KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – April 25, 2026

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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.

We're gonna talk about free market enterprise economy.

And at the midpoint, some great entrepreneurs here in eastern Iowa.

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And we thank our...

general sponsors as well, Jim and Cindy Jandron, who helped run that great enterprise Midwest Renewable Energy LLC out of South Eastern Nebraska.

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risks by an incredible percentage, but also running and walking for life.

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LifeRunners.org, go to that website, Dr. Pat Castle, runs this wonderful operation and a lot of young college kids part of this too, young and old running together alike.

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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.

My name is Russ McCullough, and I'm the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics at Ottawa University, and also the founder and director of the Gortney Institute.

And today is a special day.

We're here at Creighton University where we brought seven different universities together with young minds and some old minds like ours to help talk about various issues.

The title of our symposium is Humanomics, Exploring Humanomics, Economics, Ethics, and the Institutions That Shape Us.

That is, I'll have Dr. Michael Thomas talk a little bit more about that.

He is the Associate Professor of Economics and Finance here at Creighton.

He is also a George Mason University grad, so he's very much in the free enterprise line of thinking and freedom and liberty and all that stuff.

But really the special thing we do is bring in

relationships.

And so it's very much bringing in some new aspects that many times get overlooked in economics.

And so Dr. Thomas, I'm going to pass it to you to introduce our other two special guests that are here.

Thank you so much.

I think we've been doing the humanomics symposium here for about six years.

And the things that we ask are what's missing from the way we do economics and how can we look at places where economists have

traditionally not looked deeper.

And that's kind of what I want to do today, what we've been doing this morning in small group breakout sessions.

And that's why we asked Dr. Mark Koyama, an economic historian at George Mason University to come and give a talk last night.

He opened our conversation last night and his work uses the tools of institutional economics to explain some of history's most persistent puzzles.

One example of this is why did medieval Europe

hold on to a religious ban on lending an interest or usury prohibitions for as long as it did, even though it constrained economic development.

So that's just an example of one topic that he's talked about last night, that he also has published research on.

And this shows what institutional analysis can do at its best, take history seriously, explain persistence in institutions without assuming

that they are necessarily efficient and to test specific claims against the evidence.

We also have Dr. Stephanie Haifle, who's a scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, whose work sits at the intersection of political economy, social theory, and economic sociology.

She's developed her conversation around authors like Eleanor Ostrom.

whose institutional analysis of common pool resources, and Viviana Zelitzer's economic sociology of circuits of commerce.

And she's worked with Virgil Henry Store, and they've published a collection of essays on this topic, Living Better Together in 2023.

And so we've invited them to help us really dig deeper into places where economics, as you might learn it in an undergrad classroom, has sort of pushed these questions to the side, and we want to return to those questions and focus on them today.

All right.

Well, we'll start with Dr. Koyama.

You wrote a book, How the World Became Rich.

What's the secret sauce?

How did the world become rich?

Oh,

great.

Happy to be here.

So there is no secret sauce.

I mean, that's one of the conclusions of our book.

What we intended to do in that book was to provide an overview of the recent up-to-date scholarship in economic history and in development economics, bring them together and trying to pass out

the factors which may or may not have been important for the origins of economic growth.

So there's a contrast between our book and many others on the market where

those books are pushing a specific kind of preferred thesis of the author.

So like, it might be institutions, it might be geography, it might be culture.

And we teach our comic history, I've been teaching a course on our comic history for more than 15 years.

And so the natural way for me to teach it is actually to present a wide array of theories and take them seriously in their own terms.

And that's

precisely what Jared and I kind of set out to do.

The first part of the book actually is precisely that.

It's the role of geography, role of institutions, role of culture.

So we're really drawing on other people's scholarship as much as our own.

We're summarizing some works, which I think are quite well known, like Jared Diamond's work, but other works, which may be many of you would have never have heard about had you not read them in our chapter.

And then what we did later in the book is we're like, okay, so these these theories all have evidence for them.

They internally consist, simply makes sense, but

how much explanatory power do we have when we apply them to like the particular historical question of like when why and when did economic growth take place and that why and when question has a specific answer which is we it happened in western europe and it happened predominantly in the british isles around about like the dating is going to vary people have preferred dates but roughly in the late 17th to

early 19th century.

The classic dating for God's revolution is around 1750.

So around about the time Adam Smith was writing the world formations, which is an important conjunction, I think.

And so when we do that, we get into the weeds a little bit more historically.

We tell a bit more of a narrative account of

precisely the types of innovations which were taking place.

That stuff is kind of standard, you know, many histories of industrial revolution tell you about spinning Jenny and so on.

But what we then do is we take the story forward.

So we think about, okay,

Growth happens in the UK.

Why does it spread to Germany and the United States as quickly as it does?

So why is growth initially being diffused?

And why is there a second industrial revolution, which is focused on Germany, the US, and maybe Belgium?

And why then does it diffuse?

And why is that diffusion uneven?

And so that brings us to the present day, where you have the process of development well underway in many parts of the world.

But there's still maybe a billion people living in poverty.

who've hardly been touched by this process.

So yeah, the geography part is interesting.

I think a lot of people look at Africa and it's like, well, are they just poor because they're stuck in the middle without areas to go?

And then we've got Hong Kong that has basically no natural resources.

So when you talk about spreading it from England to Germany and the spread, what was really spreading?

Was it resources or what was spreading?

So it's predominantly ideas.

The British actually prohibit the exports of, they didn't allow engineers to leave the country and we tried to prohibit them from leaving the country.

Simply, we don't want them to go to France because they got to take with them like, you know, their blueprints.

And they actually don't want the Americans to get like, you know, the blueprints of various kind of like, you know, steam engines and stuff they're building.

But it's a diffusion of ideas.

So here we're not.

so much for doing our own work per se, but building really on the work of John McKee, recently won the Nobel Prize in economic history.

So John McKee's argument is, as we some explanation for the extraordinary innovation we see occurring in that part of northwestern Europe in the 18th century, and that relies on like culture and ideas below so on institutions.

And so when we ask like, why does it spread?

Why does, why does like the textile

Technology spread to North America, so you have textile mills in New England by the 1790s.

They're behind the British ones in terms of they're not on the cutting edge, but they have the advantage of the US, which has abundant natural resources.

So cotton textiles, the canonical industry of the First Industrial Revolution, spreads rapidly to North America, and it spreads to some other parts of Europe.

It doesn't spread to Egypt or India.

very rapidly, eventually spreads to India, doesn't produce it.

And so like that's a puzzle.

And you've got to think about like, what are the barriers to it diffusing?

And so, you know, the institutional barriers, their cultural barriers, there could also be geographic barriers, you know, you need seven levels of humidity and so on to spin, spin cotton.

So ideas of ultimate drive of things, but they, on their own, they don't produce new goods.

You need to be embedded in an actual economy.

Transport networks need to be important.

So going just

very quickly back to Sub-Saharan Africa, and the fact that if you're not on it in Land River and you're not near the coast, it's going to be very difficult for you ever to get a textile industry going because the cheapest way to transport textiles is by sea, basically open water transport.

It's never going to be economical to fly one dollar to missions.

And so the geography is there as a constraint, but ultimately we focus on ideas and institutions, I think.

Well, let's bring

Stephanie into the picture.

Michael, what do you got for her?

Well,

Stephanie, I've got a question.

So I'm listening to this institutional account and I'm thinking, okay, it kind of makes sense.

This sounds like economics and I can see the incentive story here and individual choice.

But I don't think that's what's at the center of your work, especially when it looks at Viviana Zelitzer.

So could you tell us like...

Why would we look at relationships and how does that change what we're doing as economists when we start there?

Yeah, great.

Thank you.

And thanks for having me on and enjoying all of the conversations that we're having today, thinking a lot about how all of these ideas interconnect.

And so one kind of like this idea of sort of like what's missing in economics, you can think of institutional analysis as there's new things happening there, but it's also a return to kind of a bigger picture of how people were even studying how.

you know, the world becomes rich or why we're stagnant and poor.

Going back to Adam Smith and others, they weren't just explicitly thinking about what became defined as economics.

What were their 20th century?

They looked at the political and legal frameworks, they looked at markets, they looked at ideas and culture, and so a lot of the importance of these ideas coming back.

and figuring out that it's not just one over the other, but a combination of a lot of things that are happening, I think is as much of a return to more richer and fuller economics.

I think all of that is super important for understanding how the world works.

We can think of also these big trends and where they go.

We can think of what are good institutions, how were big ideas spread.

One of the things that's always fascinated me though was

Okay, that's all very important.

And we make policy prescriptions and other things based on these results.

But how do real people everywhere actually deal with all of these things?

And how do they experience it?

You know, it's not just about being the policymaker who comes up with an idea, but how is it actually affecting people as they work on the ground?

And so what I found really enticing about the ideas of Eleanor Ostrom and Viviana Salazar was they really went back to looking at

Now, we have this understanding now, what are the actual people?

How do they interact and what do they do?

in return shape the institutions and shape our life as we go around them.

And so, one, we might have a fuller picture of what people are like.

They might have their utility functions and the constraints and the benefits that they have might be more complex than we might think of in some of our simple models.

But also, we might have a richer story of why maybe some of our predictions don't play out as much.

or how we might take into account how people are interacting and how they might respond to change or evade policies or make it so that things aren't going as they go along.

A couple of examples of that is within standard economics, Eleanor Ostroms saw this and she was definitely within the tradition of institutions and then took that down to the ground, to the bottom levels.

But she was looking at theories like tragedy of the commons, which is very clever.

It gets to something we've all experienced before.

We're here with a bunch of undergrad students and many of them have roommates and I'm sure your kitchens aren't the greatest thing of hygiene at the moment.

But she also realized we don't, it doesn't stop there.

The tragedy of the comments has been utilized to not just say we should have private property when maybe there's not there, but also to have reasons for government intervention or regulation or things to step in.

She's like, I don't think that's really...

I think we're missing something.

And so she went around the world and thought how people devised ways to climb out of the tragedy of the commons.

And so that has a lot of lessons for how we think about policy and what we do.

For many of you, if your kitchens are in rough shape, you might have tried to figure out how to label all your food so people don't steal it or maybe have a tour wheel of what's going on.

We evolve and we change.

It's like, yes.

And so that allowed for us to think about not only how are people actually living in the world based on these ideas, but how they are also possible.

It's possible to devise our own governance mechanisms as well.

So we're not just thinking about, when we think about political economy, the rules and how we then get people under it to do what we want, but they have agency and ideas and creativity that can change what that is.

Viviana Zellazar similarly

you know said that you know the context of how we interact our relationships aren't just constraints or how we interact but they are why and they do shape how we interact in these ideas and so we might not it might take us a bit to understand why remandances are so powerful in spreading ideas and and resources back when people immigrate and move and how

You know, we might think about economic development initiatives and all of these other things.

It's super important.

But the flow of remittances through personal ties is dramatically higher than the funding we spend on any of those things.

And why is that so important?

Now, of course, that means that you have to have those relations.

But it also means that you might know what they need and what they want and how to interact in those ideas.

And so, you know, if somebody is really coming to

a new country for more economic opportunity, you know, should we expect them to care about care about people back home or should we expect them to do those things?

Some of the research I've been working on now is to kind of get out a sense of how maybe we think about remittances in the domestic context.

You know, people move away from their home towns.

And what does that mean?

Is it a brain drain only or is there things that are coming back?

What are our obligations and and what do we think about those ideas?

Similarly, she talks about how money

is, of course, an important medium of exchange, but it holds more power in our lives than we think about.

And how does that change the way we respond to issues and shocks and other things as well?

How we categorize money, who we exchange with in those ways, changes the way we think about things.

And so as our market extends and we have more options, we might

pay for a bunch of things we never would have thought of in the past, right?

Like, if my mom comes to visit and she helps me clean my house, I probably don't give her a wage that might be weird.

But if I hire somebody to clean my house, that's possible.

And so we have all of those certain things, but also explains why some of that works.

Now, of course, in some areas that changes, some of Zell's work looks at, again, coming back to the college as this kind of microcosm of how to think about how we interact.

you might get thrown into a community that has vast different incomes and educational backgrounds and all those things.

How do you learn to interact as peers?

How do you deal with power dynamics that might be there?

I think what she provides is a lot of relevance and nuance that doesn't just give us a richer picture of life, but then it should hopefully make us then step back and think about, okay, when we go from understanding the big picture,

understanding the smaller picture, what does policy look like from that space rather than necessarily from stripping the humanity of how we interact?

I think maybe that answered your question.

All right, well, this looks like a good spot for a break.

So when we come back, I've got questions for both of you to be thinking about.

So for you, Stephanie, they had this concept of the circuits of commerce.

And as a cold-blooded economist, we like the impersonal world, and we actually get a lot of awesome stuff.

But to that extent, we might focus too much on this impersonal world.

I don't know the farmer, the rancher that got me my steak, and we go to the market.

you know, live these isolated worlds, we don't have to know that to participate in the market.

And don't get me wrong, that's the lion's share of the fantasticness we have, but it seems to be a missing part of the story.

So I'd like you to elaborate for people this idea of circuits of commerce and how maybe the real world again might work a little bit differently.

And then on the economic growth stuff, I want to think about AI in today's world.

You talked about information flows.

It seems to be getting easier and easier, right?

The internet, we go back to the printing press and you tell some of those stories on how information spreads to different places.

It seems like we're at max spread right now.

And so I'd like you to comment on some of the things that you think are binding constraints that really hold developing countries back.

Like what's left in the way if we have information that can flow around the globe in a fraction of a second, you know, what are some things that have been sticky for cultures and that don't allow them to pull out of maybe the poverty or the conditions that they're in.

So we'll be back in just a

bit.

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OK, so we're back and left a few cliffhangers here.

We're going to start with Stephanie to comment on these circuits of commerce.

And then eventually we'll be getting to some Q&A.

We have some hungry college students here that are ready to tap some brilliant minds.

So Stephanie, what's the idea of the circuits of commerce?

Thank you.

So the idea of circuits of commerce are that kind of like particular groups or instances allow for the evolution of possibly your own money, but also different boundaries of how we interact with

one

another.

One of the ways you could think about this is it kind of comes from the idea of the origin of money and the evolution of money over time, right?

As we started to interact with other communities, the idea for an easy means of exchange became really important, but it's not like we just snapped our fingers and they became dollar bills, right?

We had, you know, different goods that we bartered with, but then we became, that became kind of mediums of exchange and these ideas.

And so I don't think, you know, sort of one of the things we can go from that is I don't think there's a preference for

or a desire that we would think of more things as their own monies and circuits of commerce, but that they do exist even when we have these very established markets and easy flow of money.

And so a couple of examples that we can think about is the way remittances work.

And so we often, while they might use, of course, the same types of money we're exchanging with back and forth, what

they mean and how we can use them are different than as if it was just exchanging money and having people do whatever they want.

We have these ties, whether it's familial or friends.

We send remittances back in the form of money and sometimes in goods.

But there are generally some rules about what we expect the people we send those to use them for.

We often see

that this money is used for starting new businesses or being able to fill the gaps in just the general needs that people have.

But there is a little bit of one obligation to send it back.

You are going and investing in yourself, but you better bring it back home to help out as well.

And that if you're going to

If I'm going to send that money, I want you to do it for good.

You can kind of think about that in some ways of charity as well, right?

We often, as an economist, we would say that probably the most efficient way to let people get access to resources and use it for what it wants is to give them money and let them do whatever they want.

But we don't see that in charity in many ways because we have thoughts and feelings about how they spend it.

Right?

And so we might have stipulations.

We give scholarships that go to school, not just giving, you know, you guys money and you decide what

you want

with it, right?

It goes directly towards tuition.

Or you might see, you know, how there are kind of ties and, you know, kind of ways of interacting to kind of make sure we see that.

You know, if a grandparent decides to give us inheritance before they pass away, there's probably some ideas of what you could spend it on.

But they might have feelings about that, right?

Or they might have ties for that as well.

We can also think about it in ways of like how we interact with community.

So in college, you often have meal plans or you have those little cards that have money that can only be used on campus, right?

Like why do we have that rather than just that you can use it anywhere?

Some college campuses or some communities maybe expand that and maybe you can go to five restaurants outside of campus and utilize that money.

But sort of like why?

And how do we do that?

It's sort of a way that we can then use circuits of Congress to see.

We go to a coffee shop and we become loyal members and we get these little cards that let us get a free coffee after we go so many times.

Those sorts of things allow us to kind of build loyalty and interact and we value that even though it's more tied or more complex.

just kind of thinking about the ways that we parse out those ideas.

Another thing that I think is fascinating that Viviana Salazar has looked at is just the way we think about our own money and how we might earmark it.

And so we might decide to put a certain amount away every month for say like our children's college education.

We're going to invest in that.

And say there's an economic downturn and we're struggling.

It's often a real choice on whether or not you will dip into that fund to help yourselves out right now, because you've earmarked it for that, and it's supposed to be for that, for those purposes.

Even though it would make sense, you're like, money's money, you could figure it out later.

There are real ties that we put on ourselves about what those things are, and so why do we do that?

Particularly because sometimes we can just think about it as much more direct.

And so I think it kind of just adds, I think, a little bit of a rigid flavor, but also shows that even though we have really smooth capital markets, even though we have easy ways to exchange, we still add additional context sometimes to the money that we have, the money that we're giving to other people.

And that maybe reinforces our relationships.

And when we don't do that, it might erode our relationships as well.

And so it's not just relationships and social capital.

It's the way that then our interactions and our use of money and how we get our time work to fuel those or to erode them over time.

OK, so Mark, wondering about AI and information, that stuff can roam the globe pretty fast now.

What's keeping some countries from being able to pull out of?

get into higher levels of income and out of a developing type status?

Well, when it comes to AI, a lot of AI boosters instead of like a Vani assume that because the progress in AI has been so fast, you can just like 10x the whole economy because you can 10x software production.

But economists understand that what matters often is the binding constraint.

And so, you know, there's it could be like, you know, a human capital constraint that might be regulatory or institutional, but could just be the physical limits of this world.

So like, you know,

AI is great at software, but it's not so good.

Robotics is still very expensive and imperfect.

So we still need human labor for many things.

I can have AI working and having paper, but I can't have AI in my house, basically.

So there's some services which are not being any more productive, whereas others are becoming more productive much quicker.

When it comes to the relationship between AI and the question of economic diffusion or the future of growth, I think sometimes there's economists

We abstract away from some very basic things, like comparative advantage, which is in Smith and Ricardo, and it's a beautiful idea.

The comparative advantage means that some parts of the world specialize in some industries and not in others.

And then some industries are disproportionately affected by AI in good or bad ways.

And so the implications for the spread of growth are actually not at all obvious.

India or the Philippines

have more or less to some degree at least skipped industrialization as a stage of development.

They have very well developed service industries because they speak English with relatively high proficiency.

So a lot of service centers are in those parts of the world.

That could all be done by AI, right?

But where the games, the productivity gains you get, they're going to go to the US companies, which will previously outsourcing these jobs in the other Philippines.

They're not going to go to the people in those countries.

You know, like the spread of this

is not obvious to start with.

And it will not be even like economic growth is always, you know, it's, it's a quote, you know, there should be David.

It works by creative destruction.

Some people lose their jobs.

So when automobiles were invented, you know, very few of the car manufacturers who made like Austria-Hungary can survive.

I think just one survive, Studebakers and South Bend,

they

survive.

But they went bust by the 1950s or 60s.

Yeah, so I'm not a prognosticator of the feature, is all I was saying, but I think it's interesting times.

Alright, great.

Colton, I'd like you to start queuing up people.

I have a question, and then I'm going to pass to Michael for another question, and then we'll open it up to the audience here.

Stephanie, this one's for you.

Amazon, DoorDash, I'm not seeing a lot of human contact with those.

So to what extent is, you know, and even DoorDash now you can tell them to leave it on the porch because I don't want to meet you face to face, right?

So it's very impersonal.

So to what extent is our stuff like Amazon and DoorDash ruining society?

All right.

You know, I think I have mixed feelings about all of these things because one, I'm by training an economist.

So I really love the fact that we don't get to

like I just get to not think about nor interact with a lot of people.

Like I chose this so I could stay and read and think and talk to small groups of people kind of as

we

interact.

And so I don't necessarily think that sort of any kind of logical innovation or you know moving towards more impersonal markets necessarily means that we have less more relational things that are happening.

I think it just depends on

on what margins are those now important?

All right, well, that's where we're going to wrap today.

We got lots more to talk about today.

So let's give a nice round of applause for our thanks so much for being here and enlightening us all.

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

Actually, Craig University today.

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

A five-star rating helps other people find us.

Otherwise, just pass this along to friends and family that might like to take a listen.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

Thank you.

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Well, happy weekend is the Saturday after tax day.

We've all survived our state and federal taxes.

Now onward and upward here on KXEL, the Jacobson Group 1540 100.5.

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channel 50,000 watt blowtorch caraming across 20 United States and four Canadian provinces on the AM signal alone plus FM and as always you can listen live.

It is time every week the midpoint of the program for the Hames Homes interview.

We've we are so fortunate we've got Clint Hames from the great

multi-generational family, founded by Kurt and Norma Hames, Hames Homes, the Homes people, manufactured homes, and Clint is great to have you back on the air.

Hey, we survived tax season, now let's go and chase some good interest rates and a percolating economy and let's get into a safe, affordable, beautiful manufactured home.

Yes, yeah, we're looking forward to it.

We've already seen quite a few people coming in to visit us, bringing in their tax returns and using it for a down payment for a good manufacturing home.

Yes, you guys have done it so well for so long.

And I want you to just talk Clint about your location.

I just believe this is a beautiful location because you're in Southwest Cedar Rapids.

It's almost a pastoral rural setting in the background.

And yet you're literally

minutes away from all the great retail, whether it's groceries or minards, the airport is close by, the hospitals are close by, you got universities close by, you're really in the cat bird seat.

You're absolutely right, I mean we're really in the center of a lot of important things in our town.

On the southwest side, just off Wiley Boulevard and close to Stony Point Road, so you can hop on Highway 30 and head to Iowa City or you can stay local and go to Walmart, Target, all the local shopping centers are just nearby here.

And you guys, they've got these wonderful communities, of course.

If you take a browse, I really encourage you to get out there physically like I have done and look.

at just the tremendous aesthetics there.

Summit View and Grand View.

They're neighbors and they're self-contained communities in their own way with beautiful lights and freshly paved streets, landscaping, amenities like parks.

You've even got, and it's important in this day and age, you've got storm shelters too.

Talk about some of these great amenities at your locations there at Summit View and Grand View.

Oh happily.

I mean we have each each community has two playgrounds.

We've got a dog park here in our Grandview location and then top of mind right now is storm shelters.

Both communities have two storm shelters.

Whenever we even get a sniff of bad weather those storm shelters are unlocked for folks to use and hopefully we don't need them but but they're here because we live in the Midwest and it's always at risk.

Yes we're here with

Clint Hames, Clint, what's it like on a personal level?

You've been working with now three generations of family.

You guys take this very seriously as a vocation, really, and you're faith-based people.

You have enjoyed bringing hearth and home.

These are not houses.

These are homes for families.

You're absolutely right.

And the ownership here, our leadership group has led with that.

Making sure people have good, safe place to live.

We do background checks on all adults that are living out here.

We have 24 on call.

on-call service for folks that maybe have some issues going on in the neighborhood if that ever happens.

And then on our pre-owned homes we sell a warranty so we want to get people, people get started on the right foot so we include that with a pre-owned home and new homes have a 12 month warranty from the manufacturer.

So we really want to treat people the right way and that's

That's coming from the top down.

That's what Troy and Barb and Cynthia expect of us, and that's how we operate.

Here with Clint Haymes from Haymes Homes, the Homes people.

Just a sidebar, Clint.

This weekend I was helping presiding over the Iowa Broadcast News Association annual convention banquet and awards ceremony there in Des Moines, and we do work with the archiving people, and it's going to be such a joy for us to

include Haymes Homes classic TV commercials for future posterity.

They're wonderful ads and you've got them on that great website, don't you?

Yeah, we do.

You can look them all up.

We do it from time to time at home.

We show our kids like, hey, this is what your great grandparents were doing back in the 70s and 80s.

There's Grandpa Troy.

I mean, we love to show them off and we include them on our Facebook page from time to time too.

Just kind of bring up that nostalgia and it's fun to see those old style of homes and the commercials.

Boy, Grandpa Troy, he was this little kid like me back in the day around Mary and I over there.

My goodness.

You know, Clint, speaking of that great website, hamshomes.com, they've got some of the listings there.

You've got between, listen, for under 50,000,

to up just shy of $80,000.

You got three bedroom, two bath homes.

These are phenomenally priced.

Yeah, that's right.

I mean, we've got our most affordable home starting at about $48,000 right now.

And then it's kind of going from there.

But even like that $48,000 home that's been completely reconditioned by our service staff.

So they do a full 90 point check on that.

doing electric plumbing.

We check underneath the home.

This home actually has a brand new furnace and central air.

So again, just trying to get people started off on the right foot

here with Clint Hames from Hames Homes.

I always harken back.

You know, what do the people say?

And that's the most important testimony of all.

Every time I look at your website, there are new quotes coming in from satisfied home owners there on your two little towns I call them, two little cities there.

Karen Smith, always clean roads and friendly people.

John and Bobby O'Brien, we found all the features we have always wished for in a home plus more.

Carol from Grandview says, Hames cares.

This should be their motto.

And Annie and Ron Harmon say, you all have great, caring hearts.

You are greatly appreciated.

Kay Burr says, very clean, well-maintained park.

And PJ Tippi says, it's a quiet, friendly village with lots of retirees and also

families with young children.

Mary Stute says, love living here.

Ben here for 12 years of management is awesome.

Hames really cares.

Clint, you can't do better than that, can you for testimonials?

Well, we're going to try.

We're

going to

keep going.

Good answer.

Good answer, my

man.

We want more.

But yeah, that's just a testament to how we do things.

And I'm glad that homeowners are feeling that and that they feel cared for.

Clint, I want to just

finish here by saying, I just encourage everybody to look at this treasure trove of data on this wonderful website as well as Facebook.

It is a treasure trove.

How to finance, how to do insurance, how to resell, all sorts of things about the pricing and the boards and the amenities, the safety precautions that these fools take, the application process.

It's really extraordinary.

Clint, can you tell us how to find you guys?

on the web, on Facebook, by telephone, and again, how they can drive by and see it with their own eyes.

I mean, Edward Scissor's hands could not sculpt some more beautiful landscaping than there is at both Grand View and Summit.

Love it.

You can reach us online at AmesHomes.com.

We have pictures, descriptions of all of our homes, tons of information about the communities, our blog, I mean pretty much anything you can think of.

You can reach us by phone at 319-377-4863 or visit us in person.

The address here is 5410 Wabash Street, Southwest.

That's our main office.

And Grandview and some of you are nearly right next to each other.

So you can start here and kind of go wherever.

Well, I can't wait to do a remote also on some weekday out there with you guys.

And that'll be fun.

They'll be fun.

The weather is starting to just really blossom.

Clint, it's always a joy to be on with you.

Give our best to Curtis and Cynthia and Barb.

And Troy and the whole gang, we love you guys.

Well, thank you.

We most certainly will.

And we appreciate your time and getting the chance to talk to you.

On the Mighty Blowtorch KXEL, the original 50,000 clear watt broadcast signal in North America right here in Waterloo, Cedar Rapids.

And we'll be back here on the other side.

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 Gordon University Professor of Economic Education and Research.

Joining us today, we have Dr. Russ McCullough, the Wayne Angel Chair of Economics and the founder of the Gordon Institute, and he's going to introduce our special guest.

All right.

So we're excited today to have Dr. Andy Hazuka.

He is with this place called Ottawa University.

So Andy is the Professor of English and Chair of the Humanities Department.

He's

a

scholar of 18th century British literature, regularly teaches interdisciplinary classes, courses on Ireland and Scotland, Irish literature, Scottish literature.

He's traveled there with students many times, written over a dozen articles on topics like William Wordsworth, Nelson Elgren.

1977 L-Train Crash and Poetry of former Kansas City Royals pitcher Dan Quisenberry.

So, Andy, welcome to the show, and we wanted to talk baseball, I think was the topic.

Well, that's one of my favorite topics.

All right.

So far away and I'm happy to talk.

So, yeah.

So Andy has been hosting this baseball and literature conference now.

How long has it been at Ottawa now?

It's been here nine years.

Nine years.

Next year will be year number 10.

Great.

Great.

And so, oh, at some point, it's baseball and literature.

And so it was really

unique to me, but it's kind of fun.

I'm not a huge baseball fan as Andy knows, but it brings people from all over the nation and he brings some awesome guest speakers in.

And so I twisted his arm, said, oh, what about economics and baseball?

And he kind of cringed a little bit.

But he was grateful to throw something together because I have some friends that have written economics articles.

So anyway, they've come off and on and it's just a really nice event.

So

So I think maybe start with baseball and literature, like why, you know, what was kind of the genesis of

this?

The genesis of the conference was there was a guy who taught English, mostly writing courses.

He was a composition specialist at Indiana State University 30 years ago.

His name was Pete Carino, and he had gone to

The Cooperstown Symposium, which is held in Cooperstown Hall of Fame, New York, where scholars of baseball came every year.

And he realized there wasn't such an event in the Midwest.

So he decided to pitch it to his president at Indiana State.

And the president was a baseball fan and was excited about it.

He said, yeah, let's host this thing.

And so it started out at Terre Haute, Indiana.

And I happened to get a flyer in the mail in the English department where I was teaching.

And I thought, this is right up my alley.

So I'm heading that way.

At the time I was teaching,

And now by Nelson Algren, a Chicago writer, and he mentions the White Sox.

And I had an idea percolating in my head.

And so I went to that conference in India State.

And then I just went just about every year after that because I enjoyed myself so much.

So at some point, it migrated to, after 10 years there, I went to Middle Tennessee State University because Pete was exhausted for doing it for 10 years, kind of like I am now.

And they ran it for 10 years.

And they felt like they had expanded it and done all they could.

You know, the national area offered some opportunities that Terre Haute didn't, but they had sort of tapped it out.

So they approached me at the end of their run and said, do you think Ottawa University will be interested in hosting this?

I said, let me talk to our president.

It was a time with Kevin Eichner, and he was enthusiastic.

The new student center had just been built.

Shendel Conference Center was up.

It was just about ready to open when I talked to Kevin about it.

And he said, next year, this will be the perfect venue.

And so we did it then.

He asked me what the budget was.

I said, I think we can do this for $2,500.

He said, then we'll do it.

The budget has grown a bit since then, but.

Has it?

Yeah.

Who was your favorite guest that you brought?

That is, you know, every year I have a couple favorite guests and one of them was the luncheon speaker this year who I thought was incredibly nuanced and introspective and intelligent.

And I love the way he interacted with the students who were there.

Yeah.

I, you know, he was a pleasant surprise.

I didn't know too much about him when I booked him all into those that he had played in Japan.

I saw one interview he did over a Zoom interview.

It was on YouTube.

And I thought he seemed pretty articulate, but he surpassed all, all, all expectations on my part.

The other favorite speaker I have.

And that was

Tuffy Rhodes.

Tuffy Rhodes.

Carl Tuffy Rhodes, who played, he had an undistinguished MLB career.

He played six years in Major League Baseball.

Then, then he went to Japan.

He's played another 13.

where he just dominated, and he was one of the best hitters in Japan for those 13 years.

Yeah, and it was neat how he learned how to play there, as he said.

And so the Japanese regiment for practicing is completely different than the Americans, he went on to say, like the 200 balls pitching to yourself, hitting 200 balls,

and then go get the 200 balls and hit them back the other direction.

I mean, it was just, that's kind of insane.

But he really felt like he needed that discipline and grew up a lot there.

So yeah, the learning about Japanese baseball, I learned a lot from that.

That was neat.

The way he described it, Japanese baseball is a nine to five job in the off season.

When they're not playing games, they get to the ballpark at nine and they don't leave till five and they're practicing all day long.

And he said, you know, here in the States, they're out golfing after lunch.

you know, practice a little bit in the morning.

Right.

Yeah, and I had no idea that Japanese baseball had been around the time that it had.

It was

turn of the

century, wasn't it?

Turn of the century, yeah.

Early 1900s.

Early 1900s.

I didn't know.

I knew it got popular when Babe Ruth, you know, in the 30s and 40s, it's most of the 40s, we sent a team of all stars to Japan and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig around that team.

And I knew that had happened, but you're right.

I didn't know that a couple of decades prior to that,

baseball was the most popular sport in Japan.

So tell us about your favorite team.

My favorite team, well I grew up on the Northwest suburbs of Chicago and so most of us in that area were Cub fans and I was certainly and I think they had a lot to do with WGN, the Super Station, broadcasting the games every day and the games were played during the day so I would run home from school and catch the last few innings of the Cubs game to start at one o'clock and that was always a thrill.

to just see what had happened that day and catch the final innings.

They were never very good back in those days.

Well, in 1969, they had a good run and they blew it and the Miracle Mets won.

But they were in first place going into, I think, even September that year.

But then there was a long dry spell for decades.

What's the parameters?

It kind of blew me away with what baseball literature like, what are we writing about?

So can you explain to the listeners what

what people are presenting, what they do, and how it connects to baseball?

Sure.

First of all, there's one word missing in the title that you said.

It's the conference is called Baseball in Literature and Culture.

But I would say that most of the presentations are on the culture side, not the literature side.

And historically, they have been to every conference program that I've been involved in.

So we've had people, for instance, I remember the first year we did it, there was a graduate student at the University of Iowa who was in

I mean, it was a cultural studies program, but she was really interested in music.

She gave a fascinating talk on the history of music associated with baseball.

So she unearthed these songs that were composed in the 19th century that were sung at the ballpark.

And one of them was Kill the Empire.

Really?

Yeah.

And so the fans would get rowdy and they would sing these songs.

It kind of reminded me of what Tuffy Rhodes said about the Japanese style of baseball.

so they would sing these songs and they would sometimes encourage their team or to razz the opposing team or to razz the empire.

So that's just one example of cultural studies.

There's a lot of people who've done histories, even non-historians who just find some obscure player who had something interesting about him or someone who you wouldn't think played baseball but did play baseball but was famous in some other way and then they kind of talk about that angle.

It really spans the gamut in terms of cultural studies.

And I think that's what's the appeal.

It draws in people from different disciplines and independent scholars who aren't associated with a university.

So this was one of the questions I've had over the years.

It seems like and.

Part of what I'm asking is, like, is this just I'm experiencing an outsider phenomena or maybe I'm onto something?

It seems like more than any other athletic event.

Baseball has a lot of literature about it.

So every year you're bringing in people who are presenting on the different books they're writing about baseball, whether it's someone who opens, you know, a wax pack of cars and tries to track down everybody and do interviews with them, or they're writing about their own life and, you know, how baseball is a part of it, playing catch with their son, stuff like that.

It seems like there's a lot of literature about baseball.

And to me from, again, I'm not really a sports literature person, but from the outside it seems like baseball more so than most other sports.

And maybe any other sports, really.

And so one question I have is, do you think my instinct is right there that that's true?

And then the second question, the more interesting question is, why do you think that is?

What makes baseball such a good media to write about or not media, a good backdrop for writing?

First of all, your intuitive sense is correct.

That is the case.

Because I teach courses in baseball lit and in sports lit.

And there's a lot more baseball lit.

associated with any other literature, then literature associated with any other sport.

Sure.

Now, the answer to the question is, why is that the case?

And the best I can come up with is, because I've thought about this a lot, I think there's quality to baseball that's, it is qualitatively different than other sports in America.

Football, for example, is a fast-paced power game.

Baseball, there are no time parameters.

So, you know, soccer, it's over after 90 minutes in football.

It's over after the fourth quarter is over.

But I think there's there's when you're at a baseball game, ideally, at least in the old days before you had all the distractions of the scoreboard stuff happening there.

There's a contemplative quality to baseball.

And you have this beautiful green field.

It's slow paced.

And there's time to muse.

There's time to have a conversation with the person sitting next to you.

It's not, you know, you don't have to be riveted all the time because the game is not happening that fast.

You know, the only time something happens when the batter hits the ball in play, and then you can concentrate.

But for all that, and then the vast majority of time, a batter is not batting a ball in play.

So there's this downtime, if you want to call it that, or I just think it's contemplative.

And it's also very pastoral.

The baseball stadiums seem to be, Sherry Wood talked about this in his last conference about the agrarian myth in baseball.

A lot of people have written about that, that it kind of harkens back to the American agrarian myth that we have this sort of manifest destiny, right?

An endless amount of beautiful pastoral land and let's

let's inhabit that land and let's enjoy it.

So I think there's that quality to baseball that maybe is missing in some other sports.

What's interesting is those qualities, as you were talking, also seem like something that's present with golf.

But of course, with golf, you've got, I think, two differentiating aspects.

One is, at least for the majority of its history, it was pretty inaccessible sport, right?

It's not like the everyman sport.

It's very explicitly the opposite, really.

And then there's no team aspect, either, or at least in, you know, typical golf.

There's no team aspect.

So yeah, it seems like baseball threads that need

perfectly of contemplation, accessibility, but then also like community or something like that.

Right.

In the early days, in the early 1900s, a lot of baseball players were recent immigrant source, tons of recent immigrants.

And so there was that dimension too, that kind of was the promise of America being realized by blue collar laborers who come over here.

So when you brought up the

clock, the timing thing, the pitch clock came to mind.

I thought I wanted your opinion.

I've asked you in the past, but now that you've seen it in play now for, has it been just two years or something with the pitch?

Yeah, I

think this is a second.

So what are your thoughts on that?

Is that taking away from some of the what you enjoyed before and some of the things you're commenting on or because it really is kind of making the game more about the game, I guess, right?

Or to get people engaged with the game.

Right.

So the pitch clock, I think, is emblematic of our culture at large.

I mean, we've noticed this in educational circles that our students don't have the same attention span they used to have.

And so if you can't sit through a three-hour game, the idea is, well, maybe you can sit through a two-hour game.

I'm not fundamentally opposed to the pitch clock, but I'm opposed to the intrusion, the continual intrusion of technology into a game that doesn't really need the technology.

And I think this latest thing where batters and catchers can appeal a ball and strike call is we don't expect batters and fielders to be completely errorless, to never make an error the entire season.

Why should we expect umpires to be perfect?

Umpires make mistakes.

And I think that's part of the game.

I mean, the Royals only won the World Series in 2015.

I had read an article in Sports Illustrated about how well they scouted, not just their opponents, but the umpires.

So they knew every umpire's tendency to game before.

And if they knew that an umpire was calling low and outside pitches, they were ready to swing at those low and outside pitches.

And that's part of the game.

That's part of the strategy that good teams use.

And I just think it's ridiculous.

I mean, if you're going to be able to challenge a call like a ball and a strike,

pretty soon it's not going to be not just twice per game, but five times per game, ten times.

And then you guys will just replace the Empire and not have Empires.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think a similar...

thing that I've just recently been made aware of is things like the walk-up music that patrons are sometimes getting now, where

it's

like the lights are flashing and the corn is playing in the background.

I saw it and I thought, well, that looks kind of interesting, kind of cool.

But then I thought to myself, but it doesn't really look like baseball at all.

And it's kind of a hard needle to thread because you want

Baseball to survive in the current culture, right?

You don't want it to fall into obscurity But at the same time I think the the cultural desires right now are maybe like suboptimal For what like an event should be because of stuff like the attention span stuff like I would prefer

that we not need like a mini concert every time a new picture takes them out, actually.

But at the same time, if that's what we need for baseball to continue to exist, I mean, it's tricky.

I don't know.

Do you see more thoughts on your end or are you less bothered by the walk-up music?

No, I feel the way you do.

I think the pressures of modernity are changing the sport.

And I'm basically a conservative when it comes to baseball.

I would rather have

played it in the 19th century, then in 2026, if I were a professional player, because you wouldn't have all these distractions, you wouldn't have the stuff that is extraneous to the game.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

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

When we come back on, I think about AI umpires a little bit more.

And also the differences with the Japanese ball, I think with the fans and the cheering, like Peter was just bringing on, we learned some interesting things there as well.

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.

All right.

Well, that looks like a good place to wrap.

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

I'd like to thank you all for listening.

And Dr. Hazooka, thanks for being on.

Thank you for having me.

All right.

Well, pass this along to your friends and family if you think they'd like to take a listen.

Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.

Thanks.

Thank you.

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 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!