Steve Dempsey
SOMETHING STRANGE IS going on with our birth rates.
In Ireland there were 71,389 registered births in 2007. In 2024 that number was 54,062. This is quite the decrease, and it’s happening despite population growth.
And it’s not just Ireland. The same phenomenon is happening in other countries. And recent research from the US points to an unexpected culprit, at least in part: the smartphone. More particularly, the iPhone.
Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly is a paper from the US National Bureau of Economic Research.
It uses data from the American rollout of the iPhone, which was exclusive to AT&T to map iPhone availability against birthrates in specific areas. The research found that iPhone penetration (no sniggering down the back!) was responsible for 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15 to 44.
Why? The theory is that access to smartphones pushes more interactions online, reducing real world interactions, including sexual activity.
Smartphones have also made pornography more accessible and given users more private and easier access to information on birth control, contraception and abortion.
“The goal of our paper is to try to understand why fertility is declining,” says Caitlin K. Myers, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Our results suggest that smartphones may play a large role, but we certainly don’t rule out other factors such as the costs of housing and childcare.”
Does Myers think that these sorts of results would be mirrored in other countries? Like Ireland?
“I would love to see other researchers adapt this study design to other markets. If we have truly captured the effect of the iPhone, then I would expect it to generalise to other contexts in which iPhones were widely adopted.”
But there is research on teen fertility that indicates this is a global trend. Academics from the University of Cincinnati produced a paper earlier this year called The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era, which found that increases in 4G mobile broadband coverage effected multiple aspects of teen behaviour, producing a collapse in teen fertility and a surge in teen suicides.
So if smartphones have reduced birth rates and been detrimental to mental health, what else have they done?
There’s a broader question about whether a consumer product could have shaped modern society on the same scale as public policy. Could Tim Cook have had as much influence over Irish family life as recent taoisigh? Could there be other issues that are at least partially caused by the smartphone?
The answer is of course there are!
Loneliness
There’s the loneliness epidemic. Last year the OECD found that 8% of respondents in 22 European OECD countries said they had no close friends and 6% of respondents in 23 OECD countries felt lonely most or all of the time over the past four weeks.
Smartphones have facilitated the collapse of low-stakes contact at bus stops, pubs, cafés, and in queues, replacing weak social ties with strongly addictive behaviours that increase isolation.
There’s the hollowing out of our public spaces and local economies where those weak social ties often take place. Smartphones have redirect spending and attention from local ecosystems to apps and platforms and it’s a zero sum game.
Every gain for the likes of online marketplaces, social media, Amazon, Airbnb and Uber means a loss for casual retail, classified ads, bookshops, travel agents and local taxis.
There’s also the loss in trust and revenues for local and national media. Smartphones are the main distributors of algorithmically driven echo chambers that maximise time on particular apps, rather than creating a communal shared narrative in the same way public service broadcasters do.
Plus there are a host of other downsides. Smartphones have killed daydreaming and boredom; they archive embarrassing or stupid things we say and do, making it harder to forget and harder to forgive; they have made it harder to be present at family gatherings; they steal our sleep; and they have promoted a performative approach to life where our private lives are productised for all to see on social media.
So what can we do about it?
The public policy responses are well documented – albeit unevenly applied.
Social media bans for minors, phone free schools, media literacy initiatives, and so on. These are all solid, if uninspiring solutions proposed by policymakers.
But there’s an argument that we should now be regularly tracking indicators linked to some of the issues highlighted above; sleep, loneliness, fertility, youth anxiety, civic participation, local volunteering and time spent in in-person social activity.
Measuring these unintended downsides to smartphone use may lead to greater understanding of the issues.
And hey! Let’s not be too down on smartphones. They haven’t made us poorer in the normal sense. They are miraculous mini-supercomputers that have facilitated new forms of connection, unlocked opportunities and created incredible convenience.
But they may also be the largest unpriced externality in history. We just need to remember to look up every now and again.
Steve Dempsey is a media and technology expert and commentator. He is also director of advocacy and communications with the Irish Cancer Society.