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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.
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.
Anecdotally, that advice checks out.
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