Related: A fiduciary rule only a class-action attorney could love

This is precisely what's wrong with politics. It leads to knee-jerk reactions and an over-emphasis on short-term thinking. Here's how it usually occurs:

An elected official (especially those serving on their local town boards) must sit through several meetings a month. While the work is necessary to keep providing the necessary services to people, it's generally non-eventful. That means no one usually attends these meetings. That means there's no instant feedback from the people you're working for (the voters). That means there's no immediate gratification for being recognized for doing the right thing.

Suppose, just for a moment, someone from the public shows up to one of these meetings. This highly unusual event would certainly be noticed by the elected officials. They'll go out of their way to make this visitor feel welcome. A good way to do this is to listen to what they have to say. The best way to demonstrate this is to do what the person asks you to do. In fact, the probability of action increases as the number of visitors increases. In other words, the more people that show up to ask the elected officials to enact something, the more likely that something will be enacted.

While that might sound like good customer service, it's not necessarily good public policy.

Here's what I mean.

Imagine, in my small town of 4,000 voting-age residents, that 250 people come to a Town Hall meeting. OK, to be honest, if we thought 250 people would show up, we would have moved the meeting to the Fire Hall because the Town Hall is too small to handle that many people. The bottom-line is 250 people are a lot of people. Let's further say they all came to ask the Town Board to place a stoplight on a particular intersection where a major traffic accident recently occurred.

This sounds like a slam dunk decision, doesn't it?

It's not.

Here's why.

Even if 250 people represents a record attendance at a Town Board meeting, and even if they all agree a stoplight is needed, that alone does not mean we should get a stoplight. No, I'm talking not just about the need to first conduct a traffic flow impact assessment, I'm referring to something much more fundamental – and much more obvious when I tell you what it is.

What is it? It's the fact that while 250 passionate people showed up to plead their case, the more important fact is that 3,750 did not show up. Perhaps those people don't think a stoplight is such a good idea. In this example, it's critical for elected officials to listen not only to the people talking, but to listen to the people NOT talking.

In that spirit, let's turn to the fiduciary rule. I recently asked a number of financial service providers their views on how the rule will impact clients (the standard story on this topic, see "Reality Sets In: How New Fiduciary Rule Impacts 401k/IRA Providers and Retirement Savers," FiduciaryNews.com, September 27, 2016). In the process, I discovered a vastly underreported story.

Nearly all the media has focused on what the rule changes – from the availability of certain products, to changes in business models, to dramatic differences in client choices. What the usual stories have failed to emphasize is what doesn't change – or at the very least changes very little.

In a sense, the bigger story about the fiduciary rule is how the pendulum has swung the other way. For years, regulatory exemptions and legal loopholes have tilted the playing field in favor of one business model. The new rule now levels that playing field, causing that business model to incorporate substantial systematic changes. It is this side of the pendulum we've seen the most reporting on. From a journalism standpoint, that makes sense because change is news and this is the side where nearly all the changes will occur.

But there's another side of this pendulum. It's the other business model, the one that has long been on the more challenging end of the formerly tilted playing field. The folks in this world don't have much to talk about because, well, there are simply not a lot of changes for them as a result of this new rule. That's a story worth reporting.

In a world of noises, sometimes it's the silence that's most interesting.