Researchers Say Smartphones May Have Helped Drive the Global Baby Bust

Birth rates have been declining since the early 2000s, not just in the United States but also in much of the rest of the world. Some of that is explained by better sexual education, widespread access to contraception, and tougher economic conditions that make raising kids less financially feasible or desirable. Now, some researchers believe they have found yet another driver, a technology that entered our lives around the same time in the early 2000s and has since completely taken over society: the smartphone. In a new working paper published on Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, two researchers from Middlebury College laid out just how America’s biggest smartphone, Apple’s iPhone, could have had a hand in declining birth rates. Because the iPhone was sold exclusively through AT&T from its 2007 launch until February 2011, the researchers treated AT&T mobile broadband coverage as a proxy for early iPhone access. They then compared birth rates in counties covered by AT&T’s network with those in counties that had little or no AT&T mobile broadband access. “The iPhone, and the smartphone era it inaugurated, materially accelerated the post-2007 U.S. fertility decline,”