderful character.

What I noticed is green space and beautiful landscaping and lighting and new streets and amenities, whether it's a dog park or frisbee or food pantry.

You have underground storm shelters.

You have enhanced security.

Summit View and Grand View.

It's like living in two idyllic cities.

It's almost like you're the

mayor of two thriving communities, Barbara.

Love it.

They say it feels like they're living in the country, but with all the amenities of living in the city, like you said, we're not far from the Eastern Iowa Airport.

We're close to CRST.

We're maybe 10 or 12 minutes from downtown.

We are, you know, several blocks away from the new Highway 100.

which could shoot a highway 30.

Oh, it's a slick.

That's a beautiful.

It's an

ideal location.

Absolutely.

And, you know, you're not far from Iowa City either from the Hawkeyes, from Kinnock, from going to class down there.

You're close to Kirkwood.

You're close to Co beautiful, beautiful.

geographic situation.

It is location, location, location.

You know, Barbara, I'm an attorney.

I've done a lot of work in the past as a trust officer.

Obviously work with real estate a lot.

We all deal with house titles and automobile titles.

You've got a great, you have such a wonderful blog site at hamshomes.com.

H-A-M-E-S H-O-M-E-S dot com.

Terrific article this week on the blog.

Understanding manufactured home.

titles in Iowa.

It's really not difficult or cumbersome, is it, to get that title all squared away?

How's that work, Barbara, with a manufactured home in Iowa?

Well, in a bit of serendipity, manufactured homes, as you mentioned, originally were mobile homes, and before that were trailers.

So they were actually considered vehicles and not dwelling.

In fact, when 1970s, when my parents first started in business, our residents had to display license plates

in the back of their homes, which is absolutely ridiculous when you think about it.

So the ownership process for the home was a title, like a vehicle, instead of a deed, like real estate, which actually nowadays makes it so much simpler to buy a home because you don't have to go through it.

Title purge,

you don't have to pay real estate taxes.

It's unbelievably, like I said, serendipity that we

tried to get away from the image of trailers and mobile homes, and yet that one feature of them serves us well today.

It sure does.

Well, you can read more about that on the blog site.

And folks, you can take a look at that great website.

There's nice discussions on the financing application, the insurance.

You can look at all the community documents.

Boy, they do a wonderful job vetting for safety.

They're those great classic commercials.

are online there, those television commercials that I'm going to induct as immediate past president of Iowa Broadcast News Association.

We're collecting for our archives.

They've got a referral program.

And Barbie, what I love about it is you've got

homes there for folks over 55, like my wife and me are in that age group.

You've got homes for downsizers.

You've got homes for young families.

So you really bracket all ages and stages.

Yes, we have all ages here in our communities and even our seniors like it that way.

They don't want to live with a bunch of old people.

They like it that there's also young people and families here with them.

This is a

A housing choice that suits so many different people.

Singles, couples, families, retirees.

We have the entire spectrum of demographics here that love our homes.

You know, Barbara, I think I'm one of those old these days because I'm meeting my college students' parents who are young enough to be my sons and daughters in their early 40s.

And then the kids are in there.

So I always tell my kids, you're young and my granddaughter, my grandson.

And it is true.

Hames has got that respect.

It is such a family friendly group of people.

So family friendly that they have been worthy custodians now.

multi-generationally the Hamzes.

These guys, they are family people.

They do it the right way.

They do it with a Christian worldview and it's a calling for them as it should be.

I cannot think of Barbara any higher calling than providing families with safe, affordable, beautiful homes.

What could be better in America?

It's very satisfying to know that we're serving our communities, our people.

It's nice to know that we're helping families.

It's a good feeling when we wake up in the morning and see the school buses going down the street at Grandview and Summit Deal.

And Barbara, weeks like this make me even more appreciative of your father and your mother and my father and how they fought for our nation to ensure and to enshrine that innate human right of free speech.

that we've embodied in our Bill of Rights, in our First Amendment, in our United States Constitution.

And it's weathered some assaults, even some violence.

But Barbara, we're going to be free people, not just today or tomorrow, but well in the future for ourselves and for our posterity.

We know that the United States of America is still the best country in the world and there isn't even a close second and I can say that because I've lived and traveled around the world.

I don't think when people wake up in the morning they say enough good things and say enough praises and say enough thank yous to God for this great country we live in.

In Barbara you said it beautifully and I can testify to this as a university professor with about 130 kids each semester.

I would say that

10 to 15 percent of my kids are foreign students.

I have them from Brazil, from Colombia, from Canada, from Mexico, from Serbia, from Sweden, from Africa, from Asia, from the Middle East, from Britain, from France, from Germany.

Barbara, they adore America.

I think there's no better testimonials than that.

And guys, people still want in here.

Well, I want in with those beautiful manufactured homes.

Barbara, I want to encourage folks to come into the neighborhood to check them out in person or by phone or on the web with that great legacy number we can start and then the website and where to find you driving.

Let's get folks out there and purchase one of these beautiful homes.

We're located at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road Southwest.

So that's Wilson Avenue, West Post Road.

People are welcome to come into our communities anytime they like.

We're proud of them 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

We can also be reached online, like you said, at Hayneshomes.com, H-A-M-E-S-H-O-M-E-S.com.

And we still have our Marion phone number for when we had a sales center at Marion, 319-377-48.

319-377-4863.

Barbara, I love that traditional

Legacy Marion phone number, just like I like the tradition of the Haymes family and the tradition of Neil Diamond instrumental music after half a century, still wafting in our advertising.

Barbara Haymes Bryant, great to be with you.

As always, let's go Hawks.

It's always a pleasure, John.

God bless America and go Hawks.

Amen, sister.

Barbara Haymes Bryant and we'll be back momentarily.

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 Gorton Institute at Ottawa University.

Hi, and welcome to our show.

I'm Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.

I'm joined by Russ McCullough, the founder of the Guartney Institute and Wayne D. Angel Distinguished Chair of Economics, and Peter Jacobson, the Guartney Professor of Economic Education and Research.

All right, so today we're going to talk about the Overton window, which I really don't know what it is, and I didn't Google it, so there you go.

Peter, teach me.

Sure.

So the Overton Window is a concept, you could say in political science, I actually don't know how academic it is in nature as much as it is like a way that people who are kind of interested in politics and practice describe politics.

And so the idea of the Overton Window is that there is a window of allowable or acceptable opinions in American society and really any political regime.

And so, for example, the idea of

raising taxes on the rich is inside the Overton window.

And the idea of lowering taxes on the rich is also inside the Overton window.

Republicans frequently do that.

And they even say in campaigns, we're going to lower taxes on everybody, including the rich.

But I would say raising the taxes on the poor is outside of the Overton window.

In other words, people could advocate it.

You make even occasionally find a person whose policy does that in one way or another.

But saying that, oh, you could think of as tantamounts like political suicide, at least the way things are now.

The reason the Overton window, by the way, the Overton window is actually a relatively recent idea developed in the 90s.

I think it became Vogue in the early 2000s.

And so this isn't some ancient political theory or anything.

And so that's a guy named Overton.

Joseph Overton.

Yeah.

And so, you know, there's some disagreements that the Overton window is actually a thing that exists.

But I think a pretty like

thin version of what it describes is basically true.

Whether or not it's useful is a different question.

But the reason why people talk about it is a lot of times people talk about strategy with respect to the over 10 window.

And so a big claim that's made is that, you know, Trump hasn't really changed much in terms of permanent legislative policies over his two different terms.

He's added executive orders recently.

And so he can't say he hasn't done that.

There's not a whole lot of legislative change that's happened under him that isn't status quo.

Think of the so-called big beautiful bill, which is really just like another deficit or a national debt ceiling raising package.

It looks like all the others.

But the claim that either pro-Trump people will make or anti-Trump people is that the most

The largest effects that Trump has had is he shifted the Overton window.

That is, there are things you can now say, because Trump ran for president and has been in presidency and he says these outrageous things, that you couldn't say, I don't know, in 2012 when Mitt Romney was running against Barack Obama.

So, you know, things like we should deport illegal immigrants.

I mean, George Bush famously put together a worker visa program.

like that was his policy for immigration.

So even the more conservative border policy people before Trump would say things like, well, we have to tighten up our borders, but you know, the people in the country would just need to figure out a way to incorporate them in legally into American life.

Mass deportations has really become.

an acceptable idea, and by acceptable I mean you're allowed to believe it in politics without being thrown out of a room because of Donald Trump, or at least that's the claim.

So this is the idea behind the overtino window, and so I guess the questions we could have going forward is, A, what do we think about this?

Is this a real concept?

Is it an important concept in American politics?

And to what extent do we think it's

ethical to aim politics at moving the Overton window rather than you know an actual policy because one of the claims is that like our goal should be to move the Overton window more and more in our direction and make the opinions of our opponents less and less acceptable and vice versa our views more acceptable so and sometimes by the way by being more extreme than we actually are that's one of the claims

is it

I was thinking the way you defined it, that it kind of helps to find things that are out of bounds, but then you're bringing up how that can change at the margin somehow.

But is it mostly like moral claims?

Like whether it's right to tax the poor or not?

I think all political policies are moral claims at the end of the day.

I can't think of any policy like apart from... No, I'm getting... Kind of

normative type.

What should be done, people vary on.

So it ends up somewhat maybe being...

moral claims, but maybe we should let the philosopher jump in if I'm Not thinking about

that.

I mean,

they're they're political policies, right?

And politics involves what should we do?

What should we do?

There's it's politics is normative by definition.

Yeah, not

necessarily your moral always or immoral, but it's certainly normative and So I think it's important to like the way the overton window was originally presented was

Let's look at this degree of government intervention into the economy or government control.

And it was a spectrum of less free to more free.

Less free being zero government intervention in the economy and more free being zero government intervention in the economy and less free meaning, you know, the end of that spectrum is what like total Soviet control.

Right.

And the idea was

We can split these up into a couple of different categories.

There's policy.

What counts as policy is what the current status quo is, right?

Status quo would be a better word for this than policy.

And then on either side of policy, there's popular.

That is things that a lot of people like that either goes more free or less free because there's going to be things on either side of what the status quo is that people like.

And then there's sensible things that are slightly less popular than.

popular but still a lot of people like them and then there's acceptable which is it's still bandied about maybe not everybody likes it and then on the side of acceptable on either direction is radical and then finally unthinkable and the overtone window is everything from acceptable in so everything that's acceptable sensible popular or the status

quo

All right, well that looks like a place to wrap.

This has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.

I'd like to thank y'all for listening.

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.