Humans used to get bored a lot more frequently and they were forced to, uh, entertain themselves.
Nowadays, we stare at our portable light boxes instead.
Entertaining and distracting ourselves to extinction!
This study comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the numbers are honestly wild. While the researchers focus on the iPhone because that was the first smartphone, this is generally applicable to all smartphones:
The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone …
Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33 – 52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15 – 44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
Translation: Having a magic pornography and distraction device in our bedrooms at all times contributes to less sex and fewer children.
If you factor in reduced rates of marriage, skyrocketing rates of abortion and birth control, and increasing economic costs, the problem compounds itself.
However, the study shows that pro-natalist policies like paid family leave, tax incentives, and other various laws designed to lower the costs of having a family have a very small effect in raising the birth rate.
Here’s some of the conclusion of the study:
Within the United States, Kearney et al. (2022) and Kearney and Levine (2025) find that no standard policy, economic, or social variable can account for the post-2007 break, and conclude that the decline reflects a cohort-level shift in priorities whose proximate cause they treat as an open empirical question.
Our results point to one possible answer. 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. The observational evidence in Section 8 is consistent with this reading: 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.
Steve Jobs did more to slow population growth than Bill Gates ever dreamed of!
Governments are not about to spend their way to a solution.
We do not claim that the iPhone is the sole cause of the post-2007 decline, nor that no policy lever can move the trajectory. But over the 2008 – 2011 window that our design identifies, our estimates imply that the introduction of the modern smartphone played a sizable role in the decline in U.S. births. The mechanism evidence suggests this operates through the formation of relationships and the time and inclination for partnered intimacy, not the cost of raising children. If so, the policy instruments to which governments have committed the largest sums — cash transfers, tax credits, subsidized childcare, extended parental leave — do not, on their own, address the behavioral shift our estimates suggest is at work.
Single men and women, put down your phones and go hang out with other people.
Husbands and wives, lock your dang phones up and spend time with each other.
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