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This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good morning, Nia. How are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm excellent. How are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine. I'm really fine because I resisted the temptation to call you this morning, Nia, on a landline.
N. Rodgers: Do you have a landline?
J. Aughenbaugh: I do not have [inaudible] .
N. Rodgers: The temptation there wasn't so strong?
J. Aughenbaugh: It wasn't so strong. By the way, for our younger listeners, if you're not familiar with the term landline, Nia, what is a landline?
N. Rodgers: A land line is a piece of copper wire that goes from some mystical place that I'm not entirely certain into your house, and brings phone calls into your house and back in the day AT&T was the monopoly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: No, Ma Bell.
J. Aughenbaugh: Ma Bell.
N. Rodgers: Ma Bell was the monopoly on landlines. Everybody had a bell telephone in their house, and my grandma's was the kind that had the dial where you would dial it around in a half circle and it would go [inaudible] to go back.
J. Aughenbaugh: You're talking about the rotary dial phone?
N. Rodgers: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: Then they got the push button kind. That was like we're living in the future, we're living in the jets and era.
J. Aughenbaugh: I recall, once we got the push dial, then we even got a phone that we physically put on the wall instead of actually having it on the table.
N. Rodgers: That's right so you could get rid of the telephone table which, by the way, had been in existence for 100 years.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We should start by saying for listeners who don't know a landline, also when they first were put in were shared. Most of the time you would call a building, and like let's say you lived in a tenement in New York, there would be one phone, and so somebody would answer the phone and go find the person in their apartment, bring them down to the telephone, and you could have a brief telephone call. It was, by the way, terrible noise like you could barely understand, and there were operators. What Aughie would do is he would call an operator and he would say, I would like you to connect me to Nia at 4186, whatever my number was. It wasn't a big long digit. It was just because it really mostly was within cities, and the operator say, hold please and she would connect his call, but she would get somebody onto the phone who would then go get me, and I would get on the phone and she would say, you can talk now. She could not listen, but if she didn't have any calls coming through, she might very well listen to our conversation, because the operators did that on the regular, and it wasn't-
J. Aughenbaugh: So the quality of the reception was usually terrible. It was a laborious process to make initial phone calls and in terms of privacy, and there was no privacy.
N. Rodgers: Then it went into people's houses and then you're like you just call them directly, and that was like a miracle. You didn't have to go through an operator, you could call somebody directly, and then you could call into their house, and then it was just you and them and theoretically, just you and them and the FBI. I kid. They had to get wire tapping, and when we talk about wire tapping, what we're talking about is those copper wires.
J. Aughenbaugh: Wires, that's right.
N. Rodgers: But what's great is when the power went out, those bad boys still worked because they were self powered.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, they were self powered. They were not necessarily connected to the electricity.
N. Rodgers: To the main electrical grid.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: People would call you and say, my power is off, is your power off? Which now, if your power is off and the cell towers come down, you're not calling anybody to tell them if the cell towers are coming down.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you've not charged up your cell phone, and then the power goes out, then you have that moment of panic, Nia, where you're looking at your cell phone and you see what percentage is less on your battery.
N. Rodgers: Then you turn it off to try to save it.
J. Aughenbaugh: Save it. I do the same thing in regards to my laptop and my daughter's tablet.
N. Rodgers: Another battery driven.
J. Aughenbaugh: You are just like, man, I should have gone ahead and charged this up before the thunderstorm hit.
N. Rodgers: Why does this matter though for politics? Why does it matter for government?
J. Aughenbaugh: This gets to the reason why we're doing this particular episode. Earlier this year, one of us was perusing the newspaper and there was an article, I think, in the Washington Post that had the title of barely a quarter of Americans still have landlines. Who are they? Now, listeners, neither Nia or I have a landline, however my mother.
N. Rodgers: Both our moms do.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, both of our moms do.
N. Rodgers: They have had since God was a boy, since dawn of time. There was a big bang, and then there were telephones.
J. Aughenbaugh: Eve reached out to Adam and said, hey, would you like a bite of the apple, and Adam said, no, I'm on hold I will be with you in a second. I shared the article with Nia, and Nia and I were like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, there's something really fascinating here.
N. Rodgers: We were intrigued by the demographics involved in this.
J. Aughenbaugh: We were intrigued by the demographics, but we were also intrigued by the fact that there is a government agency that tracks this.
N. Rodgers: It's actually more than one.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's more than one. It's actually a really good example of government agencies cooperating with one other.
N. Rodgers: Agency say, phone usage is tracked by the National Health Interview Survey.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Which, by the way, listeners, if you didn't know of this survey, we think you're in good company because neither Nia or I were familiar. Nia, were you familiar with this survey?
N. Rodgers: No.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: I knew that health statistics came from somewhere because I used them from the CDC, which is the mother organization under which the National Center for Health Statistics works. But I did not know about the sub-agency. I just knew that it was some mystical and tada the CDC has health statistics. But I know who does the actual surveying.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is the Centers for Disease Control.
N. Rodgers: Thank you.
J. Aughenbaugh: What I mean but hey.
N. Rodgers: I was dropping an acronym there.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, you know hey.
N. Rodgers: Watch the acronyms.
J. Aughenbaugh: We love our acronyms on this podcast.
N. Rodgers: But don't just leave them laying around. Somebody might trip.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. That's why you need to go ahead. First usage, always say what the words are.
N. Rodgers: That's right. Center for Disease Control, (CDC). That's how that should appear. We should just do that verbally.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They track phone usage.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They don't really necessarily track like the type of phone ownership. They don't ask you, would that be a landline or a cell phone? What they ask you is how many hours per week do you use the telephone? Because what they're trying to get at is the reason it started.
J. Aughenbaugh: The reason why it started was the National Center for Health Statistics, the NCHS, were really concerned when this new invention occurred, and the new invention was the mobile phone, the cellular phone. Because they did all of their surveys, they called up people on their landlines, and they were concerned that they would no longer be able to survey Americans in regards to all kinds of medical knowledge.
N. Rodgers: Because cell phones you can opt out of having be part of a national call list, and most people did. Remember that Aughie when we went onto the big list and put in our cell phone number and was like, don't call me?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because we don't want to be robo called for all kinds of things.
N. Rodgers: Oh my gosh. During election season, when you get 156,000 robo calls. Also, remember that cell phones came to their fruition when generation X were the people buying cell phones, and we don't want to talk to anybody.
J. Aughenbaugh: Anybody.
N. Rodgers: We're like, it's amazing that we got together and had children with other people because we are very much loners. As soon as it became available for us to have a cell phone, which meant that we could be in touch for emergency had to, but we didn't have to be at home and we didn't have to answer a phone, and they used to come up with a number so you could ignore them. We were like, this is our heaven. This is great for us.
J. Aughenbaugh: You were screening your calls. I'm like, of course, I was screening my calls.
N. Rodgers: I'm gen X.
J. Aughenbaugh: I saw your number.
N. Rodgers: I didn't want to talk to you.
J. Aughenbaugh: I didn't want to talk to you.
N. Rodgers: Back in the day, cell phones they were not built the same way they are built now, and at the beginning, I think people were also worried about things like radiation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Did they cause cancer?
N. Rodgers: There was all this stuff with cell phones. Some people still worry about that. We're not saying that those people have no reason to be concerned, but really what they should be worried about is the number of people who stare at screens for hours at a time and walk into traffic and get hit, or fall off the train platforms or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because every week my cell phone goes ahead and sends me a message and compares cell phone usage for the most recent week to my previous averages, and my daughter has seen that pop up on my cell phone and she was just like, daddy, you just don't ignore my text messages, you basically pretty much ignore everybody's text messages.
N. Rodgers: You're not special little girl.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm just like, hey, unless the message starts off with, this is an emergency, I might or might not click over. But I really am fascinated by why they were concerned because they wanted access to this information, and this is really important information, folks. Because this is information about rates of immunization, risky behavior, health care use, chronic conditions.
J. Aughenbaugh: They would call people on their land lines.
N. Rodgers: If you don't have a land line and you're not answering a cell phone, how did they get a representative sample?
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right, because you can't go ahead and make predictions about what the government may want to focus on in regards to healthcare in the United States, if people are not responding and you don't have a representative sample. Because let's just face it. If the only people you get in a phone survey, are 18-25 year olds, these infamous young healthy according to the health insurance companies, well, that's not a representative sample of the fact that the United States is grain, has more chronic conditions as the population gets older, etc.
N. Rodgers: Has more chronic conditions in general.
J. Aughenbaugh: Sure.
N. Rodgers: Young people are also struggling with some chronic conditions, but I want to bring up something and have Aughie talk to us about it. Dewey beats Truman.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Was not a surveying mistake of landlines?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Well, when we started doing political polling in the United States, they did phone surveys. There were a couple notable examples in the 1930s and the 1940s. When FDR ran for reelection in 1936, some of the polls suggested that he would lose. But he won in a landslide. The reason why they
figured out was they would call people during the daytime, and ask who were they more likely to vote for. Well, the problem was many Americans in 1935 and 1936 lost their homes.
N. Rodgers: The Depression.
J. Aughenbaugh: The Depression. The only people who were actually home during the day answering their phones, were typically the wives of really rich Americans, many of whom were very supportive of the Republican Party, and the Republican Party candidate, and not this Democratic reformer etc. But likewise with Truman running for re-election in 1948, his opponent was Dewey. Again, most of the surveys were phone surveys, and it didn't capture all of those Americans who weren't answering their phones during the daytime because they were working, they were out in the fields. We still had a significant foreign population in the late 1940s etc. Going into the election, the assumption was it would be a close race, but Truman would lose.
N. Rodgers: That headline was posted, on New York Times, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: A number of major Tv and newspaper.
N. Rodgers: It was a major newspaper, which is Dewey defeats Truman, and Truman's holding up, in the famous picture, he's holding up that headline after he's won the election.
J. Aughenbaugh: The next day when the results are finally in, and Truman was like, I lost. We've learned a lot about polling, and Nia and I have talked about this in previous podcast episodes. Yes, of recent vintage there have been problems in regards to pre-election polling, but one of the major problems of the 1930s and '40s has been addressed, which is if you can rely on phone surveys, you need to make sure you truly do have a representative sample.
N. Rodgers: One of the ways that they've dealt with that, is to also have in-person people, what I was about to say. I don't know how you'd be an in-person, not person. But anyway, that's an interesting thing to me. Is that one of the things they've done since what the 1950s or so?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. You actually have people do in-person surveys, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: Most government agencies do this. Nia, you and I've talked about this in regards to the census. The census has a two step process to count all Americans. The first step is they send out the census form, and they use tax records to do that. When you submit your annual tax return, you give an address. That is one of the few pieces of information that the IRS will actually share with other government agencies. This also can be verified with the Social Security Administration, because a significant number of Americans get Social Security and disability checks. The Census uses that information to send out the census form. Now, most of us get the short form, but a certain percentage gets the longer form. Now the response rate to the longer form is poor. Which forces Census to hire a
whole bunch of Americans. By the way, I've done this work. When I was a grad student, I made extra money by being a census enumerator.
N. Rodgers: Which means you walk out to the door. Hi, I was wondering if I could ask you a few questions for the census?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, and the reason why Nia is bringing this up is that the NCHS relies also upon in-person surveys.
N. Rodgers: They help bridge the gap and give you a more holistic view. Representative,.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, representative sample. But one of the reasons why they had to do this Nia, is the number of American households with landlines began to shrink dramatically.
N. Rodgers: What's the percentage of American adults that live in a household without a land line?
J. Aughenbaugh: Seventy-three percent of American adults lived in a household without a land line, at the end of 2022, 73%.
N. Rodgers: First of all, you got to figure out who the 27% is.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you want a representative survey, then you have to balance those numbers in some way.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, because you don't want to go ahead and exclude key subpopulations, when you're trying to find out, the state of if you will, American Health.
N. Rodgers: Right, and that should be noted for the record. These people are specifically coming to ask health questions. They are not coming to ask immigration questions.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: They are not coming to ask legal questions. They don't want to know, have you ever been in trouble with the law?
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: They don't want any of that. They don't want other demographic information, they are coming to ask about your health. There are 800 or so, I think, people who work for the NCHS, work for this survey, who go around the nation knocking on doors and saying, hi, can I ask you about your health.
J. Aughenbaugh: In the process-
N. Rodgers: If for some reason that happens at your door, it would be really helpful if you just went ahead and answered the question.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because there's not a lot of them, they don't ask a lot.
N. Rodgers: No.
J. Aughenbaugh: Okay.
N. Rodgers: It's not a hugely long survey. But it is useful because it helps us track changes over time of anxiety levels in the country, of illness levels in the country, of all stuff like that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then this allows the federal government then to go ahead and compare it to the data that's reported by hospitals, and health insurance companies, to improve accuracy.
N. Rodgers: To improve services.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: If we know that there's a part of the country that is being under serviced.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: For some reason then we throw resources at it to try to fix it.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's why for instance, we knew years ago that there was the potential for an opioid crisis. Because the survey was seeing an uptake in various subpopulations using opioids in various ways. Then that also was connected to what hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies were also beginning to report. In many ways, we should not have been caught off guard by the size, the scope of the opioid crisis, because we had this information. But what was fascinating, at least to me, Nia, was when they find out that there is 73% of American adults who live in households without land lines, that begs the question, who does still have or use land lines.
N. Rodgers: It's funny that that's what your question was, because my questions had to do with, what did they figure out about behaviors? Let's talk about both. First of all, who owns land line still?
J. Aughenbaugh: Homeowners are more likely to have land lines than renters. The percentage difference is 34%-15%.
N. Rodgers: That makes sense.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: It's a permanent thing. A landline is a permanent thing, you can't pick it up and carry it with you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: That line goes with the house. When you move into a new house, you got to learn a new phone number.
J. Aughenbaugh: In terms of demographics, in regards to race and ethnicity, Hispanic Americans are less likely to have land lines than their white or black friends, 20%-30%. Again, we're still not talking about majorities in any of these subpopulations.
J. Aughenbaugh: Typically, only 2% of US adults use landlines. Three percent rely on their landlines, but these statistics blew my mind. There is actually 1% of American adults.
N. Rodgers: Wait. Two percent only have landlines, 3% mostly have landlines.
J. Aughenbaugh: But there is 1% of American adults that don't have any phones whatsoever.
N. Rodgers: Freedom.
J. Aughenbaugh: No landlines, no cellphones, nothing.
N. Rodgers: That's interesting. Some of that may be homeless folks.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: But some of that is also housed folks that just choose not to have a telephone. Good for them.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you want to go off the grid, don't have a phone.
N. Rodgers: That's one of the ways to do it.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's the start of the process.
N. Rodgers: Does age have anything to do with it?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The largest group of folks who still have landlines are Americans 65 years old and older, and this is the only demographic where the number of households with landlines still outnumbers wireless households.
N. Rodgers: It was painting tooth and nail trying to get my parents to accept the cell phone.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, my mom still refuses.
N. Rodgers: My mom leaves it at home. We will go out and I will say, well, if I'm in the store and you think of something, just text me if there's something else you want me to pick up and my mom is like, I left the phone at home. I'm like, then why do you have a mobile phone? My mom says, well, I just check for texts at home. I'm like missing the point of mobile, but okay. My mom leaves her mobile phone immobile. My stepdad never touched a cell phone. Eighty five years old and he never used one.
J. Aughenbaugh: My mother and my grandmother have never had a cell phone. It just drives me nuts, particularly as they get older.
N. Rodgers: Take that in the car with you when you go to the grocery store in case anything happens.
J. Aughenbaugh: They are more prone to -
N. Rodgers: Falling.
J. Aughenbaugh: Life-altering accidents, yes. What was fascinating to you?
N. Rodgers: See, what was fascinating to me was people who go cell phone only. People who cut the cord. I thought it was interesting that they have more risky behaviors.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I think that's psychologically interesting. That landlines tend to make you little conservative, not politically, but just little conservative. Whereas people who own cell phones are more likely to binge drink, they're more likely to smoke, and they're more likely to go without health insurance. Part of that is age, but the researchers say that even when you control for age, sex, race, ethnicity, and income, that's still true. It's still true that they are more likely to engage in risky behaviors. Which I thought was fascinating because I would have placed it just on age. That the older you get, the less risky behavior, but maybe there's something about the mobility of cell phones and untying yourself from a landed location. I thought that was really interesting.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, the psychology of this. Do you think that because you have the cell phone and it gives you immediate directions to places where you want to go or if you do get in trouble-
N. Rodgers: Immediate assistance.
J. Aughenbaugh: You don't have to go home to make a phone call. I could just go ahead and call whomever to get help.
N. Rodgers: I know that people who watch crime dramas now don't understand crimes from the '70s and '80s when people had to run to a house to get help. Because now you would just pull out your cell
phone and call the police wherever you are and they would come to you. But it used to be that when you were being chased down and trying to be murdered, you had to find a place to make a phone call.
J. Aughenbaugh: If you broke down in a rural area, and you and I both grew up in rural areas.
N. Rodgers: You had to wait for somebody to come by.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or you had to walk 2.5, 3 miles over poorly paved roads. If they were paved at all. Sometimes you had to go ahead and cross livestock fields and hope that you didn't wake up the bull or the horses or whatever, to get to a farm house.
N. Rodgers: Or the tractors if you watched Cars.
J. Aughenbaugh: But just to get to a house and then you would knock on a door and you would hope.
N. Rodgers: They would wake up.
J. Aughenbaugh: Up one. Two, actually answer the door and three, not answer the door with a shotgun.
N. Rodgers: Then they would let you in and let you use the phone or call for you. I don't want to necessarily come into your house, how about you call the cops for me? That's why chase scenes in murder movies in the '70s and '80s involved you running to a house to get help, and now they involve you trying to run and use your cell phone at the same time. So it's in the mind skill set, but I do you think it's interesting.
J. Aughenbaugh: There was a psychology there that was pretty fascinating, but they also have made certain findings in regards to the regions.
N. Rodgers: Well, before you go into regions, can we throw out one piece of detailed information that our younger listeners may need?
J. Aughenbaugh: What's that?
N. Rodgers: Which is that old landlines are not the same as what people have now. Your grandma's landline is not the same as a landline you would get if you moved into a house and you were like, I'm going to be bold and strange and get a landline. You and the other 27% of people in the nation. Those landlines still don't work the same way the old landlines work. The new landlines almost all use the Internet to make phone calls. They use VOIP which is voice over Internet protocol to send calls through your Internet connection. That whole copper wire, old school, they're not doing that anymore. I assume got to be expensive maybe. But because also people want broadband in their house, and so a lot of institutions are saying, well, why would we put in two things when we could just put in one that does both?
J. Aughenbaugh: A lot of this was demand, but it was also in regards to the cost of supply. If you're a phone company, at some point in time, if a larger percentage of your customers are using the Internet, have cell phones, at some point in time, continuing to invest into landlines and maintaining those particular lines when the future seemingly suggested that they were going to want to get their information and they're going to want to communicate with one another with other technology. Well, they just stopped maintaining landlines.
N. Rodgers: Copper wiring is expensive, I'm assuming, as opposed to fiber optic cable?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Which is a lot less expensive, and it's lighter. It's easier to maintain. It's just easier for the companies to switch away from those things. Now that being said, it will be interesting to see what happens to our older rural folks as they pass and younger people move into those houses if they have new fiber optics put into their homes because they're trying to do more of the new fiber optic. Well, the fiber optic, it's not new, it's been around for quite a while.
J. Aughenbaugh: Quite a while. But Nia, where you went with this, actually points to the geographics of where landlines are still popular or more popular. Listeners, Nia, just went ahead and explained that "landlines" are actually not the same landlines of your predecessors, your previous generations. This actually is probably the explanation for why the Northeast has the highest percentage of Americans with landlines than any other part of the country. The explanation here is, when you started having demand for home Internet, you had phone companies pitted against cable providers. This was considered the triple play, and I still remember it was advertised this way. You wanted phone, broadband, and cable TV. That was the triple play. I still remember people in houses that had all three. I was just like, wow, these folks, they got it all. Cable companies like your Comcast, etc, were already behind phone companies. Particularly the phone companies that made up Ma Bell. For our younger listeners, you don't recall that in the 1970s and '80s, the United States federal government brought an antitrust lawsuit against Ma Bell because Ma Bell had the landline phone monopoly in the United States. The US federal courts agreed with the federal government and forced Ma Bell to break up into, I believe, six smaller firms.
N. Rodgers: Seven.
J. Aughenbaugh: Seven.
N. Rodgers: The Bell System.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, The Bell. One of the resulting firms was Verizon.
N. Rodgers: Well, the baby bells, they were called.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, they were called the baby bells.
N. Rodgers: The seven were broken into baby bell. Bell started everything. The bell system was all over the United States, I think.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, it was.
N. Rodgers: But it was heavily focused in the east, because that's where the population was. It was created in 1877. So the bell system is ancient. But I see your point. Where it began and where it's been its strongest, it still exists. That makes sense.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because as the article pointed out, many customers, particularly older customers for phone service, cable TV, etc., are creatures of habit, and Verizon was smart. They went ahead and offered package deals.
N. Rodgers: What they call bundling.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, they call it bundling. If you already had a landline and you wanted broadband and you still wanted your cable TV, Verizon basically said you could have all three, we will bundle them together, you would pay one price, and eventually, the cheapest of the three in that bundle was the landline.
N. Rodgers: Why get rid of it if it turns out to be a relatively negligible price, and you've already made the decision to have a cellphone and an internet. They say, for $2 more, you can keep your landline. Why would you not?
J. Aughenbaugh: Verizon was smart. Verizon would go ahead and share with its customers those emergency management experts who say, well, during a hurricane.
N. Rodgers: A power outage, which is not unusual in the northeast.
J. Aughenbaugh: With the east.
N. Rodgers: With the cold weather, and the snow and the ice. Your landline will still work.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. The northeast does get all four seasons, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Two or three of which may lead to incidence of power outages. Hey, for a few extra dollars more a month, you have the security of a landline.
N. Rodgers: Makes sense.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's who has Verizon Fios broadband, a landline phone from Verizon and a cell phone.
N. Rodgers: Can you hear me now? Which is branding which works, by the way. We were discussing branding the other day, a friend of mine and I and he was like, my entire childhood was branding and everything has stayed with me, because advertising works. What's interesting to me about that is places in the nation where that is not the case.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, that don't have landlines.
N. Rodgers: That don't have landlines. A lot of rural, I would have thought it would have been mostly rural.
J. Aughenbaugh: I did too.
N. Rodgers: But it's not.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not, and in part, you can actually go ahead and thank the federal government and a number of key members of Congress, including some of which are from the fine state of Virginia who have pushed for the federal government to incentivize the local governments to create broadband service in rural areas. Now, I mean, they did this in part because you would have constituents in states with pockets of large rural areas who could never participate in the internet economy, who could never shift from landlines to cell phones without a commitment.
N. Rodgers: Government intervention.
J. Aughenbaugh: A government intervention. Because if you're the private sector.
N. Rodgers: It's not worth it.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's not, yeah.
N. Rodgers: To run landlines out to the mountains in Idaho, that's not worth it. I'm not trying to be ugly to Idaho, I like Idaho, give me some potatoes. But it's not financially-wise to do that. But when the government says we will help pave the way, and those people are like sweet. Now that we have the Internet, we don't need to worry about this landline thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, we don't. Because, again, usually with the Internet also comes cell phones or cell phone towers, etc. I mean, if you're already building one, you can go ahead and put in the other.
N. Rodgers: Well, and you're switching.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Because whatever has been built is probably not the original telephone company.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right, yeah.
N. Rodgers: One of the things that Verizon has the advantage of is it's a derivative of the original telephone company. But probably who's putting in your Internet, Comcast, for instance, is not originally a baby bell. It's a purely Internet company that added on phones, which is a whole separate issue. If you're going to switch anyway, part of what you've got with the northeast I would think is, and I'm not trying to be ugly to people who live in the northeast, because I know your mom and grandma live in the northeast. But it's a little bit laziness in the sense of if I don't have to switch companies and I don't have to give up, why would I?
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, it's not just about the northeast, it's also the fact that there are customers. You talked about branding, but go one step further. Branding leads to brand loyalty. If you had a Verizon landline, then you had Verizon cable, and those both generally worked fine. You're generally satisfied with the cost and then Verizon comes in and says, and you can get a cell phone with us, and you can bundle all three. Well, why go with a different company? If your basic experience has been generally good and they go ahead and point out, hey, keep your landline for a few extra dollars a month, well, you're like, okay.
N. Rodgers: Especially if it's a very small percentage of the bill.
J. Aughenbaugh: The bill, and I don't really have to do anything.
N. Rodgers: That's the key. I don't have to do anything.
J. Aughenbaugh: Think about, for instance, Nia, you and I chatted about this before off-recording.
J. Aughenbaugh: How many cell phones, actual physical phones, have you had in your lifetime?
N. Rodgers: I think I may be an aberration because I've only had three.
J. Aughenbaugh: No. Again, this goes to the point that you were making. In my adult lifetime, I've only had four. In the first two were given to me by my employer because I was frequently traveling for the government. They wanted to be able to get a hold of me because I wasn't in the office near a land line. But in part, even though our cell phones get old, and this may be an older generation thing, they get old and the battery life.
N. Rodgers: Diminishes.
J. Aughenbaugh: Which diminishes, etc. Just the thought of having to go to a cell phone store.
N. Rodgers: You can't see me, listeners, but my eyes are rolling so hard that I'm practically unconscious.
J. Aughenbaugh: Her head is cocked, her shoulders have swamped forward.
N. Rodgers: It's all exhausting. You go in there and there's 7,000 models and you can't tell the difference between one and another. This one does this, but this one does that, I'm like, which one does my laundry? If none of this do my laundry, then they are all the same to me. The other thing, and this is an age thing for sure, you know what I use cell phone for mostly, is to make phone calls.
J. Aughenbaugh: That is an age thing.
N. Rodgers: Young people they'd rather die than make a phone call.
J. Aughenbaugh: They will send you 500 texts in roughly the same amount of time.
N. Rodgers: That will take to make one phone call.
J. Aughenbaugh: To cover all of the items in those 500 texts.
N. Rodgers: Without the typing.
J. Aughenbaugh: But they are so adept and so used.
N. Rodgers: It's who they are.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's who they are.
N. Rodgers: But to bring us back, oh, sorry.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: But to bring us back to the larger question. I wanted to ask you, how does this affect politics going forward if only 27 percent of people own a land line? Does that mean e? That pollsters and campaigns have to find different ways to communicate with people? Is that the future? You can't rely in the same way.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's part of the difficulty that we have seen recently, Nia, with political polling. Is that because so many Americans don't have land lines and they have cell phones. They can see on their screen a number and if they don't recognize the number or in the case of my cell phone, it tells me potential spam. Well, I can't click on it. Or I get a text, my phone will go ahead and say potential junk or spam. A lot of them are from political pollsters asking me to do a survey. This makes it more difficult to get that random, representative sample.
N. Rodgers: Because the people who are answering those have feelings, big F.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They have some things they want to say.
J. Aughenbaugh: They may not necessarily be representative of your garden variety American who follows politics, but is maybe a moderate or leans towards one political party or one set of candidates, but could be persuaded otherwise. Many of them are looking at their phones and saying, oh the heck with this. If they're busy, they're not going to be at their house waiting to answer the door to go ahead and do an in person survey. That really makes it difficult. Then you add into that an entire subpopulation of voters who don't trust pollsters of any sort.
N. Rodgers: Or the telephone.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or the telephone.
N. Rodgers: They don't trust either one.
J. Aughenbaugh: Look how difficult it is now for those who do political polling to get a truly random representative sample. You saw some of those problems in 2016, in 2020, and even last year's midterm elections. Where increasingly you're seeing political pollsters hedge their bets. Their confidence interval has gone 3-5-7. In some cases, I read polls where the plus minus was nine, and I was just like, well, what good is this poll?
N. Rodgers: Or Steve Kornacki with his wall.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is part of the difficulty. As Americans shift their phone usage. Because one of the things I even remember doing this, Nia, when I was doing surveys for government agencies. We would pull up a phone book and do you just a random number generator of land lines.
N. Rodgers: Side note for listeners who have never seen a phone book, a phone book was often large volume and it had every telephone number of every land line in your city. You had to opt out of it, so it was in there if you didn't tell them you didn't want to be.
J. Aughenbaugh: You actually had to take a special step not to have your phone number included in the phone book. Phone books were delivered to every household.
N. Rodgers: Once a year.
J. Aughenbaugh: Every business and they were also placed in phone booths, so if you couldn't remember your friend's number you could look it up. I remember when it only cost a nickel, then it became a dime, and then it became a quarter but nevertheless. These things were huge.
N. Rodgers: These were spider killing books.
J. Aughenbaugh: They were great as door stops.
N. Rodgers: For certain cities. Now, if your city was 1,200 people, your phone book was a quarter inch and you're done and that's in the town I grew up in, but in New York City.
J. Aughenbaugh: It was better for killing flies. But in New York City, it was large enough to be a doorstop or a really effective weapon if somebody broke into your house.
N. Rodgers: After the new one came, you could put the other one under stuff and it would raise it up. The first computer I ever had sat on top of two phone books because there was no such thing as a shelf for you to put your computer on. That was also when computers weighed approximately 7,000 pounds and were three feet deep or whatever it was when the huge table and they hang out in the back. But that was a phone book.
J. Aughenbaugh: That was a phone book.
N. Rodgers: Now there's no listing of all the cell phone numbers.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: I don't know that, I'm assuming that the cell phone companies could produce one if they had to, say, for before your request or an FBI investigation or whatever.
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, they do it for the government. The government goes ahead and submit.
N. Rodgers: There's no master list where you can look things up now. You could pay. There are pay services where you can do that. But do you think that posters will change their polling styles?
J. Aughenbaugh: Well, they'll have to change their techniques unless they want to.
N. Rodgers: Technique, that's the word I want.
J. Aughenbaugh: Unless they want to go out of business. Increasingly how do you reach people. Politicians wanted it.
N. Rodgers: Internet surveys, I suppose but that limits you to people who have the internet, and have access to the internet and will answer things if they access in the Internet. Same demographic problems.
J. Aughenbaugh: Same demographic problems. The digital divide does still exist in the United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: The difficulty also increasingly with Internet surveys and polling is that many of us work at places to where websites may be prohibited.
N. Rodgers: Right. That's a fair point. If your company is locked down from a variety of places, for instance, if there was a TikTok poll, no Virginia state employee could use their work computer to go there.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because it's prohibited, and Virginia is not the only one that has such a ban.
N. Rodgers: Using the Internet to poll people is always a dangerous thing too, because when you're polling people either in person or over the telephone, they are, I suspect, more likely to be at least attempting to tell you the truth, especially in person.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Because you could see their facial expression.
N. Rodgers: There's a social aspect to that. But on the Internet man, that would be tough. Also people have lots of identities on the Internet.
J. Aughenbaugh: I filled out polls on the Internet. Truth be told, I was also eating a meal, watching something on the TV, etc. I really didn't focus all that much.
N. Rodgers: Half focused.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. I filled out the survey because I was hoping I was going to win one of those Amazon gift cards.
N. Rodgers: That's the other thing. That's a really good point for us to end on, is incentive.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: It used to be that when somebody would call and ask if they could poll you, first of all, if they could avoid your dinner time, and they could actually get the head of household onto the phone, a lot of times that person would answer the questions. I can remember as a kid my father answering political poll questions. But now there's an expectation that you will pay me to answer questions. In some way, you will enter me into a lottery for a gift card, or you will give me a gift card. We do that all the time at the library, we'll give you a $5 Starbucks gift card if you fill out this survey. It's to encourage participation, but only people who want a $5 Starbucks. That would never work on Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: No.
N. Rodgers: He doesn't drink Starbucks coffee, he's not interested in having a Starbucks gift card. He might fill it out and just say, keep your gift card, I'm just interested in filling out the survey, but he might not. But there's a transactional nature to that.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then it begs the question, can you trust the veracity or quality of the responses if it's transactional. Think about all the kinds of transactions that may underpin other relationships that call into question how healthy the relationship is if you're doing things because of transactional costs and benefits. That could lead us into other podcast episodes. But you raise a really good point here. All of these thoughts came to mind listeners simply because we saw this article, and it never dawned on us
how important landlines were to a government agency to get accurate information in regards to Americans and their health.
N. Rodgers: Exactly. That's a perfect summary, and you know what that comes back to people? The same thing, everything comes back to commerce clause. Commerce clause of the Constitution. Because of monopoly that had to be broken up, that led to the creation of Verizon as a baby bell. That led to Verizon having bundling. That kept landlines alive in the Northeast part of the United States in large part when they are not as prevalent in other places, because the Commerce Clause works or doesn't work.
J. Aughenbaugh: But it doesn't work. But again, this brings us back to the Commerce Clause, it brings us back to the fact that we have government agencies that need this information. This is all rooted in government authority, which you could plausibly make the argument, and this is a little spooky, that the government wants to go ahead and survey us about our health. On the other hand, if we ask the government to do more about collective and individual health, they need to know this information.
N. Rodgers: If you live in a toxic area of the country, they need to know it's toxic so they can clean it up.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: The United States government is a great, big sweater.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You're like, hey, what's this loose thread? You start pulling on it, the whole thing unravels. It unravels from some spot that you probably can't even see to start with. Like you pull on the front right sleeve and the back bottom ribbing starts to come out and you don't even know that that's what's happening, that's how the federal government, it takes a lot of different mechanisms for people to figure out how they can then put in policy that will fix a thing. If we now know about black lung in West Virginia, because we do health surveys, then we can put more resources into clean air in West Virginia, so that we can help people with their black lung issue.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. If there are a bunch of people in another part of the country that are getting sick because of water borne diseases.
N. Rodgers: We got to clean up the water.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, we got to clean up the water. It may not necessarily mean that a local or state government is being negligent etc., it may be that they don't know.
N. Rodgers: Exactly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Information is important. But we never figured this out. It never dawned on me how important landlines were to at least the CDC. It never dawned on us.
N. Rodgers: Then to other agencies that have to deal with. The response to those things, because if it's a power problem, that's energy, if it's clean air, that's EPA. All these other agencies rely on this information to do their work. It's all interconnected.
J. Aughenbaugh: Good. Thanks, Nia.
N. Rodgers: Thank you, Aughie. This was interesting.
J. Aughenbaugh: This was an interesting discussion, one that I would never thought we would actually have. But when I saw landlines, why are they important? I'm like, are they still important?
N. Rodgers: Are they important? It turns out they are. Thanks Aughie.
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