America’s birth rate has plunged. Are smartphones to blame?

Source Domain: www.cbsnews.com

A decades-long decline in the U.S. fertility rate has confounded policymakers and economists alike, with experts pointing to possible causes ranging from the economic fallout of the Great Recession to changing public attitudes about parenthood. Now, one economist is pointing to another factor: the iPhone.

A new research paper by Middlebury College economist Caitlin Myers found that Apple’s 2007 introduction of the iPhone accounted for 33% to 52% of the decline in the fertility rate. The reasons are rooted in the enormous social impact of putting a powerful new device in people’s pockets that not only tethered them to the internet but also rewired how we relate to each other — or whether we choose to relate at all.

Specifically, Myers posits that many people have turned to their phones as a substitute for in-person interactions. The technology also makes it easier to view pornography and find information on contraception, factors that have weighed on birth rates, according to the paper.

“What we are seeing is that the places that have the iPhone have big fertility changes relative to the other places,” Myers told CBS News.

The findings rely on a natural experiment created by the iPhone’s exclusive distribution through AT&T from its rollout in 2007 through 2011. That allowed Myers to compare birth rates in U.S. counties with widespread AT&T coverage — and, therefore, access to iPhones — with those in regions with minimal access to the carrier’s service.

Myers told CBS News she wanted to check whether the results might reflect that AT&T’s coverage areas, which were focused in urban areas, were harder hit by the 2008 financial crisis. To do that, she ran several statistical checks, controlling for economic and demographic factors, and found that the iPhone effect remained consistent.

“I said, ‘Wow, but this has to be too big,'” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Let me try everything I can to explain away what I’m seeing in the data,’ and I just couldn’t.”

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