Transcript
KXEL Presents: The Jacobsen Group Podcast – May 30, 2026
The Jacobsen Group with Jon Jacobsen · Tue Jun 9, 2026
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make congressional districts on the basis of race.
So in a lot of states, Democrats have made sure to create districts that are, for example, largely African American or Latino, the thought being like, well, we want them to have representation.
And so you're going to create a, basically draw the district around where they live.
But the Supreme Court says, well, this is racial discrimination, right?
It doesn't matter if the intention is good.
The fact of the matter is that we can't legislatively, racially discriminate and that includes how we draw congressional maps.
So that's one of the two things.
The second big thing is kind of in response to some of the Republican map changes that have happened over the last few years.
Virginia tried to redistrict their map that I think gave a pretty significant, maybe like six seat swing.
I'm kind of going off the top of my head on that towards Democrats.
And so they had this kind of like gerrymandering response, but the Virginia Supreme Court struck down their map.
I can't remember on what basis.
I didn't really look that much into it.
But essentially, Democrats were touting like, well, if you do this, we're going to do it back.
And then the Supreme Court stopped them, the Virginia Supreme Court.
So Democrats in general are very unhappy.
Republicans are very happy.
Something close to home here is that Missouri Republicans redistricted to basically take away Kansas City having a blue congressional seat.
They redistricted them with a lot of the rural areas surrounding Kansas City to make it into a red seat.
And so the mayor of Kansas City was out the other day talking about how this is unfair.
And so just the fact that gerrymandering is in the headlines kind of brings, I think with it, some discussion about what is gerrymandering?
Should there
be gerrymandering?
Can there be a world without gerrymandering?
Yeah,
I'm thinking there's a lot of people, including myself, maybe, that I'll get.
I don't think I have all the answers.
I'm sure you're informed, like you always are, since you're smarter than me.
um of either young people or otherwise that maybe not even really have a clue what it is.
So let's do a little gerrymandering one-on-one just with the start of the district.
So you know it seems like it'd be fair if you live in a state that you would you know slice up somehow random equal sizes or something and and then these are your voting districts to get your representatives.
So how is it done?
Are there a fixed number of districts?
Does that always stay or and then we're always moving
the borders as as population moves in theory population and then of course now we're starting to talk about race and other issues that come into it.
Yeah I'll give you my general understanding of the matter is first off the number of seats is based on the population counts relative to other states and so every certain number of years the Census Bureau updates the numbers for the states and states are allocated congressional representatives.
Based on the population that they have and I think they cap it at the what if 435 or whatever it is I don't remember top my head And so they kind of redistribute those congressional seats on that basis And so the state is told you have five seats or two seats or ten seats, whatever I could pick if maybe the minimum was even one because you get through two senators automatically Maybe it's three.
I'd have to double check.
But anyways, they're told the number that you get
And my understanding is then the state gets to decide independently how they draw those districts.
And so some states put this through, for example, their state, house, and senate process.
I wouldn't surprise me if the governors were more or less involved in different states.
Again, this is where I'm not as sure on the particulars of does he every state handle the exact same way.
Maybe the obvious thing, you start with the outer boundary of your state.
Yeah.
And then you've got X amount of districts and now we're carving it into.
five districts or whatever, X amount.
And my understanding is there are some bounds on like the populations must be relatively similar in the districts.
So you can't like make 12 districts in a rural area of a thousand people and like one district for a city.
Like they have to be relatively even in terms of population
But yeah, then the borders can be drawn or redrawn by the state level party.
And so obviously the issue here is when you have
a dominant Republican or Democrat majority in the state legislature of a certain state, maybe they have the governor too, they can easily draw the maps in such a way that perhaps, you know, a city is majority Democratic overall, but if you take some of the surrounding areas, you can carve up pieces of the city until the whole city ends up being...
Republican or vice versa, right?
Democrats will take rural areas and they will like attach them.
It'll be like they'll divide Chicago into five pieces and they'll go and cover five different rural areas with Chicago to give them all five electoral votes and take them away from the Republicans.
So you end up with these very strange looking maps that more or less are politically motivated.
The districts do have to be contiguous.
That's why we get these weird shapes I've seen where there's long fingers that go in weird.
direction, even spiral around or something places.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so ultimately, like the, the simple, you know, take and response, this would be like, well, why don't we just, you know, have some sort of system where we avoid this, right?
Why don't we get rid of gerrymandering?
The problem is it's much harder than you'd expect because, again, the maps have to be drawn somehow.
You can't just have a map that is decided by the federal government at the beginning of time with no political bias and use
it
forever.
Because things change over time, right?
Some areas lose population, some areas gain population.
And so you can't just use the same districts every single year.
I'd
like to think us two economists could come up with some sort of fixed rule.
Right that that couldn't we like dream something up of some equation that you pop it in there and so I think
the I think the problem is the fixes are worse than the problem so that's my general take about this because the easiest way to do away with this would be to move away from geographic representation within states in general and just have like a statewide popular vote
yeah and so you have statewide popular votes for all six of your different you know the seats
yeah.
and then that's decided right yeah
yeah but the the problem in my mind's uh of this is that in with just like within our country within our states we do have different people represented like the fact is the interest of people in southern Illinois
are very different from the interests of people in Chicago.
And so just because Chicago dominates most of the state in terms of population doesn't mean, in my view, that those southern Illinois farmers should be forever beholden to
the
interests of the people in the city of Chicago.
And so my thought on this is, unfortunately, the problem that you run into is the solution to gerrymandering, any possible solution to gerrymandering, I think, is a movement away from geographic representation.
And I consider the geographic representation kind of a non-negotiable.
And so I don't think anybody's a fan of gerrymandering as a citizen.
Like everybody kind of understands that gerrymandering is bad and it shouldn't happen.
But I'm also unwilling to replace it personally with anything.
I can't think of a system that would do what I would like to be done that is having fair geographic representation.
I'm sure there's examples where the gerrymandering
Process isn't perfect like they they tried to get swing and it didn't work, right?
So like there's still some uncertainty It's not like you move the boundaries and for sure you're going right.
Yeah swings.
Yeah, that's a good point It's somewhat related reminds me of
Democrats very interested in increasing like the Latino population in Texas or electoral reasons, but the Latino population in Texas ended up going behind Trump at least relative to history this last election.
So you can never fully like play the population game and win every time or at least not without like you said uncertainty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and so who has the power?
It's always the the group in office that can change.
And is it every year?
or is it when is it up for you know if it's like two years when the when the votes are in so that it at least stays fixed for a couple years or it does seem like it comes up pretty often so
yeah so i think that states can choose to draw their districts whenever they want i'd have to look into that that's the part i'm not sure about but every 10 years is when these new congressional seat distributions are allocated
So in theory, your current map that you've got is going to be your map for the next 10 years, unless there's some sort of reason for the folks to change it.
But again, it's state by state in a legislative process or legislative procedure.
For example, what could happen is maybe Democrats are in charge at the beginning of the new population census and they make a certain map, but Republicans get in charge a few years later and they decide to redistrict
at
the state level, right?
So that's my understanding is that you, depending on your state's rules, can just choose to draw yourself a new map at any point in the process.
But 10 years is when you actually reallocate and you basically have to draw a new
map.
Recently, this was within maybe a year that California was threatening, and Texas was, remember it was Texas doing it, and then
California's like, well,
they're doing it, we're doing it.
And that
did happen, yeah, yeah.
So Texas redistricted and gained some seats for Republicans, and then California did basically retaliatory redistricting successfully.
And so that
one I think did hold up in the courts.
And so yeah, there is this kind of like, another thing I really dislike it is there is this national level tit for tat that happens.
that kind of undermines the local interests.
Because in theory, you want your local districts to be representative of the problems that you face locally.
Well, what ends up happening since we live in a national politics ball game, this process kind of becomes subservient to like the national interests, right?
And so now these state level Democrats or GOP people are trying to like earn points in the Trump Newsome game instead of paying attention to their own state, which itself I think is a bit of an issue.
And so with the movement of the lines, does that change like where people actually vote in terms of the, they're trying to do the how?
of who they're voting for, but does it actually, does it materially impact people on where they vote or something?
All that stays the same.
It's just where it's counted.
No, because the representative, their choices would be different in
the voting.
So their choices would be different.
And so this is one thing that happens is like you can have redistricting that.
targets even individual politicians and the way that you would do that is you would cause the geography that a politician used to have to overlap with a perhaps more popular politician even of the same party sometimes redistricting is a tool by which parties kind of enforce their own norms internally and so if you have a candidate who's not behaving right within your party in your opinion and they're very popular in their home district one way to erase that is to basically
caused this person's district to get carved up into other districts and then they have to compete with some other popular incumbent rather than running against some sort of challenger from the party.
And so yeah, it does change who would be voted for.
In terms of voting locations, I think that that is always just like something that can be in flux, right, is that volunteers essentially set up those locations and volunteer hours and that sort of thing.
So when the what got overturned was
They were looking at areas and they know the demographics.
There's probably all kinds of crazy maps, especially with AI now, but to show where black areas were and white areas or whatever.
And so it was because they specifically proactively, because of DEI at the time, we're going to do it this way because people of color are in this area.
And that's what got thrown out.
Yeah, I forget which law they actually kind of, I don't want to say reversed or...
Oh, there was probably wording on the exact wording of...
Yeah, so they essentially weakened what was called Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
And so the Voting Rights Act had a section which essentially enabled people to district according to racial lines.
And the Supreme Court said, well...
this conflicts with the rest of what our constitution says about government and making discriminatory racial decisions.
And so because of this, they were able to overturn the map.
I can't remember if it was Louisiana they were looking at.
Yeah, it was Louisiana.
Louisiana was redistricting in a way that would have been more beneficial to Democrats.
And there were a lot of maps drawn on these racial lines.
The
Supreme Court basically struck this down.
So now they just have to be more...
Clever at trying to do what they're probably doing anyway.
Yeah, it's not explicitly along the books
Yeah, well, I think that's part of this and maybe this is something for after the break But there's an interesting kind of like rent seeking or maybe even rent extraction components to gerrymandering that
Maybe it's somewhat solved by the judicial branch having different interests, perhaps, but I think that's a big topic.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, I think that looks like a good spot for break.
So and then I'll bring up the old issue of redlining just as a kind of corollary to this.
We'll be back in just a bit.
This and maybe this is something for after the break, but there's an interesting kind of like rent seeking or maybe even rent extraction components to gerrymandering that
Maybe it's somewhat solved by the judicial branch having different interests, perhaps.
But I think that's a big topic that
we should have.
Yeah, yeah.
It looks like a good spot for a break.
And then I'll bring up the old issue of redlining just as a kind of corollary to this.
We'll be back in just a bit.
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The amount of a peninsula or a finger.
Those are a geographic.
Yeah, some sort of like you can't do these crazy ones.
Yeah.
After it reaches X percent of the
of the other mass, there'd be some way to mathematically say that's the boundary.
You can't stretch that finger any further.
If my kindergartener would never draw the shape, then it can be a district that sort of thing.
So yeah.
No, I agree with you.
There probably is some engineering solution,
but
then the engineering solution gets engineered too.
So someone will figure
a
great way to destroy all the Republican districts by slightly tweaking the parameters, right?
So the point here is not to be doom and gloom, but just to say,
Sometimes the bad is better than the alternative,
right?
The devil you know and the devil you
don't know.
Good lesson learned.
All right, this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.
I'd like to thank you all for listening.
Five Star Rating helps other people find us.
Other than that, be fruitful, multiply.
Thanks.
I'm able to step to the table.
So then that's when the law overturned and went back to, you know, you can't do that practice.
So it seems like this gerrymandering is a little bit like that that were, and now if you can't do it by race, obviously they're just back to probably mostly voting anyways, probably what they did anyway, is that they'll have data that this neighborhood 80% voted Democrat in the last election or something.
And so
they're trying to either avoid it or, depending on what team you're on, avoid it or grab it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think of the phrase like multiple margins of adjustment, right?
And so one of the issues with putting constraints on politicians is that it's a lot less straightforward than you would like it to be.
And so to give an example of this, like one of the battle cries that left is often like, we need to keep money out of politics.
And sometimes they'll
say things like, oh well in order to do that we should, for example, limit campaign contributions a certain amount, right?
That's one way to keep money out of politics.
Well the problem is, I can never remember the research paper that looked into this, but when in recent history we've put more severe and strict limitations on campaign contributions, what we see is an increase in contributions to politicians in office through political lobbying.
So there's more expenditures on current politician lobbying when there's less expenditure on
perspective politician campaign.
And so this is an example of multiple margins of adjustment.
If you can't change on one margin, if it becomes more costly to change on one margin, then you will tend to change on a different margin, right?
Same thing's true here.
Because of the limits placed by the Supreme Court,
Democrats aren't going to be able to redraw a lot of the districts that they have right now in a similar manner when they're forced to, and I think they're forced to, like I said, at the end of the 10-year period.
So they're going to have to figure out other ways to draw the districts such that they can't be accused of doing it on the basis of race, right?
And it's not enough for them to just say, oh, we didn't do this on race if they have a congressional district that has all of one race, like the courts will still strike that down.
So they're going to have to actually be able to figure out how to do it without a racial...
profiling.
And so I think that, you know, overall, it does become a little more costly to gerrymander on that margin.
And so we should expect less of it.
But I wouldn't say very much less, kind of like what you said, they're just going to find other methods by which for the gerrymandering to happen.
But that does, I think, bring into like the economic and political kind of calculus here of rent seeking.
And so when I think of rent seeking, the way I think in my head of the economic concept of rent seeking is I contrast it with profit seeking.
So profit seeking is when you are trying to create value in the economy and in so doing, bring some of that value in towards yourself.
And so, for example, if you start a new business and that new business takes a bunch of inputs and it produces an output that's more valuable than the inputs, you actually increase the value of resources in the economy.
The proof of that is your output is more valuable than your inputs, right?
Otherwise, you don't make a profit.
And then you get to keep in our society the profits and you know, at least some of them you get taxed on some of them too.
So it's not a full profit gain, but that's profit seeking.
And you create a win-win situation.
I always like to highlight at this point, I know where you're going with this too, but right, but oh, I went to Walmart and I bought it from this entrepreneur and I paid $35 and I would have paid $55.
So I gained off the transaction.
And
of course we know that the entrepreneur gained because they were able to
buy it at or have a cost of 20 and they sell it at 35.
And so both parties win.
And then there's enough leftover with the risk they're taking on to get that profit.
So profit seeking or value seeking, right?
And that's probably the softer, gentler way that people can absorb.
But we're really creating value for society.
We're creating two winners, positive sum game.
Yeah.
And the contrast is.
rent seeking uh and this is a confusing term unfortunately
yeah kind of
everybody wishes the term was different but it's too late now so i'm not sure where the first uh was used but
it's been used in a paper
yeah yeah so some academic paper and just ran away with it but uh to give you an example of rent seeking listeners an example of rent seeking would be like if i spent time and money buying a lockpick kit and learning how to pick locks
And I went to Russ's house at two in the morning and picked his lock and gave his dog a treat and then took up.
stack of cash out of this house.
Now, let's think how is this economically different?
It's obviously morally different.
It's legally different.
But how is this economically different from profit seeking?
Well, here's the economic difference.
When I was profit seeking, I was increasing the value to society.
In other words, I was creating value and then capturing myself.
In the rent seeking example, I am taking already existing value that's Russ's money and I'm expending resources.
That's my lockpicking kid and training and time and all that in order to capture
the already existing value.
And this can be done in politics too, right?
The more common example of rent seeking is in politics.
So when a group lobbies Congress to spend a bunch of our tax dollars on their special interests, that's basically the same thing that's going on in the lockpicking example.
Someone is spending resources to capture already existing value in the world.
And the problem, to contrast with Russ's great example there of the positive sum game, the problem with rent seeking is it's not a positive sum game.
You could even make the argument that it's negative sum because I've received money personally, but Russ's loss is exactly equal to my gain.
If I steal $100, Russ lost $100.
But not only that, I lost some money learning how to pick locks.
And so my net gain is actually less than Russ's net loss.
And that means our societal net is a loss overall.
That's Rancy.
And Bastiat calls it plunder.
So in Peter's first example, stealing from me is plunder, like pirates plunder a ship.
He wrote this in the late 1800s.
And legal plunder is...
the political way.
Yeah, where it's totally legal to lobby your politician at this point and get some goodies coming your way that were at the expense of the taxpayer, but it's totally legal.
So legal, and Bostiak claimed legal plunder is actually much worse than regular plunder.
And the reason he gave there was that, well, we can have laws on the books that put Peter in jail when he steals from me, right?
We have protection of property rights and the rule of law.
Whereas when the law is manipulated to do the plundering, we're in bad shape.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And so how does this relate to gerrymandering?
Well, the gerrymandering process itself is a form of rent seeking by and large.
It's an expensive process.
So politicians spend a lot of time, a lot of internal political resources in order to redraw these maps.
And generally, the purpose of these maps is not to increase societal welfare unless you're kind of naive.
The purpose, as Russ and I have highlighted and everybody kind of knows already, is to increase the value that a particular party is able to capture, essentially.
And, you know, if you believe one party is better than another, you might be okay in general when your side wins, because that means you're maybe receiving that value.
But...
Behind the veil of ignorance, in other words, if you don't know which part is going to gerrymander, it's very easy to accept that this process is essentially a rent seeking process.
It's expensive.
People hire people to do, like, particular gerrymanders.
They get challenged in court all the time.
That's expensive.
I would ask my gerrymandering is in the millions of costs, not in the thousands of costs.
And if you look at the cost of, like, running a court, then I think that becomes pretty clear pretty quick.
Yeah.
Yeah and I'm glad you brought that up because I wouldn't have thought it to be really a costly process.
I would just think it's okay let's pull off the map and yeah I tell us and let's just move the boundary over here and
unfortunately lawyers are expensive and every year there's maps that are challenged you know that there's again we were just outside three different cases that have happened for with Texas and California actually in the last six months that have gone
through lower courts, to higher courts, some of them ultimately the Supreme Court.
I mean, that's a ton of man hours, lawyers are expensive, and it's never just one lawyer, it's a team of lawyers, right?
So the money racks up quick.
But the problem is the geography side, I think we should pivot there a second.
One of the biggest anti-jerrymandering arguments essentially comes down to the belief that geographic voting is bad and that we should do away with it in general.
So I defended geographic voting earlier, but
you hear these things like land doesn't vote, people do.
Land shouldn't get representation, people should.
And the comment that's being made there is like, well, why should it be the case that like some like rural section of a certain state should get like awaiting that's higher essentially?
Because again, that's ultimately what gerrymandering does.
It waits certain geographies higher
than
other geographies.
And I would guess that it tends to
cause rural areas to be more highly weighted.
Maybe it depends on the state there.
You could probably draw it the other way, but
I'm just thinking in Kansas, like would a whole district be
the whole southwest part of the state with the densities that, I mean, it's just very few people per square mile when we start getting into southern and southwestern Kansas.
Yeah, so all of northwest Kansas is one, more than northwest, so I'll actually turn the map around for you Russ, like it.
Oh my!
Yeah, there's almost every county in Kansas, a majority of counties in Kansas are in one congressional district on the northwest edge.
or cattle per square mile than there are people.
Yeah,
exactly.
So ultimately, there's kind of this tension between the folks who think, well, the easy way to do it with gerrymandering is just direct democracy.
In other words, maybe it's not direct, but it's more direct democracy.
Instead of voting by these districts, let's get rid of the districts.
Each state gets six congressmen.
Like Russ said, maybe a rank choice voting.
Everybody gets six votes, and the top six candidates win.
And they're your representatives for the whole state, not just part of the state.
And so that would do away with rent seeking it would do away with gerrymandering but my view this is still not a very good solution because like I said earlier whether people like it or not people tend to geographically locate around people with similar interests at least on some margins and when we do this popular choice voting what happens is you get majority rule and unfortunately when majority rules you also get.
rent-seeking, right?
When 51% can vote for 49%, you get the same sort of rent-seeking process that gerrymandering has.
In other words, 51% can vote to plunder resources from 49%, right?
And in my mind, it's actually way more likely to have rent-seeking going on when you have a 51-49 situation than under this kind of like labyrinth, strange, antiquated, redistricting situation.
Like, it's hard, I think, to rent-seek
in gerrymandering.
decentralized yeah
and it only i i actually did a little more looking at the break it only happens at most every five years and so they're in some states they can't even happen in those five years and so it's kind of lagging and so like russ said you can't perfectly predict what ten years is going to look like so you might screw up the redistricting right i almost think that the gerrymandering process is sort of like we're giving our politicians like a gun
And like gerrymandering is kind of a musket.
And people are saying, no, the musket, they could shoot people with that musket.
We need to hand them an AK-47 instead.
And that's the 51-49 majority rule.
And in my mind, the AK-47 is worse.
Yeah, I'd rather them have a clumsy weapon than a more precise weapon.
Well, and they do have to, at a minimum, pay lip service to their district, right?
So I guess I don't want to forget that there's real politicians that are
Only able to be voted on in that district.
So the politicians have to go to the neighborhood meetings and the Whatever road show stuff and listen to the concerns of the citizens and so we would lose some of that if we got rid of the geographic part Yeah, no, I mean there can't there definitely is issues
you know, like you said, with Southern Illinois versus Chicago and same thing in Kansas, but really same thing in any state.
All right, this has been a production of the Gorton Institute here at Ottawa University.
I'd like to thank you all for listening.
Five Star Rating helps other people find us.
Other than that, be fruitful and multiply.
Thanks.
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If you thought you couldn't afford to buy a home,
Think again.
Think about owning an attractive, practical Haynes manufacturer.
Heavily insulated.
Warm and comfortable.
The price you can live with.
Even on a Haynes home like this, for one-third the cost of a side-build
home.
We've had thousands of people on homes down.
We can help you.
Gird and Norma Haynes.
The Homes people.
Homes at a price you can live with.
Cracklin Rosie, just like we play it here.
And Barbara, I heard some wonderful voices there.
I heard Kurt and Norma.
Oh, how wonderful, John.
First of all, hello.
And thank you for playing that.
It's so good to hear my parents' voices.
They have always been, had always been advocates of beautiful affordable housing, whether it was back then or now.
It's still safe affordable housing and it's so good to know that we're carrying on that tradition.
It is Barbara and I look at these captions on these wonderful ads and some of the same mantras apply today.
They lower your utility bills, interest rate, affordable, best buys.
There's a whole, if you go to this great website, I got to plug their website, hamshomes.com.
They've got so many
treasure troves of information, but also the historic commercials that really captured the imaginations of all Eastern Iowans through the CBS affiliate television.
Back then it was WMT also Channel 2.
And Barbara, now you've got these beautiful communities at Summit View and Grand View.
Tell us about these communities that you preside over.
I want everybody to come to Southwest Cedar Rapids and do Summit View and Grand View.
We're at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road Southwest.
So that's Wilson Avenue, West Post Road.
We have Grand View and Summit View and Grand View Sales Office is open seven days a week.
We have lovely parks, playgrounds.
We have emergency storm shelters for safety.
We have resident events.
We have a dog park for furry friends.
We've got sand volleyball courts, picnic pavilions, and walking trails.
Oh, and did I mention we also have a Frisbee golf course?
There's so many amenities that are here and available now, this time of year, because it's summer in Iowa.
I hope everybody just comes and drives through.
Just take a look.
See what you see.
And not only that, but folks, if you drive by, the infrastructure is so new.
The streets are beautifully paved.
The lighting system is wonderful.
And Barbara, I look through these lots.
These are homes on really nice sized lots with perfect driveways and beautiful landscaping.
The lawns and the shrubbery, the landscaping, these are lovely neighborhoods.
You know, that's our residents that do that.
We don't require people to plant tulips and hostas, but they do, and it looks beautiful.
And once one person on the street starts landscaping the yard, you know what happens.
Everybody does it.
Here with Barbara Haymes Bryant, the matriarch of Haymes, the homeless people.
Barbara, cutting to the chase here, I'm looking at some very spacious homes.
A lot of these are three bed and two bath.
They're all in that 1800 square foot range.
And what's incredible to me is the pricing between 150 and $190,000.
And these have got a lot of room for family to grow and flourish.
They sure do.
Those are double sectionals that are new.
And those are the price ranges on it.
but folks can get a pre-owned, single sectional home for less than that.
It's still 1200 square feet, about three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and many of our home sites have garages on them.
All of our home sites
have off-street parking.
non-manufactured homes.
You guys even have storm shelters for your residents at these communities.
That's correct.
Each one of our communities have two storm shelters, so that's four storm shelters total.
We also have a service we call hazard call, and it's a service we subscribe to that gets weather-related alerts out to our residents on their phone or by text.
or by phone call when there's imminent danger of bad weather.
So during the derecho, that sure came in handy and directed a lot of our residents to the storm shelters.
You remember the derecho, it happened on a Monday, so a lot of folks were at
work.
August 10, August 10, I'll
never
forget.
I'll never forget.
12 30 in the afternoon here in the theater, after the wind began to blow and the sky got really dark and
We had a lot of folks in our storm shelters.
A lot of folks, like I said, were at work, but the folks that were here in their homes were welcome to come and use storm shelters.
Barbara, you also take the hassle of the two things that always vex me.
Financing applications and insurance.
You guys have a one-stop shop there.
You even help coordinate that if folks want.
That's right.
We have two licensed mortgage load originators on staff.
So we can direct folks to our own mortgage funding bank.
It's called Circle Finance.
Or there's local lenders like Green State Credit Union that also make good loans for manufactured homes.
We insure manufactured homes through Foremost.
It's the premier insurance company in the country for insuring manufactured homes.
And we are a licensed insurance agent called Haines Insurance Agency.
So yeah.
one-stop shop.
You can do it all right here.
So Barbara, how do they find you?
Tell them how to drive there, how to call you on that great Legacy Marion number, and how to find you on social media.
Thank you, John.
First of all, our website is where most people start.
HainesHomes.com H-A-M-E-S-H-O-M-E-S.com.
We're also on Facebook at HainesHomes.
Legacy phone number that you refer to is the number we've had since 1969.
It's 319-377-4863.
319-377-4863.
And we're also available seven days a week at the corner of Wilson Avenue and West Post Road Southwest.
We have sales staff here seven days a week and they'd be happy to show you
Your next home
an old glory as well as our beautiful Iowa State flag fly proudly as well as the POW MIA flags Kurt Norma the late great Devoted veterans in the service of our country and always think about them around these days of Memorial Day get out there and see Barbara and the gang folks.
It's wonderful.
It's absolutely
the time of year to think about your next move.
So get out and see them.
And Barbara, as always, thanks for being part of this program and sponsoring.
We're very proud here that we've been ranked among the excellence in Iowa Large Market Radio, both for public affairs and political coverage.
Who'da thunk, Barbara?
Oh, John, I woulda thunk it.
You're the best.
I'm gonna go watch some old commercials, so you have a good day.
You too, Barbara Haymes Bryant,
guys, we'll be back right after this.
a presentation of the Gortney Institute at Ottawa University.
Okay, welcome to our show today.
My name is Peter Jacobson.
I'm the Gortney Professor of Economic Education and Research.
Joining me today is Dr. Justin Clark.
He's the Menard Family Professor of Philosophy and Ethics.
And Justin, you're going to bring us into the show today.
Hey, thanks, Peter.
So I thought it would be fun to talk about
tragedy.
And I don't mean tragedies that, you know, befall actual human beings in daily life, like newspaper articles about tragedy.
I mean the art form of tragedy, because it's really interesting that we as human beings, we go to such great lengths in our own lives to avoid experiencing
pain and tragedy and to try to avoid bad things happening to us.
And yet, historically, tragedy is like the oldest dramatic art form that we have.
And it doesn't seem like this is going away.
Tragedies are, they were the earliest dramatic art form we have, and then they are still popular to this day.
And when I talk to my students about tragedies, when we talk about
You know, sometimes I'll ask them, like, do you know any tragedies?
And they go, like, well, what about I had to read Macbeth in in high school or something like that.
And, you know, well, sure.
And then I just started asking them about, like, OK, well, what movies have you watched recently that made you cry?
Right.
And, you know, it's it's not just Macbeth.
It's my dog.
You know, it's what's the dog movie?
Not my dog skip.
That might be a tragedy.
I can't remember.
But you're right.
Yeah.
No, Marley and me.
Marley and me.
Okay.
That's Marley.
Like it's a tragedy, right?
And so, I mean, actually the, the way.
The Green Mile, Schindler's
List, like all these things.
Yeah.
And the caricature of a tragedy versus a comedy, if we wanted to like split drama down this right down the middle is that, you know, characteristically,
in a comedy at the end everybody gets married and in a tragedy at the end everybody dies right and that doesn't always hold you know um there are some tragedies where only one person dies or but you know it's that it centers around this really bad thing and I don't know about you like I so for me Marley and me is a good example for me because
I saw that movie and I heaved like a, like big, ugly, heaving sobs.
And I have to tell you, like, going into it, I knew that doc was gonna die.
And I've watched it again.
And when I watched it again, heaving sobs again.
That's not something that I think a lot of people, we don't usually seek out experiences that do this to us.
So yeah, you have any thoughts, any tragic art forms that move Peter?
You know, I think I must not be like a big seeker out of tragedy because when you brought it up I thought oh, yeah, that'd be a good topic and then I'm thinking well What tragedies have I seen and you know, I'm throwing in like top 100 tragic movies.
It's like oh man.
I haven't seen any of these One of the ones that popped up early on just to prove that it's kind of timeless Even though I think this is more of a classically a chick flick would be like the Nicholas Sparks novels which I haven't read but he they adapted the Fault in Arc stars into a movie back in 2014
I think I went and watched it with my now wife, Hayley, but I don't have a perfect memory on that.
But this is a movie about a girl who dies of cancer while being in like a romantic relationship as a teenager or something like that, right?
I don't remember the plot very well.
And, you know, part of me coming out of something like that does have the thought process of, well, why did I bother with this movie, right?
Like this just like upset me.
So it does bring an interesting question to bear about why people do enjoy tragedy.
I think everybody does to some extent.
Some people ask them others, speaking of my wife Haley, she hates tragedy.
Any time a movie has even a slightly, even if the ending of a movie is overall happy, but there's a sad aspect, the movie's a bad movie.
We were talking before the podcast and Interstellar is a good example of this, where he does save the world, but he loses his life with his daughter or whatever, so there's a tragic component.
Taylor can't stand the movie for that reason.
So it's interesting how different people react differently to those sorts of things.
But yeah, I guess I've never really thought about why it is people seek that out.
So I think like the two classic examples and they agree with each other for like philosophically are Aristotle and Nietzsche.
So Aristotle was I think the
one of the first people to write about tragedy.
And he's writing about tragedy in Athens, you know, as a Greek.
And we get our tradition of tragedy from the Greek play.
And our earliest tragedies that we know of in the Western tradition, the earliest things we would call a tragedy do come from the Greeks, Sophon and Sophocles.
And so
Aristotle has a good kind of argument for why we like this and Nietzsche has a good kind of history that I think kind of colors Aristotle's analysis.
And so Aristotle says, you know, we like tragedy because we are temporal creatures and these are
A lot of, you know, death is an experience that we will all have to face.
And there is something emotionally cleansing about experiencing this kind of situation in an atmosphere of relative safety.
And this probably, you know, people use the same explanation to explain why people like scary movies or horror movies as well, right?
not that we will all have to face the clown at the end of our lives or whatever, but that it's the relative safety part of it, right?
That these are experiences that we like to enjoy vicariously.
Am I understanding you right that like the reason that people enjoy whatever you're scaring with your tragedy is because
Geez, good thing that's not happening to me.
Like is that the you know, what would you say like relative security?
That's kind of what it sounds like.
I think that's the horror explanation.
Okay, but Aristotle would say the Nietzsche would say that the tragic explanation is actually more something like That unlike in the horror explanation
And the tragic explanation, we have to go, but this will happen to me.
Something like this will happen to me.
And so in taking part of watching it, I kind of emotionally get, get rid of these emotions that I would normally have.
And that works, the getting rid of the emotions happen works for the horror too.
But this idea that this can
and might, and probably a lot of these things will happen to me, that's unique to tragedy for, I think, Aristotle.
This is where the explanation of catharsis comes from.
I'm sure a lot of listeners have heard the word cathartic before.
Aristotle, we get this word popularized in Aristotle's analysis of tragedy, if I remember correctly, where he goes, we have these emotions and it feels good
for us to get rid of these emotions sometimes.
We feel good after a big cry, even if the experience of crying itself isn't pleasant.
And so this explains why, you know, I watched Marley and me again, even though I knew that dog was going to die and I had a feeling I was going to cry.
I remember the second time I watched it, I was with my brother and I was like 26 and my brother was 22.
He had just graduated college.
I was working.
And we were both watching this together, and we had a dog that looked a lot like Marley growing up, and of course that dog had died.
We had some other dogs that looked like Marley who were on their way out, and they're now dead.
RIP, Lucy, Elvis, and Josie.
But we were in the room with the dogs, but there were also our two girlfriends at the time.
And both me and my brother were heaving sobbing, right?
And our girlfriends were just stone faced.
And neither of us are married to those two women.
And I don't know if that says anything, but...
Well, it reminds me of the other great plus for Ray Romano, who I'm sure had a part in writing the acclaimed TV series, Everybody Bluffs Raymond.
in which there is an episode, the entire plot of which revolves around the fact that Deborah, in her day alone, decides to sit on the couch and cry.
And Ray comes back home kind of like accidentally and unexpectedly, and he sees her.
He's very upset that she said it feels good to cry, she would just want some time to cry.
He's very upset that this is her explanation.
And yeah, there's an interesting question here of like, if I think about this economically.
The fact that people pay money for this means that they value it.
Of course, that doesn't mean that it will ultimately be for their good.
That's a different question.
And so one obvious question is, is this is crying more like, I don't know, going to a theme park where you're like experiencing like a roller coaster and that's fun for you and assuming there's not safety risks.
Then it is at least harmless if not beneficial.
Or is it like crack cocaine where like, yeah, people pay for it and enjoy it, but it's actually damaging you.
And I also wonder on this note, not on everybody loves ringing the note, but this note in general, can people overindulge in this sort of thing?
Are there people who are too wrapped up in tragedy to the point where maybe they're living a life of like melodrama or something like that?
So I don't know.
What?
What?
Are you talking about theater kids?
Perhaps, yeah.
It does seem like there are some people who almost enjoy being sad, right?
And could be wrong about that, right?
But teams like that exist out there.
And so there is a question to what extent this is indulgent.
Now, of course, the Aristotle reasoning would suggest no.
The Aristotle reasoning suggests that this is like a healthy way to come to terms with something or something like that, if I understood the argument, right?
But there is an alternative theory of like maybe this is like playing on a center of our brain to derive some sort of feeling in an otherwise boring life or something like that.
I
think it's a good time to take a break and then we come back and talk about Nietzsche's analysis of Aristotle.
Yep.
When we come back, we'll go ahead and spend some time not talking about Nietzsche.
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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, welcome back.
Before break, we were talking about whether enjoyment of tragedy as an art form can be beneficial or if it's self-destructive, maybe.
We were trying to sort that out.
We had talked a little bit about Aristotle and his view of what tragedy was, the function it served.
And then Justin left us with a cliffhanger of
Well, what does Nietzsche have to say about it, the philosopher Frederick Nietzsche?
So I think even Aristotle, I think, might think that you can overindulge in it, right?
Because he's looking, he's looking to explain why we like it.
And he he'll have an explanation for why we like wine, too, right, which is, I mean, it makes us feel good or whatever.
But he'll also say, and of course, if enjoying wine gets
in the way of all these other things that Aristotle think are good, then this might be a time where you need to back off the wine a little bit.
I think Aristotle would even say that we can indulge in tragedy too much, but it is Aristotle who is the one who put forward this cathartic theory of why we enjoy the thing that seems like it's not enjoyable from the outside.
Nietzsche's first book was The Birth of Tragedy, and it's his most academic book, the one that kind of made him famous.
And he does this whole study because Nietzsche, a lot of people think of Nietzsche as a philosopher.
He was actually a philologist, which is essentially a classicist, or the study of classics.
So he did a study on early Greek tragedy.
And Nietzsche notes that in really early tragedies,
There's really there's only one character it's just one person on the stage and the audience actually takes up the role of what's called you know what we call now the chorus.
And they answer the protagonist.
And at the end, the protagonist always dies.
And we if you're a part of the audience, you are singing and chanting.
And you kind of you play the role.
Nietzsche says Nietzsche divides this into what he considers like the two main Greek gods with regard to art.
There's Apollo and Dionysus.
Dionysus, if you ever see in the Roman tradition, is called Bacchus.
But Bacchus Dionysus, if you see the god Dionysus or the portrayal of him, usually has a jug of wine around his shoulder and an enormous erection.
So he's the god of really like partying and submitting to like the flesh or whatever.
And also of a loss of individuality.
like joining the crowd.
Anyways
listeners, thank you for tuning in.
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you
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everyone till we meet again have a great weekend and bye bye