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Is it the damn phones?. A new article from one of my favorite energy bloggers suggests that the cratering of fertility rates (which were stable for much of the late 20th century and early aughts) could be driven by the adoption of smartphones. I'm personally rather convinced by this hypothesis, as many of the other explanations given by both people on this forum (status) and in-real life (economics, fear about the future) fall apart with counter examples. You're really telling me that motherhood is now equally low status in the USA, Latin America, the Middle East, and South Africa to depress fertility below 2, or that middle-class young white people are so economically oppressed that they can't have kids? I don't buy it. The smartphone, and its related access to a 24/7, truly global media environment seems to the only material change that could cross so many geographic and cultural lines. There's also a ton of causal mechanisms: hypergamy for instagram baddies, less time interacting with people in person so fewer marriages and thus fewer babies, and atrophied social skills for when interactions do happen in the wild.
Of course a lot of the effects of the smartphone can't be decoupled from high-modernity in general and its culture of extreme convenience and isolation, nor from related technologies like social media and short-form video content. And the groups that seem to avoid this depression in fertility seem to avoid all of these technologies.
I haven't killed my smartphone just yet, but I did delete all my dating apps about a month ago and have stayed off of them for the longest time since I last had a girlfriend. More in person relationships for me in the future I hope.
I continue to maintain that the "modern" (IE post-modern) liberal-striver ethos is simply not conducive to forming healthy and stable relationships much less families.
I see the all the stuff that @Nerd brings up below about the pursuit of jobs over relationships, and the collapse of socialization, as the downstream effects of people choosing to prioritize "emancipation" and the maximization of one's own material condition/status over other considerations.
Being in a relationship means being bound to someone else. Having kids means incurring significant costs both material and spiritual. It also means accepting that you are no longer the protagonist of your own story. A lot of people are simply not prepared to make that trade.
Phones/Screentime are merely a contributing factor.
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The obvious issue with that hypothesis is that, in most countries, the decline in fertility started long before the invention of smart phones. I'm sure the phones play a role, but it's hard to see them being the sole causal factor. Unless "phones" here is being used as a catch-all for any kind of modern entertainment technology, including old-fashioned CRT TVs, but I get the sense that the blog author means it literally.
My own opinion is that it comes down to the changing views of women's status and place in society. Technology like phones obviously help to change that culture and spread feminist messages, but it's not directly related to phones or technology at all. A big part of it is that, in the past, there was a relative shortage of men because they tended to get killed off in wars and dangerous manual labor, but now men are the majority in younger ages and there's a scarcity of women.
This seems plausible to me. I remember hearing the advice to not have a TV in the bedroom decades ago for reason that were, ah, directly related to fertility.
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I think it has more to do with society telling women to surrender to their base instincts when it comes to sex. It makes sense that straight up encouraging women to sleep around in their twenties would cause stable relationships to plummet which then reduces sex and fertility rates across the population.
I really don't think it is that complicated. Young women seem to deliberately shy away from romance and commitment, instead preferring more casual hook ups and friends with benefits. Society broadly encourages this. Even parents seem fine with it, not wanting to dictate how their daughters should use their bodies. This naturally results in family formation being delayed which then leads to fewer children overall.
Numbers don't back that story though, Gen Z is the least sexually active generation ever.
This does not contradict what I wrote. People are not in relationships, so sex is limited to casual encounters and booty calls. It takes a lot less effort to fuck when you live together or at least hang out often, which is usually reserved for more committed relationships.
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Women surrendering to their base instincts when it comes to sex leading to less overall sex seems entirely plausible, though.
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Meh, smartphones may be contributing somewhat. But the more likely factor is the fall of earlier marriage due to the pursuit of education and jobs, collapse of socialization & communities (predates smartphones: read Bowling Alone) & the rise in single-hood that follows, rising secularism, and a decline in education and well paying employment in the (non college degree having) male population. The whole decline is multi-factorial and isnt really just one thing.
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When I saw this post my first assumption was that it was going to be about the physical effects of carrying a radio-transmitting device within inches of your reproductive organs at every waking hour, but I didn't see this mentioned anywhere. Has anyone looked into this?
If you're talking about sperm quality - I think it has gone down over the last couple of decades but it doesn't seem to be a major factor in reducing the TFR so much. Unless you're implying that the phones would influence hormones and behavior.
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I doubt it. A fertility crisis driven by young men being disincentivized to marriage is remarkably common in history. Emperor Augustus dealt with this issue during his reign. I believe he taxed and restricted the legal and social privileges of unmarried men over age 25. He also made adultery a crime (it had already been in some cases) and enforced it strictly. An unmarried man over 25 could not inherit property, hold public office, or even join public festivals.
All these reforms were unevenly enforced around the empire, but Augustus at least was serious about it.
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I am reasonably confident that the third world was not getting an influx of smartphones before 2005; slowing growth is obviously possible without them. From his earlier article,
That could be a problem with averaging lots of regions. Of course, it could be the pause which is an artifact. I think a general decline, concealed by regional trends in vaccination or something, is quite possible.
He’s got a more detailed graph in this article which he claims shows a 90s plateau. I’m not sure I see it. I would describe this plot as an overall “downwash” with surges in the early 90s (fall of communism?) and late 00s. That would make the post-08 crash a return to form, right?
Frankly, I’m getting a whiff of motivated reasoning from this guy. He was rightly skeptical of the UN plots which looked like regression-to-the-old-models. That skepticism should probably also apply to models which line up with his sixth-extinction hypothesis.
/images/1782938893573945.webp
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It's probably not anything recent
He thinks that tiny dip after 2010 is the phones. Could be. But he's missing the bigger picture, which is what happened after the baby boom (before that I think it was just infant mortality dropping and education increasing).
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The smartphones can't really be decoupled from the status cause, since smartphones have had, in part, the effect of lowering relative status of most men for most women due to enabling easier access to higher status men than before.
Clearly in this case status is endogenous to phone introduction and phones are exogenous.
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If it is the phones, I welcome it. Good people should reproduce more when they receive something as awesome as a smartphone. It even lets you find a mate far away who is a great match, basically for free, which was impossible before. The phone is a mirror. The cursed call the mirror cursed when actually the mirror is honest.
Very few people end up finding matches on dating apps, or through instagram and facebook, if thats what your referring too. Dating is far superior if you go and talk to the girls in person. The people that arent pairing up via the phone arent cursed - the medium itself is flawed.
Online dating is where over 50% of couples meet nowadays.
You might not be interested in online dating, but online dating is interested in you.
Any attractive girl you meet in-person at the gym, at the mall, in a grocery store—much less at a bar or nightclub—will almost certainly be thotting around on Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, so you're competing with the likes and DMs she receives on social media when it comes to dopamine hits (at the very least).
While your percentage chance at hooking a given girl's attention is better via in-person approaching than DM'ing her online, you can message a lot more girls online in a given amount of time than approaching them in person.
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I can't tell if this is satire or not, but if not I could not disagree more with this take.
Why would you think it's satire? My point seems substantial enough. Phones are a blank slate and humans are the ones that provide the substance. If you don't like what most phones do, you don't like most people. The phones are not agents.
Presumably because it's coming from the same person who just posted this
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No, but the people who write the code that runs on the phones are.
Tinder is designed to do specific things. Those things appear to be antisocial.
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The medium is the message bro. Our material environment fundamentally changes how we interact with each other. Yes humans are agents that can make decisions, but those decisions are heavily influenced by our environment. No technology is a blank slate, but conditions us for certain behaviors via its design. The smartphone has been engineer very deliberately to alter your behavior. Don't believe me, just ask Tristan Harris. Your logic doesn't follow.
Postmodern marxist pablum.
How does the phone provide influence? Fundamentally, it is a calculator and a radio. Humans freely chose what to compute and transmit on it. You don't like that they chose narcissism and vanity. And you're not willing to accept that the reason is that they are narcissistic and vain.
No, voluntarily downloaded software has been engineered to give consumers what they want. Huge difference.
You sound like my boomer dad. Just resist all social engineering and social pressure and muscle through. What bullshit.
Are you 17? I was into Lacan and « semiotics » at that age, as well as complaining about old Pops. When you get older, you'll realize everything is heritable, just like your dad is trying to tell you through his wisdom.
Lol I am 28, but I did have this argument a lot with my dad when I was 17 in the context of the purchase of a lockbox. I just ignore him now because he's clearly way more addicted to his phone than me.
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