A recent Harris-Guardian poll shows that the public’s perception of the economy is different than economic reality. Most things that the majority of Americans believe about the economy are wrong. I have to say this surprised me more than it probably should have.

To give some examples

• 55% of poll respondents think that the economy is shrinking. Almost the same percentage of people believe we are in a recession. The reality is that the economy has grown consistently every month over the last two years. The recession was in 2020 during the pandemic, and the U.S. economy is outperforming the economies of every major economic power.
• 49% of poll respondents believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high. The opposite is true, and unemployment has stayed below 4% for over two years – something that hasn’t happened since the early 1960s.
• 49% also think the stock market is down this year, when the market has grown by over 10%, and most markets have reached an all-time high in recent months.

How can the public’s perception be so different than the economic reality?  There are a number of possible reasons. For one, many people base their opinion on issues like the economy according to their own situation and personal feelings. They might know somebody who lost a job and take that to mean that the economy is doing poorly. They might see higher prices for things they regularly buy and think that inflation is still high, while the reality is that inflation was in the past  but has currently slowed back down to historical levels. It’s harder to explain why people think the stock market is down, with the best explanation being the large amount of misinformation in our digital world that gets magnified on social media.

What does all of this have to do with broadband? I often write about the broadband policy issues that are being widely discussed within the industry. People have strong feelings about whether ACP should be renewed and how it should be funded. Inside the industry there are hot and heavy debates occurring about the issue of letting people in apartments opt-out of landlord provided broadband. Industry folks have strong opinions about the BEAD grant program, the FCC, and a host of other industry issues.

But it’s easy for industry insiders to forget that insiders live in a telecom bubble. If half of the people in the country have the wrong beliefs about basic economic facts, then how many people know anything about the end of ACP? In the press outlets that I regularly read, the ACP issue only garnered a minor mention once or twice – certainly not enough for a non-industry person to understand or even notice the issue.

It’s hard to break out of the telecom bubble. I’ve been writing this blog for over eleven years, and I understand it’s written for telecom folks. The only blog I ever wrote that got noticed outside the telecom bubble was a blog that went viral and described how squirrels and gophers like to chew on fiber.

The only telecom issue that reached huge numbers of the general public in the last decade was net neutrality – and most people both for and against the issue got the facts wrong. The arguments for net neutrality argued that reins had to placed on ISPs or they would sell priority access to the point that it would ruin broadband for everybody else. Opponents of net neutrality said that putting any curbs on ISPs would kill broadband investments and innovation.

These arguments for and against implementing net neutrality were far off base. Industry insiders understood that this was not a big fight about fast lanes or monopoly abuse, but about the simple question of whether there should be any regulation of ISPs. In all of the loud back and forth about this issue, the question of regulating or not regulating basic ISP behavior was barely mentioned.

I’ve concluded over the years that industry insiders can be as vulnerable to hyperbole and misunderstanding of the facts as the general public is about the economy. Practically every FCC docket includes exaggerated claims from industry trade groups on the impact of whatever regulatory change is being proposed. Insiders often think the sky is falling over issues that people outside the industry have never heard of.