Economists searching for an explanation behind the world’s falling fertility rates have landed on an unexpected suspect: the device sitting in nearly everyone’s pocket.
A working paper released Monday, June 8, by the National Bureau of Economic Research carried the provocative title “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” and set out to explain why American fertility has dropped 22% since 2007. Its authors, Middlebury College economist Caitlin Myers and student Ezekiel Hooper, zeroed in on a coincidence of timing: the first iPhone reached consumers that same year.
Their method leaned on a quirk of early smartphone history. Because Apple sold the iPhone exclusively through AT&T until 2011, the researchers contrasted US counties blanketed by AT&T service against those where coverage was thin or absent. The gap proved telling. Access to the device lined up with birth reductions of 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and by 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with older women showing smaller but still meaningful drops.
Myers and Hooper are careful not to assign all the blame to the phone, calling it far from the “sole cause.” Still, they argue the technology reworked daily habits in ways that suppressed births. As they put it: “As modern smartphones diffused, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity fell sharply alongside rising consumption of pornography, a possible substitute for partnered sex.”
The American findings echo across borders. A separate paper published in May by University of Cincinnati economists Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo drew on World Bank figures covering smartphone uptake and teen fertility in 128 nations. They observed birth declines speeding up as the devices spread, a pattern holding firm across societies “with fundamentally different healthcare, welfare, economic, and cultural environments.” The consistency, they argued, signals “a common global technology shock.”
The stakes extend well beyond any single country. Falling birth numbers feed aging populations and thinner workforces, squeezing pension systems and threatening to slow economic growth. American fertility now sits at a record low according to the Centers for Disease Control, and the major Asian economies are bracing for population contraction. Beijing scrapped its one-child rule in 2016, while Tokyo and Seoul have poured money into pro-family programs that have barely moved the needle. Even middle-income giants such as India and Brazil are watching their fertility rates slide quickly downward.
For all the data, the theory has its doubters. Skeptics point out that US teen births began declining in the early 1990s, well before any smartphone existed, complicating the idea that the device alone bent the curve. Neither paper, notably, ventures into how policymakers might act on the conclusions reached.
