The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44

throwa356262

You mean Instagram?

bel8

I'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.

functionmouse

https://jacobin.com/2026/06/birth-rates-capitalism-socialism...

catoc

https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

hodder

"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.

onlyrealcuzzo

So... 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?

muizelaar

"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

Worth understanding the idea of a natural experiment to understand what's being studied here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment

sizzzzlerz

Well, with them constantly taking selfies of themselves they have no time for normal human activities

suncemoje

And what does the iPhone have to do with that? What are the hypotheses? Can't tell from the abstract at least

pembrook

This 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

theonlyjesus

It definitely was iPhones and not the first recession that started erasing the middle class in the United States

abhaynayar

I'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

Sounds 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

There'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

gomox

Was 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.