NEW RESEARCH: What About The Smartphones Reduces Fertility?

In the past month, two working papers found that the modern smartphone may be linked to the declines in fertility in the past month. The first looked at expanding 4G coverage predicting falls in teenage fertility, the second looked at spotty iPhone coverage to identify iPhone effects. These were augmented by a piece in the FT by John Burn-Murdoch which showed that the take off of smartphones correlates consistently across countries with a downward kink in fertility trends.

All well and good, but they don’t tell us how smartphones reduce fertility. Is it simply the time spent on these devices instead of meeting people and having sex? Is it its facilitation of porn use? Is it dating apps ruining dating? Is it social media doomscrolling depressing us? Is it reels radicalising us against the other sex? Is it something else?

In a working paper out tonight, I use a method called a ‘panel model with two way fixed effects’ to estimate the extent to which interest in specific digital platforms can explain changes in fertility behaviour. The results suggest that the story is more nuanced than ‘every recent thing = bad’.

Interest in tinder significantly predicted falls in fertility outcomes at just a 1 year lag. I think this pretty clearly suggests that mobile dating apps really have, as often complained, in some way ruined dating. The mechanism by which dating apps do this isn’t clear from my model, but it seems they have been pernicious in one way or another. If I were to speculate: I think the average person is lazy and just convinces themselves that they are still ‘doing something’ about their romantic life by mindlessly scrolling and/or going on ill-suited dating app dates instead of actually proactively going out and making an effort to come across people and build relationships.

Interest in instagram was significantly associated with falls in the marriage rate at the 1 year lag. There was also a negative association between interest in tiktok and the marriage rate of larger magnitude, but it wasn’t statistically significant (probably because of lack of time/data). But interest in youtube and facebook didn’t have the same associations. I think this suggests that there is probably something uniquely bad about short form social media content, presumably in its ability to proliferate shock-factor negative content that turns the sexes against each other, per the ‘angry young women’ phenomenon reported in the New Statesman.

But what about the first paper? The iPhone coming out in 2007 precedes all of this dating app and short form content malarky! In truth, I’m not that convinced by the second paper, as a) I’m not sure it properly accounts for inherent differences between places that had mobile coverage sooner than others, and b) my paper, after controlling for digital platforms, failed to find negative effects on fertility from mobile connectivity coverage alone. I think pre-2012 fertility declines are plausibly Great Recession-related, whilst post-2012 fertility declines are, to grossly simplify, related to dating apps and short form content.

Where do we go from here? I think a nice first step for policy is introducing (where not already introduced) and ensuring strong enforcement and tightening of age verification to avoid child use of dating apps and social media. I think the next step might be best done on the societal level: when new shiny things are introduced, rapid adoption is often common, and can give way to norms of moderation and, in some cases, prohibition. That might give us a lesson today.

On the individual level, I think it’s worth keeping these results in mind. What’s optimal on the societal level might not be optimal on the margin, so this doesn’t automatically mean you should throw away the apps (although maybe you should anyway, that’s something for you to evaluate), but I do think it means at minimum that you should not rely on them. Anecdotally, I’ve seen people implicitly justify not putting themselves out there in real life situations because at least they are on the apps. But the evidence released today suggests that societal-wide faith in the apps is not working out too well.

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How to Break Up With Your Phone

The New York Times

23/2/2019