As governments around the world struggle with ways to reverse plunging birth rates, new US studies suggest they have ignored a key culprit — the smartphone.<\/p>\n
“Is the iPhone Birth Control?” asked a paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, delving into why US fertility rates have fallen by 22 percent since 2007.<\/p>\n
For a while, experts linked the decline to the recession that struck in 2008 when the global financial system nearly imploded, driving millions of people into hardship. But when the economy picked up, a rebound in births never came.<\/p>\n
Myriad other reasons have been posited, such as increased use of contraception, more female education, and growing housing or childcare costs. However, no clear cause has been established.<\/p>\n
So Middlebury College economist Caitlin Myers and her student Ezekiel Hooper tested a hypothesis that smartphones — which emerged with the arrival of the first iPhone in 2007 — might have something to do with it.<\/p>\n
Until 2011, iPhones were available from a single US cellular network, AT&T, so they compared US counties that had near-universal AT&T coverage with those that had little or none during those years.<\/p>\n
And they found that access to the iPhone correlated with reductions in births by 4.5\u20138.0 percent at ages 15\u201319 and by 3.2\u20136.6 percent at ages 20\u201324.<\/p>\n
There were also statistically significant but smaller declines among older women.<\/p>\n
While they stress that iPhones are not the “sole cause,” the introduction of the smartphone “played a sizable role in the decline in US births” after 2007 as it shaped people’s behavior with less in-person contact.<\/p>\n
“As modern smartphones diffused, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity fell sharply alongside rising consumption of pornography, a possible substitute for partnered sex,” they concluded.<\/p>\n
– ‘Technology shock’ –<\/p>\n
Another study published in May by University of Cincinnati economists Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo found evidence of similar trends and on a global scale since 2007.<\/p>\n
They analyzed World Bank data measuring smartphone penetration and teenage fertility rates in 128 countries.<\/p>\n
They found that the decline in birth rates accelerated once smartphones became widely available — a phenomenon found across countries “with fundamentally different healthcare, welfare, economic, and cultural environments.”<\/p>\n
This, they concluded, points to “a common global technology shock.”<\/p>\n
Some academics remain skeptical. For example, teenage births in the United States have been falling since the early 1990s, long before the dawn of the smartphone.<\/p>\n
Neither study examines how governments might utilize their findings.<\/p>\n
Both rich and poorer countries are grappling with declining birth rates which lead to aging societies and a shrinking workforce — putting strain on social security systems and potentially dampening economic growth and productivity.<\/p>\n
The Centers for Disease Control says US fertility rates are at an all-time low, while leading Asian economies all face the prospect of shrinking populations in the coming years.<\/p>\n
China’s communist government abandoned its decades-long one-child policy in 2016, while Japan and South Korea have invested heavily in pro-natal policies with little impact.<\/p>\n
The world’s poorest countries, such as in sub-Saharan Africa, often still have high birth rates, but middle-income countries like India and Brazil also face a fast-dropping fertility rates.<\/p>\n
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