Analysis: the 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
Related coverage has moved from broad arguments about technology’s social consequences to a more specific demographic mechanism: reduced in-person interaction. A subsequent study cited in the corpus estimates that iPhone diffusion accounted for a meaningful share of the US birth decline in 2007–11, with effects concentrated among women aged 15–24.
That makes the story consequential beyond a general critique of social media: it frames smartphone-mediated behavior as a possible input into fertility trends, while the wider corpus also cautions against treating phones as a universal explanation for every social problem.
First-order effects
The analysis raises the importance of offline socializing as a measurable outcome for smartphone and social-platform products, rather than treating engagement and connection as interchangeable.
Demographic researchers and policymakers gain a technology-linked hypothesis to test alongside established explanations for lower fertility, particularly for younger adults.
Second-order effects
Platforms and device makers could face greater pressure to show whether product design changes social behavior offline, not merely time spent or online interaction.
If the relationship holds across markets, sectors exposed to aging populations—including housing, education, consumer goods, and labor planning—would have another behavioral driver to incorporate into demand assumptions.
Third-order effects
The larger shift is toward evaluating consumer technology as social infrastructure with demographic externalities, potentially broadening scrutiny beyond privacy, competition, and screen-time harms.
Causality remains unsettled: the corpus supports a plausible and studied mechanism, but the cross-country pattern would need to distinguish smartphone effects from economic, cultural, and policy factors.
The trend: Consumer technology is increasingly being assessed not only as a communications market, but as a force that can reshape offline relationships and long-run population structure.
The right is going to keep trying & failing to address this situation with racist & chauvinist pronatalism—but it also creates a huge opportunity for a new proudly pro-immigration politics in any halfway prosperous country [image]
We used to joke about our grandparents having many kids because there was no TV. Smartphones looked at TVs and said “Hold my beer!” Less young adult in-person socialising Fewer couples Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once https://www.ft.com/... via @ft
“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/...
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.
American women who have children have more than previously, but this is more than offset by fewer women having children in the first place. In many rich countries, declining fertility rates are now driven by fewer people having children. By @jburnmurdoch [image]
At the FT today, John Burn-Murdoch ( @jburnmurdoch ) has an excellent article describing how fertility is declining everywhere at the same time: [link] He quotes me and, even better, draws the reader's attention to my work with Gustavo Ventura, @King_ofSweden , and Wen Yao on “Th…
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]
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 2…
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]
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.
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.
This research should be a warning to investors in social platforms. The demographic collapse is going to lead to a re-ordering of geopolitical power and governments will take heed. …
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. …
Anyone see the piece in the FT by @jburnmurdoch.ft.com hypothesising that mobile phone ownership explains declining fertility rates? — My view is “that's an interesting hypothesis that is impossible to study”. — But maybe we should debate identification strategies!? — www.f…
“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...
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.…
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…
This will launch a thousand awful headlines blaming phones and stirring up the creepy pronatalists. There are also a thousand factors at work: start with a fucked up economy and world. — Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once — https://www.ft.com/...