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The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
- skynotblue 4mo ago[flagged]
- josefritzishere 4mo ago10/10 comment.
- coldtea 4mo agoMore like knee-jerk 1/10 reaction comment. See the sibling comment for why
- ilija139 4mo agoEvery person after taking just one 101 statistics course tells everyone "correlation doesn't equal causation". But here, in the abstract is clear: > National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
- throwa356262 4mo agoYou mean Instagram?
- bel8 4mo agoI'll bite. Maybe it's not the iPhone itself, but social media. I have seen studies about damages that social media can cause in behaviours. This might be one of them. Smartphones are the catalyst to social media consumption as we know. Like people contantly on their phones everywhere instead of interacting with other people, for example.
- sph 4mo agoWhy not go further? It's the Internet as a whole. People socialising online, and online becoming an actual place people spend their entire lives within, free from the hard constraints of the real world, was the natural evolution of the Internet. Plenty has been written about how any technological innovation leads to massive societal changes no one could foresee, and no one could avoid, but only analyze in retrospect.
- FabHK 4mo agoIndeed. When Germany unified, the birth rate in the formerly socialist East dropped by half. Certainly increasing uncertainty played a role, but there was also speculation that there wasn't much to do in the East except read, drink, and procreate, while the West had plenty of diversions.
- bel8 4mo agoYep. Even many of our jobs became remote and less social.
- browningstreet 4mo agoSocial media wasn't the thing it is today during the AT&T exclusive period.
- macNchz 4mo agoThat's the thing that jumped out to me here—iPhones themselves and everything you could actually do with one during that period were way different from today. There were effectively no endless feeds of content to consume, the phone screens were way smaller and less vibrant, push notifications only came out about halfway through. I was age 19-23 during that period (in the "highest impact" age group from the article), and I think I used my phone more for coordinating in-person social activity than anything else at the time. Additionally on that—iPhones were not widespread in my cohort at the time, even at an expensive private college with many students from upper income families.
- tgv 4mo agoIt really did start in the time frame. Facebook opened in 2006. Twitter already existed and grew rapidly in that period. There were messengers. And because everything was slow, I suppose it could even take an hour to doom scroll Slashdot. Mobile gaming might be another reason.
- trollbridge 4mo agoI don't remember social media really being that significant from 2007-2011.
- wmichelin 4mo agoWell, it was for many. MySpace, and then BBM, Facebook, and Twitter were absolutely huge at that time for the folks using them.
- functionmouse 4mo agohttps://jacobin.com/2026/06/birth-rates-capitalism-socialism-germany https://jacobin.com/2026/06/birth-rates-capitalism-socialism...
- ch4s3 4mo agoAhh yes, Russian fertility was famously… lackluster in the Soviet period. So clearly capitalism caused fertility to decline.
- applfanboysbgon 4mo agoGenuinely fascinating article. I had no idea that the DDR's fertility rate dropped to 0.8 after reunification. That said, I am skeptical of the assertions. Statistics can always be used to paint misleading pictures to support any narrative you like. For example, it neglects to mention that, according to the same source it links to show the birthrate dropped after reunification, that DDR's fertility rate was already down to 1.5 beforehand, well below replacement level. That strikes me as something of a lie by omission. The emphasis on "it takes a village" seems strangely misplaced, as well. It presumes that culture is so malleable that a shift in government policy can change the culture overnight. Have East Germans completely abandoned their supposed previous culture of taking care of relatives/neighbors children after the fall? If there was a genuine cultural difference in communally raising children, and that was meant to improve fertility rates, you would expect to see higher fertility rates reflected regardless of the current government policy.
- catoc 4mo agohttps://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
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- hodder 4mo ago"Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies" LMAO does the author really take themselves seriously as they type that. This author has no understanding of statistical methods. This sort of article is the reason why people distrust science. Not because the scientific method is flawed, but rather because nonsense like this get published.
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- dahart 4mo agoWhat exactly is the problem with that sentence? Are you sure the problem isn’t that you don’t understand what it means? Here are a few links explaining the terms: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7384548/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7384548/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_regression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_regression https://lost-stats.github.io/Model_Estimation/Research_Design/event_study.html https://lost-stats.github.io/Model_Estimation/Research_Desig... I don’t know why people distrust science. Sure, it’s not perfect, and scientists, like all people are subject to human problems. But there’s nothing else in the history of the world with a better track record than science. I feel like the problem is that some politicians spread FUD and prey on people’s insecurities, and unfortunately it tends to work, disproportionately on people with less resources. The problem isn’t science at all; the problem is people and politics.
- hodder 4mo agoI know what a linear regression is and how to examine event studies, lol. What you don't understand is that the author is leaning on linguistics to insinuate strong evidence of causation where it doesn't exist. If this was a quant in finance, they'd be out the door in days. "The problem isn’t science at all; the problem is people and politics." Agree completely.
- dahart 4mo ago> the author is leaning on linguistics Please elaborate. I haven’t used entropy balancing or difference in differences, but those articles explain that their purpose is to try to tease out causation. What - exactly - is the linguistic trick, if they actually did use an entropy balanced Poisson regression and difference of differences?
- onlyrealcuzzo 4mo agoSo... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring iPhones who weren't going to have kids anyway?? Why definitely not? And why definitely iPhones or Smart Phones or whatever?
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- ilija139 4mo agoNot every rich person got an iPhone. The rich people without an iPhone did not had equal amount of less kids. There are two groups, one has an iPhone, the other has not. The assumption is that two groups are big enough to have equal amount of people from any other group that can explain the decline in fertility, i.e. equal amount of rich/poor, educated, etc. They can control for this because they know which people had access to the iphone based on the AT&T network coverage. At the end of the abstract they state the likely explanation of this seemingly spurious correlation: > National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
- pbhjpbhj 4mo ago>the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency. Why would iPhone _particularly_ do that? I can see greater social media use, greater access to porn, would do those things. But that's common to smartphones in general.
- ilija139 4mo agoThe iPhone was the only smartphone in 2007, and the one that they could track based on AT&T coverage.
- muizelaar 4mo ago"The fertility drop is concentrated among young populations and largely operates through declines in unintended births (Buckles et al., 2025), suggesting the operative margin may be less about the cost of raising a child and more about whether the relationships and sexual activity that produce children are forming at all."
- prabhasp 4mo agoWorth understanding the idea of a natural experiment to understand what's being studied here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment
- sizzzzlerz 4mo agoWell, with them constantly taking selfies of themselves they have no time for normal human activities
- theonlyjesus 4mo agoIt definitely was iPhones and not the first recession that started erasing the middle class in the United States
- suncemoje 4mo agoAnd what does the iPhone have to do with that? What are the hypotheses? Can't tell from the abstract at least
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- Shalomboy 4mo ago[flagged]
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- pembrook 4mo agoThis garbage "research" being on the front page of HN without getting flagged is a good indication we've reached peak irrationality in the current smartphone moral panic. About time we revisted this: https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
- abhaynayar 4mo agoI've been able to quit short-form content, but does anyone have any tips on how to quit long-form content like YouTube or Netflix? Also, why is this flagged?
- OgsyedIE 4mo agoSounds entirely accurate. Among all other technological advances, the biggest tracker of the very first wave of women's fertility decline in rural Europe in the late 1800s was access to electric lighting, which permitted rural women to make use of night hours for self-directed social, political and educational activity. (The source for this I use, although there are others, is The Subject of Virtue by Laidlaw) Smartphones massively reduce the barriers to entry for self-directed career-based, social, political and educational activity (plus entertainment, but gambling addicts have differing fertility patterns so lesser degrees of it are useless to study). Outside observers may consider the real-world quality of such activities to be low, but the activity they enable people to do in their many brief lulls of free time between different daily tasks do fit into those buckets more than anything else. And the cumulative effect of all of them is to delay life milestones.
- phyzix5761 4mo agoThere's another interesting paper that talks about how in 2007 teens shifted their socializing to the smartphone. This led to a large reduction in teen fertility, as teens would spend more time communicating digitally rather than in person[0]. [0] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6676839 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6676839
- gomox 4mo agoWas the AT&T monopoly period of 2007-2011 have substantial social media adoption? Seems to me like the early iPhones were just a very capable phone & texting machinery.