Sharp decline in birth rates linked to adoption of smartphones

According to an in-depth data analysis by the Financial Times, the introduction of smartphones may have led to a further decline in fertility worldwide.

Birth rates around the world have been in decline for several decades, especially since widespread secularization and the sexual revolution of the 1960s, which promoted women’s emancipation, promiscuity, contraception, and abortion. Today the average number of children per woman is below the replacement rate of 2.1 in more than two-thirds of the world’s countries.

However, despite already low fertility levels, there has been another drop in birth rates in recent years that researchers have sought to explain.

One reason may be the use of smartphones and constant access to the internet and social media. Two researchers at the University of Cincinnati have recently published a paper examining birth rates in relation to the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the U.K. and the U.S.

Fertility fell fastest in the areas that first received high-speed mobile internet. The authors argued that smartphone use has transformed the way young people connect with each other, significantly reducing in-person socializing and resulting in fewer relationships.

According to an analysis by the Financial Times, the same trend can be observed in other countries. The same drop that was seen in the U.S. and the U.K. from 2007, when smartphones became widespread, was observed in Poland and France in 2009, and in Mexico, Indonesia, and Morocco in 2012. Those dates align with the introduction of mobile devices with high-speed internet. Similar drops could be seen between 2013 and 2015 in high-fertility African countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal, around the time smartphones were widely adopted there.

This trend was especially pronounced among younger generations, who have the highest smartphone use.

Economics professor Melissa Kearney from the University of Notre Dame said it is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling.”

Demographer Lyman Stone observed: “If you spend lots of time socializing with your peers in the real world, your standards [for a potential partner] are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram, your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what is normal.”

The Financial Times‘s research also suggests that the well-documented ideological divide between young men and young women, with women becoming more progressive and men more conservative, may be exacerbated by heavy social media use.