From the campus of Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, this is the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour, bringing the activity and education of the college to listeners across the country. Here's your host, Scott Bertram.

Hello again, everybody, and welcome in to another edition of the Radio Free Hillsdale Hour.

On this episode, we'll talk with Charles Steele from Hillsdale's economics department.

Tim Carney from the Washington Examiner and the American Enterprise Institute at his

recent piece, Small Town America Fights for its Life.

Lee Cole from Hillsdale's Philosophy Department on Aristotle's physics and Kevin Myers, a

Hillsdale graduate and CEO of Lucy Darling.

We're joined by Dr. Charles Steele, Associate Professor of Economics and Herman and Suzanne

S. Dettweiler Chair in Economics, Business and Accounting at Hillsdale College. Dr. Steele, thanks for joining us.

Oh, great. Thank you, Scott.

I was reading the other day, well, I was a story about a paper. I don't usually go around reading academic papers, you know, just willy-nilly.

But the point being that the author was blaming something called Bommel's cost disease as being responsible for cost increases in certain categories here in the U.S.

So let's give people some idea.

What is Bommel's cost disease?

What's that theory behind it?

What's the theory behind it? The Bommel cost cost disease? What's that theory behind it?

The Bommel cost disease is an idea that was developed by William Bommel, professor.

He was at New York University, and he's now deceased. But the notion is this. For most kinds of goods and services, what we see is that with technological

improvement, the relative price of goods falls. They become cheaper. A good example of this

is a calculator. The first engineering hand calculators that were developed in the mid-70s

cost in the equivalent today of thousands of dollars

in today's terms.

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