In case you needed another reason to distance yourself from your smartphone: It may lead to the eventual extinction of the human species.<\/p>\n
The plummeting birthrate is an arresting metric, and often seems like a stand-in for society\u2019s ills. Nearly 710,000 fewer babies were born in the United States<\/a> in 2025 than in 2007, and even fewer are predicted for 2026. Increases in women\u2019s education, the high cost of child care and even narcissism<\/a> have been named as contributing factors, but nothing yet has \u2014 or perhaps can \u2014 fully explain the decline.<\/p>\n It\u2019s tempting to hunt for an archcause to explain it all \u2014 if a single culprit can be identified, perhaps a single solution can be too. But in the search for a magic bullet, we risk ignoring less obvious but more viable solutions. Or oversimplifying the problem to the point that we overlook the more nuanced factors at play.<\/p>\n A working paper<\/a> published in the National Bureau of Economic Research this month seemed like the most promising single-factor explanation yet: \u201cIs the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence From AT&T\u2019s 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly\u201d uses a natural experiment to correlate fertility decline with smartphone use. When Apple first rolled out the iPhone in June 2007, it was available only on AT&T\u2019s network. The researchers mapped the geographic rollout of the phone between June 2007 and February 2011 (when AT&T stopped being the exclusive carrier) to compare fertility rates in those parts of the United States with and without the mobile phones.<\/p>\n \u201cOverall,\u201d the authors found, \u201cthe diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52 percent of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44,\u201d with the greatest decreases concentrated among teenagers and young adults from ages 15 to 24.<\/p>\n