Analysis: mass adoption of smartphones and social media may be a primary driver of declining birthrates globally, in part by reducing in-person socializing
The demographic landslide defining our era is gaining speed — and terrain. In more than two-thirds of the world's 195 countries …
Financial TimesJohn Burn-Murdoch
Context & Ripple Effects
The coverage connects a broad demographic argument to a subsequent study attributing a sizable share of the 2007–2011 US birth decline to iPhone diffusion, with the strongest effects among women aged 15–24. That gives the smartphone-and-social-media thesis a more specific empirical foothold, while not establishing that it explains fertility changes everywhere.
It also sits within a longer debate over technology’s social consequences: smartphones connected much of the world, but the proposed cost here is less in-person socializing and potentially fewer paths into relationships and family formation.
First-order effects
The immediate implication is a sharper challenge to the idea that fertility decline is driven only by economics or family-policy choices: digital behavior and social connection become variables policymakers and researchers must account for.
Platform and device companies face more scrutiny over whether products that capture social time are displacing offline interaction, especially for younger users.
Second-order effects
Demographic-policy responses may need to pair financial support for families with interventions aimed at social isolation and opportunities for offline connection; cash incentives alone would not address the mechanism proposed here.
If the evidence strengthens, social platforms could face pressure to measure and mitigate relationship-displacing use, while competing products may market features that facilitate real-world groups and events.
Third-order effects
The larger shift is toward treating consumer technology not merely as a communications market but as infrastructure that can shape population formation and other long-horizon social outcomes.
Causality remains contested: the reported US estimate and the global analysis support further investigation, but they do not by themselves show that smartphones are the dominant fertility driver across countries.
The trend: This is one data point in the expanding effort to assess whether ubiquitous digital platforms are reshaping offline social institutions, from friendship and dating to family formation.
At the FT today, John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) has an excellent article describing how fertility is declining everywhere at the same time: https://www.ft.com/... He quotes me and, even better, draws the reader's attention to my work with Gustavo Ventura, @King_ofSweden, [imag…
I honestly don't think it's the smartphones. But if it is it would be the most hilarious explanation for birth rates crashing. Developed ape got too mesmerized by shining screen in his hands and forgot to reproduce.
Please overlay the Great Recession dates with ge below metric And include birth rates from 1800 please Longevity leads to lower birth rates Humans living 50 years past ability to give birth = lower birth rates. [image]
“In country after country, the birth rate plunged after introduction of smartphones, no matter what the previous trend was. The younger the age group, the more pronounced the downturn—a mirror image of phone usage patterns.” @jburnmurdoch, so persuasive: https://www.ft.com/...
It was 2008 GFC and not iPhones that collapsed birth rates Labour had been devalued and never quite recovered. The youth can't buy the same homes their parents bought for the same man hours even if they're smarter and more qualified.
If Steve Jobs were still alive, he would have the moral authority to face and maybe even to solve this problem. But I doubt anyone in the phone business now does. [image]
Birth rates have nothing to do with phones and everything to do with enforced poverty. Most children and young adults will never own their home, and therefore never have any money to provide a decent life for children. This is the real cause.
No smoking gun, but the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics, as the culprit for the global drop in fertility: • In the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G earliest • Birth rates were stable in the US, UK and Australia until [im…
Since this is LinkedIn and focused on work, this is an important article from FTimes. There are dramatic changes going on in demography from the impact of smartphones. …
Interesting article by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com linking phone use to falling birth rates strangely mentions only the effects that phones have on reducing socialising & raising women's expectations - completely ignores the massive effect of spreading misogyny & p0rn among men. www.ft.…
“All of these inflection points coincided with the mass adoption of smartphones in local markets — as measured by Google searches for mobile apps.” — www.ft.com/content/fba3...
Huh, a non-ideologically-motivated birth rate article that interprets data with a degree of sobriety? Amazing. — TL;DR: Cell phones and social media appear to be a massive drag (globally) on the formation of real human relationships that lead to kids. And housing is too expen…
obvi i shit on meta for being a fundamentally unethical business but the fact that apple gets away unscathed from this is also worth thinking about. maybe our only hope is having execs with kids now.