Smartphones and America’s baby bust: New study suggests the iPhone may have helped trigger a historic fertility decline
Publish Date: 2026-06-15 01:46:00
Source Domain: timesofindia.indiatimes.com
For years, economists, demographers, and policymakers have been trying to solve one of modern America’s biggest social puzzles: why are fewer people having children? People have blamed sky-high housing costs, expensive childcare, later marriages, debt, career changes, shifts in women’s roles — you name it. Now, a new study is turning the spotlight on something most of us carry everywhere: the smartphone.Now, a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) says the introduction of the iPhone back in 2007 may have played a real role in the drop in US birth rates. The researchers estimate smartphones could explain one-third to half of the decline since then, which gives an idea that’s getting a lot of attention, and a fair bit of pushback, from experts.It’s hard to ignore the timeline. Before 2007, which marked a particularly significant “inflection point” in the US fertility rate, the fertility rates were falling slowly. But starting that same year, when Apple launched the iPhone and brought round-the-clock internet and social media to our pockets, the decline sped up. Since then, the birth rate has been down about 22% and has hit an all-time low.
What does the study reveal?
The study, called “Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly,” comes from Caitlin Myers and Ezekiel Hooper (Caitlin Myers’s stepson) at Middlebury College. Rather than simply comparing fertility trends before and after smartphones became popular, the researchers attempted to isolate the phone’s effect using what economists call a “natural experiment.”“We initially all just assumed it was the global recession. Births have long been known to be pro-cyclical, and so the conventional wisdom was they’ll come back up,” said Caitlin Myers, an economist with Middlebury College and the National Bureau of Economic Research, who is the lead author on the new paper, adding, “Then we had a baby-less…
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