KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – September 20, 2025

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Good morning on the Jacobson Group here on KXEL, 1540, 100.5 FM.

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We're gonna have a wonderful show today.

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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 here with the Gordney Institute.

Joining us, we have Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics, and the founder of the Gordney Institute, as well as Justin Clark, the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.

All right, so Dr. Clark is going to lead us through some laws of politics by a guy named Robert Conquest, which makes me think right away, Jeepers.

If we're going to conquest politics, are these the laws of President Trump?

He's in the conquest, it seems like.

Is that what he's following?

I'm not sure where Justin's going to take us, but Dr. Clark, take it away.

Thank you Russ.

So Robert Conquest was an Anglo-American Sovietologist during the middle to end of the 20th century.

He wrote a couple really influential books about like the purges under Stalin and the transformation of the Soviet Union from

Stalin's essential gulag to the kind of liberalization-ish under Khrushchev and he was also involved in like intelligent circles.

I think he was a member of MI6.

I could be wrong.

But he was involved in British intelligence and he was also very plugged into the American anti-communist agenda as well.

And he's probably most famous for his three laws of politics and

I think they're really interesting, and they get quoted often, so I think it'd be fun to talk about them.

So I'm going to run through all three of them.

There are sentence long.

The first is, everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

The second is, any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

And the third is the simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

And listeners, I mean, we just recorded a podcast on the Cracker Barrel changing its logo.

and it blew up in its face of investors.

And a lot of people ask questions like, how could they have done this?

And one answer is like, well, Cracker Barrel is a large bureaucratic organization.

The best way to explain this behavior is to assume it's run by people who want to destroy Cracker Barrel.

So Conquest is, his claim is that this is true for all large bureaucratic organizations and for the other ones as well.

So I'm wondering if is there

Any of these that jump out at you or that you'd like

to talk about?

I mean the first one I'd like to hear you explain a little bit more.

So you're conservative with the things you know or how was it phrased?

But everyone is conservative

about what he knows best and conservative in what sense?

Well conservative if we look at like what it means it usually means deference to history or deference to some kind of established norms a Reluctance

to change and especially to change for change's sake.

A kind of aversion to novelty in favor of established norms.

Yeah, let's talk about number one.

I think that it's true.

I'll begin with that because of course all these are subject to debate so we could talk about whether or not these are right.

I think number one is true.

I think we can observationally see a lot of these and so you don't see many really fiscally liberal economists.

This is a good example of that.

You do get professional economists who have kind of crazy or new opinions like you get the MMT crowd

for example

But people at Harvard Yale MIT even though they are like politically left-wing and these economists do not embrace like MMT as a theory right and so we can ask well Why would that be like MMT is maybe like the most left-wing?

I'll take my stab and then you tell me if I'm right basically you can kind of

unlimitedly print money to do what you want to do because it won't have

consequences.

Yeah, reasons.

Right.

I think it's actually conceptually a little incoherent, but I think you've gotten what basically the gist of it.

Okay.

And so

you know, it's very left-wing view in terms of like policy, economic policy, and yet these left-wing economists, you know, a lot of these economists being registered Democrats, whether it's like, you know, Cass Sunstein, like Obama's chief economist, like he recently came out and said, I think the libertarians have something on economics, right?

And so like, he's not embracing like this economic craziness, even though he's institutionally very left-wing.

And so the, you know, we could see this all over the place, try to think of other versions of economists, Justin.

I think a good example is like,

English

professors, professors of literature, they're conservative a lot, much more conservative about literature, right?

Politically, very radical.

We should overthrow, you know, let's destroy the economy, let's start, let's invent political economy from scratch.

And if, you know, for instance, you go,

Let's just throw out poetry.

Let's start out, you know, you do find some literature professors who are like, what's great is slam poetry or whatever.

But most literature professors have a deep respect for the literary canon.

Yeah, I think you could see the same thing with environmentalism.

When you get right wing environmentalists, it's the people who are really interested in the environment.

So like a lot of times if you hear like

someone talking about preserving like forests, it's like hunters, right?

And so like the right wing environmentalists tends to be people who are expert in environmentalism.

And conservative environmentalism actually would be to like maintain forests and stuff like that, even though the left generally is maybe more favorable historically recently.

But regardless, so I think this is true.

And I think the answer is why is kind of similar or along the lines of what Justin mentioned.

And in fact, I think in order to explain it, we don't have to go much further.

than GK Chesterton's fence.

Chesterton was a British Catholic lay theologian slash writer is how I would put him.

So he talked a lot about theology, he wrote a lot about theology and politics and other things.

And one of the propositions that he developed, this isn't totally original to him in the sense that like it's been recognized for a long time, but if there's a fence, you should figure out what the fence is for before you tear it down, right?

And so, you know, the idea is like,

the if the fence is serving some function it would be improved it to tear it down and so why wouldn't you try to figure out what functions it's serving and so it could be the case simply that people who are experts have studied what the fence is for right or at least they're still not certain that the fence is useless right

And so it's really easy to come upon something that you've never seen before, and if you don't see the immediate use, get rid of it.

But if you do the historical research, if you get familiar with the field, then maybe the fence becomes valuable and you start to recognize how the fence has been valuable over time.

Apply that to any topic.

Why is it valuable that our Federal Reserve be governed by a rule rather than just print whatever amount of money helps the economy be best?

I'm putting air quotes around that at the time.

Uh, and it's, you know, because we look historically at when the Fed has been untethered by rules, and it's like, basically everybody agrees at the very least that the Federal Reserve worsened the Great Depression.

Not everybody believes they caused the Great Depression, but everybody believes at least that the Federal Reserve worsened the Great Depression.

And why?

They were just kind of ad hoc, right?

And because they were ad hoc about things, some people think they were too slow, some people think they were too proactive.

So there's some fight about this.

But in response to that now, we have a federal reserve system that is based mostly on rules.

We're targeting something, right?

And the rule changes over time, and maybe we don't target it perfectly.

But even the most liberal economist, well, not the most, but even the the median liberal economist says we should probably have a federal reserve that's governed by rules rather than like what one guy wants to do.

So I'll kick it off and remain independent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which

is also a

little bit.

Yeah.

Well, I think it's an interesting corollary of the first law because I think.

Everyone, I think you guys are right on the money that the reason people are conservative about what they know best is that knowing something best involves coming to understand the historical tradition of the thing that you know the best.

And you might disagree with portions of it, but it's very hard to know something best and think everything about the tradition is wrong.

And there's complexity and details that take time to know it, and once you've done that, then you have a better appreciation for being conservative about it.

Well, exactly.

But the corollary of this is that revolutionaries, by definition then, almost always don't know what they're trying to revolutionize.

They're amateurs.

Amateurs, yeah.

Yeah,

the

complexity, don't know the history,

yeah.

The desire to overturn

The the game board or you know overturn the apple cart.

It's it's evidence not proof But evidence that maybe you don't understand what you're trying to do.

Yeah, I think that's a good point and actually Maybe this wouldn't stand up scrutiny if you thought about it much, but you think about the Revolutions that have historically been considered successful.

It's like the American Revolution.

Why would that be well?

There wasn't actually a big precedent for America having British rule, right?

So maybe the American Revolution was so successful because it was one of the few revolutions where the people on the ground actually did know more than like the authorities who were being revolted against.

Whereas the French Revolution, you know, there's mixed opinion on it, but out of all of the Western revolutions, it's probably the one that comes under the most scrutiny, maybe that of Russia.

But it comes out in their scrutiny because it went totally crazy.

Like they started killing, you know, random people, members of clergy, you know, they're just chopping off people's heads left and right, you know, tearing down, you know, buildings, burning things.

I think it's not a totally crazy thing to say.

The French Revolution got out of hands.

And that would fit this pattern of

Well, who are the revolutionaries in that case?

Probably actually the people who knew a lot less about France than the aristocracy at the time.

That doesn't mean that it couldn't have been justified by some other margin, but I think maybe the success or failure of revolutions might have something to do with this fact that if you're in a situation where the revolutionaries are totally amateurs, you're more likely to be a failed revolution.

Yeah, so Peter's making the bold claim that the reign of terror...

I tried to be... I'm trying to be modest, and I'm actually much more extreme, just like the French, I believe.

But I'm trying to be more modest.

And does that relate to law number two, then?

Let's move

on.

Yeah, let's move on to law number two.

Law number two, again, is any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

Not explicitly, right?

It's hard to argue with that, at least in the American context.

I'd be interested to hear what people in other places in Western Europe think, but my mind immediately goes to American Christianity and mainline Protestantism.

And it's true that from the 70s to the 90s, almost every mainline Protestant denomination liberalized in a very extreme way.

Actually, I would say

More extremely liberal than most people are currently comfortable with and so you know almost every of the one of these donations liberalized on having women pastors right is very common things happen you're actually start starting to see people draw away from that a little bit a lot of these.

institutions liberalized on things like gay marriage, right?

And so that was a very common feature.

And what's funny is those organizations maybe in some ways were explicitly conservative, but not politically explicitly conservative, right?

And so this is one example of the liberalization, but universities is actually the classic example, right?

Compare, you know, the political ideology of people at Harvard, MIT, Yale, you know, 100 years ago to now.

I mean, it's not, there's no comparison really.

I

know.

I think, yeah, I mean, I think this law is stated even more weekly than it could be.

I think you could you could just say, I mean, it doesn't say only organizations that are not explicitly right-wing sooner or later become left-wing.

But I mean, it just seems like most organizations, this happens to most organizations, even ones that are explicitly right-wing, you can look at, for instance, like,

the Cato Institute a lot of people think the Cato Institute has moved Leftward over the last 50 years or yeah, so I think it just holds Generally,

yeah, so there's two questions then well I have one question and then there I also have an observation So to give evidence for the law like you look at the place like Hillsdale, right?

Hillsdale is a university that remains relatively conservative.

And what's true about Hillsdale?

It explicitly says that it's conservative, right?

Same with like a college like Grove City College.

So what are the major conservative universities right now?

What's all the universities that declare themselves to be conservative?

I think that's true with respect to churches to a large degree, too.

You know, what institutions of Christianity didn't liberalize at least as much.

Well, the Catholic Church, right?

Yeah, the Church

of Missouri, San Luis, and some of the more informal ones.

And so what is unique about the Catholic Church is that they give weight to historical precedent, right?

And, you know, this could be true or false, whether or not they should is a different question.

But as a matter of fact, historical precedent has a weight in the Roman Catholic Church that it doesn't have in most main line Protestant churches, or probably any.

Like, I think it's actually safe to say,

with the exception of maybe some weird high church Anglicans, like Roman Catholics view church history as being more authoritative than any other Christian group.

And it's, again, like, whether you think that that's good or bad, it does seem to be the case that because of that, Catholicism did not liberalize in the same way as these other, you know, mainline Protestant organizations.

Now some of them have swung back, other things like that, but that's my observation with respect to that.

Then the question is why like why would why wouldn't organizations get more conservative over time instead or say stay the same like I think this observation is generally true But the question is why is it true?

Yeah, that looks like a good question good cliffhanger to bring us into break and I'm kind of struggling a little bit with like the size of Like government if it gets bigger is that all just part of it moving that direction or not?

It seems to play a role somehow in there.

So we'll try to unpack that right after break.

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So we're back and Peter you want to try to answer your own question?

You kind of teed something up for us on whether they head right at all or not circumstances?

Yeah, so again the second law for listeners is that an organization that's not explicitly conservative will become liberal over time or something like that just won't correct me on the particulars.

But then the question is why?

Like why wouldn't it be the case that an organization that doesn't explicitly declare itself to be liberal will become conservative over time or you know why don't organizations just stay the exact same?

I think it must have something to... Well, the first and second law could be connected.

This is kind of a stretch, I think, to be totally honest with you, but this is my best stab, is that, like, if the first law is true, that people who are most experienced in something will be conservative about it.

What that means is, if you add someone who's new, and if new people, on average, are less experienced than old people, what that means is, as you replace the status quo, necessarily, you're on average going to get more liberal people, because they're less knowledgeable than...

the people with the more experience, right?

So every time you had a new person, if the first law is true, that new person is less conservative about the topic because they know less about it.

And if you start adding those people at a quick enough rate, not only do they start moving the average, but they also get involved in the choosing of other people, right?

And so the inexperienced people then began to pick even more liberal people than the experienced people.

pick, and not liberal by nature of just politics, but because of experience.

And so there's a sense in which the first law maybe leads to second law.

I don't know exactly though, like I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with that explanation.

It's just the best thing I could come up with on the fly.

So I'm reminded of Mansur Olson's book, The Rise and Decline of Nations, and in that he talked about the, I love this phrase, the sclerosis of collective action.

And so the idea is that

organizations kind of start small and I think to law number one you could have maybe be more conservative maybe not explicitly stated you know but but it's a smaller venture and whoever the starters are and then as the organization whether it's a non-profit or for-profit starts to grow then we start to see more what economists call rent seeking so you're kind of trying to fight for your own territory your own turf a little bit more infighting maybe come up with

transfers from one department to the next of wealth and it ends up heading, I think, left.

Mansur Olsen didn't explicitly say that, but he kind of hinted at it through the way he describes it.

And I think maybe Hayek with road to surfroom is kind of on that.

that path too that as you leave things be and head that direction that you're on the road to the left as we're in the context that we're talking about here.

He was fearful of socialism writing that back and I believe 1946 after World War II and so he wanted to give people a warning that even in our

conservative quote-unquote economy things could head that direction in a different way.

So I think two and three are related to each other and so two again is any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing and three is the simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume they're discontrolled by a cabal of its enemies and

I think Russ brought up like the growth of government.

And a way to think about this might be like some government bureaucracies.

And it seems like every time the United States declares war on some concept like terrorism or poverty or like those wars go poorly.

The Department of Education was established when 70s something.

Yeah, I

think

so.

It was in the 70s along with

the

Fair Department.

And

Test scores have gone down since the Department of Education was established.

It seems like the war on poverty has largely failed.

The war on drugs largely failed.

You know, drugs win drug war, right?

And so it does seem like three seems like it has at least some truth to it.

That once we get all these people together to solve this problem, the problem gets worse.

and

that's weird

because

it's job security maybe in some cases that if their problem goes away then my job goes away and so that could be part of it at all

yeah but that that seems to like attribute malice in a sense where maybe like it's

a little more yeah innocent than that looking for problems and finding problems as part of what they do

yeah if if they had solved the problem then it wouldn't exist anymore that doesn't mean that that's why the

They recognize that, and that's why it still exists.

But it might just be the case given one, right?

One says that everyone's conservative about what they know best.

If organizations, as they bureaucratize, get more liberal or more left-leaning, and if that via one means that they are going to be less effective at solving the problem that they're going...

that they're aiming to solve, then it means that the organizations are going to grow and the problems are going to get worse.

And by definition, then, it's going to attract people who want to solve those kinds of societal problems.

And largely want to solve or say, what I want to do with my life is solve the problem of poverty or whatever.

That just does appeal more to somebody with a left-ish political.

Yeah.

So I want to distinguish something here because

when a new first of the third law I think like that's funny but clearly not true like that was my reaction but I think if we distinguish some things then maybe we can also talk about it being true in a sense so it's definitely funny to think of an organization trying to destroy itself and also like you do have the cracker barrel moments where it's like man it seems like you're really trying to destroy yourself that's weird but also like that you know economic theory tends to say that like the purpose of organizations especially nonmark

organizations, actually of which corporate boards sort of are.

They're not totally, but they sort of are.

The purpose of non-market organizations is to sustain themselves over time.

And I think that's true.

And so like I can't on one hand say organizations are trying to destroy themselves and also say organizations are trying to sustain themselves over time like those things conflict.

But here's the way where we can marry those two insights.

Which is that like I think that the purpose of a bureaucratic organization is to allow the people to continue to be in the bureaucratic position year over.

per year.

In other words, you know, the purpose of the CDC to some extent is to make sure the people who are employed at the CDC or who wants to be employed at the CDC and the people who are currently employed like will be employed in the future.

And so the CDC wants the CDC to exist.

In other words,

I

don't expect the CDC to cure disease because that's not evolutionarily a good thing for the CDC.

That doesn't mean I think they're actively trying to subvert it intentionally, but

I

don't think like the it's compatible with evolutionary theory that they would be successful at destroying it.

But I actually think that that's compatible with the idea that organizations are self-destructive in the sense that they're self-destructive to like the original goal or something like that, right?

And so it's not that the CDC is trying to disband.

It's that the CDC, again, whether the individuals know it or not, are trying to be unsuccessful, right?

Which is sort of like saying you are run by your own worst enemies, right?

And so it's totally compatible with economic theory to say a bureaucracy that's in jobs to solve homelessness will not solve homelessness and continue to persist, right?

Like this is just a matter of fact.

So what I would expect is that the organizations that are bureaucracies that are meant to solve homelessness won't do that.

And so in one sense, we could say that that's not a cabal of your enemies trying to destroy themselves because like they're trying to persist.

But in another sense, like in so far as the founding of the organization was about solving the homelessness problem, yeah,

it

is kind of like a cabal of your enemies controlling you.

So I think it's totally weirdly, it's totally compatible with the idea that the purpose of organizations is to survive, and yet it's your own worst enemy is trying to destroy you.

Yeah, I think that's the way to read enemy.

Yeah.

The enemy of the stated purpose of your bureaucratic notion.

So I think the value of the market really comes into play here.

And I think this is what gives market organizations an advantage that no other organization has, which is what I was alluding to a second ago, which is that there is, I think, a pressure to continue to persist over time in non-market organizations, but it's not always

good for something to persist.

Like we want problems to get solved.

And if a problem gets solved, an organization dedicated to solving the problem should close, right?

Like this is pretty straightforward.

In the world, we want things to disband when they are no longer functional, right?

Like that's exactly how things should be.

And yet we have these bureaucratic forces trying to stop that from happening.

So this is the value of the market is when a business starts to try to prevent itself from solving problems.

In other words, you know, satisfying customers, for example, there's pressure from outside competitors, both business competitors, but also potential buyers to basically put that company in the grave, right?

And so this is the value of the market is losses signal to everybody, competitors, customers, potential buyers of the capital that the current way of doing things is not working.

And so it doesn't matter how hard the bureaucracy is trying to destroy itself from a mission perspective.

If it succeeds at doing it in the market, then what's going to happen is it's going to be purchased by someone who won't do that and turn around or the customers are going to stop going there and it's going to die.

So this self-sabotaging from a mission perspective motive that bureaucracies have cannot exist in markets.

It's almost like an evolution that supersedes the evolution from a market perspective.

Another way of putting this might be like

a market institution, the problem that it's trying to solve results in the continuation of the organization.

If my problem is giving people cheeseburgers, if that's the problem I'm trying to solve, then the more cheeseburgers I give people, the better my institution can survive into the future.

If my problem is to end homelessness, then to the extent that I end homelessness, I no longer have a bureaucratic future.

Yeah.

So yeah, once again, competition is the secret sauce.

So I think what we're setting up is what conservatives, maybe in one sense or the other, I'm not sure if it fits into this discussion, but would suggest having to tackle homelessness, it would be better to have many institutions, nonprofit institutions that are

competing for donation dollars to help solve that problem as opposed to having a government bureaucracy tackle it from the top down.

Because then the market with the nonprofits is the competition for donations showing that, hey, we've made a dent in homelessness.

Hey, we came up with a new innovation to do this.

Look at how great we're doing.

If you could check for $500 or $50, whatever you can give.

You see my point?

That's fundamentally completely different using market forces in the nonprofit arena and is a way to combat the inefficiencies in the bureaucracy.

Yeah.

No, I ultimately think you're exactly right.

So the question on my view is whether or not there's competition.

Because there's competition in all aspects.

Anytime you're trying to allocate resources, you're competing.

The question is what kind of competition and i think russ is right that market competition is really the key because market generates incentives that no other form of competition does if you're in a war you're just trying to destroy the other person.

If you're in a market then you're actually trying to make someone else satisfied and that's just in pointed out that is the mission.

And again, if you start trying to go this route of the new bureaucrats in charge say, well, we've satisfied customers for a long time, but what if we tried not satisfying the customers, right?

Once that comes up, the problem is not that they can't do that, it's that if they do that, they fail, right?

That's not the case in government bureaucracies.

If you have a bureaucrat who says, no bureaucrat would actually say, I don't want to solve homelessness anymore.

But if instead they say, I want to pursue this thing and whatever this thing is doesn't solve homelessness.

there's nothing that stops them from continuing that except maybe voters but then if you think that's a powerful solution then just think to yourself well what do we know about like what do you've listener personally know about how the country is spending money to stop homelessness like we spend millions of dollars a year on this do you know what the programs are i have no idea and you know this is something that i do for a living right

yeah and the the competition in government can be competition among departments or bureaucracies within the government for budgets right yeah and then but if you now think about the

the incentives for these bureaucracies is no we got a bigger problem than that department we need the money right give us the money and so the incentive is actually to persist the problem like we were discussing earlier and part of that's due to the

Competition is not the same that way.

And

to expand your mission, mission creep, right?

That's the best

way.

Yeah, make it bigger and look for more budget allocation.

And that is just fundamentally different.

It is a form of competition in a way, but it doesn't have the same incentives to get us to lead us to better results, the results we're looking for.

All right, well, anything else on this last words here?

It's

read a headline the other day that said we are 12 years in to Gavin Newsom's two-year plan to end California homelessness.

My final comment would be, I think that these are good rules of thumb.

I would never call them laws, because I don't think they're robust enough or something like that.

But I think we see them occur enough that if you think about things this way, you're not often going to be wrong.

Right.

And in some ways, a rule of thumb is maybe even more valuable than a law of nature.

Yeah, yeah.

I'd

say the law of demand has a little more credibility.

Yeah, absolutely.

But they

are good points.

Yeah, good point.

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.

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Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

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And Alexa knows how to find us too.

It's where Iowa comes to talk.

News Talk 1540 KXEL.

Well, it's another great Saturday and the Hawkeyes are looking to get back-to-back wins here and I'll tell you who's a back-to-back winner, generation after generation.

The folks at Hames Homes and we're so honored to have Curtis Hames back with us today as we alternate our quarterback rotation between Barbara Hames Bryant and Curtis.

Curtis, welcome back.

You're an All-American in your own right.

Well, that's very kind.

I'll accept that high praise.

Thank you for having me.

You know, whenever I drive by there, I don't know which one is my favorite.

You've got a summit view and a grand view community.

These are manufactured homes.

They're beautiful, affordable and safe and aesthetic.

Talk about the two big neighborhoods, so to speak, Curtis.

We're all one Haines community on the southwest side of Cedar Rapids and we're divided a little bit on with a little farmland in between.

Both communities hold about 450 homes, and we're nearly 2% of Cedar Rapids.

Whether you live in Summit View or Grand View, you'll have the one point of contact for ownership, for sales, and service.

We're all under the Haines umbrella.

So Summit View and Grand View, all part of the Haines team.

And what a magnificent family.

I've known these folks for well over half a century.

They're family, friends with my

parents and the generations continue of this outstanding stewardship as a calling to be able to bring to such a great community as Eastern Iowa safe, affordable and beautiful homes.

I'm going to tell you how to drive through or take a

virtual tour here at the end of this.

But Curtis, I'm going to talk about the safety and affordability.

Let's hit the safe communities and the financing options.

This really makes you guys an incredibly viable option here and now for for a living space for a family home.

Well, we're touching on what I think are our two highest, highest accolades.

The first is being a safe

planned community.

We are planned.

We're a managed community.

We have a background check for all of our homeowners.

We don't have any rentals out here.

We don't have any subleasing.

What we do is we want to have a planned safe community for homeowners.

And what that means is everyone has a background check.

Everybody who moves in is going to check in and we know who lives here.

For everybody's safety and convenience, we have, for everybody's convenience, there's a small sticker on the exterior of people's vehicles, and that's to make sure that we know who's coming and going, and we're a planned, safe, secure community.

We work hand in hand with the Cedar Rapids Police Department, so there's nothing untoward or any problems here.

It's very unlikely that we would have an incident, but if there were, we have a 24-hour relationship with our team.

The staffing, we work in conjunction with the Cedar Rapids Police, a safe, clean, planned, well-maintained community.

Indeed, indeed, and continue because I know the financing rates are lowering as smidgen and we'll continue to do so.

It's a good time to talk about financing.

We couldn't be more excited about that.

We're hopefully the good news from the Fed.

We'll trickle down into what our banks are seeing.

But what we do here in the sales department is myself and Clint, my brother-in-law, it's a family affair here.

But what we do is we look at an individual, we take their application for financing, and we look at their income, their down payment, and their credit.

And what we do, rather than focusing on sales, what our emphasis is to be a liaison to ensure

that our buyers get the best interest rates, the most affordable and high quality insurance because we know every little bit helps.

And finding the best scenarios and allowing to do a compare and contrast and let the banks fight for the buyer's business is our goal.

We want to make sure that you're getting the most affordable, highest quality product at the lowest payments because no one wins a medal by paying extra interest to the bank.

We want to have

high-quality lenders fighting for the buyer's business.

Curtis Hames sing it perfectly, well-named after the Scion, the founder, the co-founder, along with his wife Norma, the late great Curtis Hames.

And go to this website.

It's a wonderful website, H-A-M-E-S-H-O-M-E-S dot com, HamesHomes.com.

You can read the multi-part series, You Belong in a Hames Home for Downsizers.

for young families and first-time buyers as well as for condo shoppers and owners and their recent article on understanding manufactured home titles in Iowa.

I've given the address for that wonderful compendium of data and testimonials

and offerings on the website, Curtis.

But how do they drive by and how do they telephone you guys and get on Facebook to also find you?

We want to keep it really simple.

We want everybody to be able to reach us online in person.

The name of the company, Hames Homes.

That's the website.

That's our Facebook page.

Very, very accessible.

put it in your Google, put it in your Bing, Ask Jeeves, whatever search engine you like using.

We love, love, love seeing people in person.

That's our preference.

We want to meet you.

We want you to come in.

We want people to see our high quality communities.

We're on the corner of Stony Point and West Post Road on the southwest side of Cedar Rapids.

We love to work by appointment.

We want to make sure we're available for you.

So please call ahead 319-377-487.

And

guys, you'll even see his handsome photo of the great sales team there on that website.

Curtis always a joy.

How about those Hawks?

Kirk Ferris.

I've only had

Two Iowa football coaches from the end of my high school years, Curtis, and I'm almost 65 years old, what a tenure.

Fry and Ference and now Kirk as the leading all-time Big Ten winning coach in football.

Well here at Haymes Homes, we're definitely, definitely understand the benefit.

of continuity and staying with consistent leadership throughout the year.

So that's something that we admire and that's something that we're trying to emulate here in our ownership group.

Indeed, and guys, the Hames-Holmes communities are very nearby Kinnick Stadium, you know, your 15-20 minute drive.

So those of you that live and work in Iowa City, Coralville,

Tiffin, all those areas, it's very viable there.

You're close to the airport, all sorts of retail, along with that pastoral, rural setting in the background.

Curtis, always a joy to visit with you, my friend.

Very good.

Thank you very much.

Go Hawks!

Go Hawks!

Hames Homes!

The Homes people, we will be back after this.

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 ethics.

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's 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 uh well actually there are a couple things but the inciting incident was mainly the cracker barrel fiasco and so for those you know it 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 on our suburbs podcast, we all agreed.

that the suburbs are good and necessary.

The only thing I just like about the suburbs, as 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.

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.

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.

No, I absolutely get 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 I

still think it's 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 it's a kind of

Borgification and blandification of everything.

Yeah, the thing is that 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 to

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 the 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.

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 going to do my own thing, but are they becoming less and less?

And why is, I think what you're questioning 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

next

blood 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 CrackerBall 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.

Like 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, you know, doing 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 investor's eyes, said, oh, something must be up with Grackerbler.

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, unless like,

you

know, 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 a 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 seems 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 like looked at the world capitalist country for more than five years knows like the phrase the customers are always right.

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

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 expects 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.

Otto University has an exciting new major.

PPE, which stands for philosophy, politics, and economics.

Each of these fields is interesting in their own right, but they intersect in ways that are important to understand both individually and for your community.

If you find philosophy fascinating but want to make sure that your study of the subject is practical, if you enjoy economic analysis but want to see how economic laws interact with more principles, if you are interested in politics but want to explore how economic and ethical realities constrain our political choices,

you should consider the PPE program at Ottawa University.

This spring, Ottawa University is organizing a PPE League competition or 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 Gorton 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.

It's affordable, flexible, layered with support.

Our new online micro is optimized for you.

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, he was an old codger.

and but then you got the young bucks 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 gotta you know keep up with the banks there's these new mortgage instruments that we can use and we could be doing some lending and and they're like well you never lived through the savings and loan crisis and so they kind of have 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'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, it 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 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.

The kind of the evolution of the firm and 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.

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.

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 bless us.

everyone till we meet again have a great weekend and bye bye