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GWYNNE DYER: Is there a link between smart phones and dropping birth rates?

New research suggests that people are doom scrolling instead of making romantic connections and having babies

Smart phones seem to be directly linked to a worldwide crash in the birth rate.

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It is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on society that have led to a decline in romantic coupling,” said Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame.

She has to talk that way, being an academic, but what she means is that people are doomscrolling, not copulating.

That’s old news, but the evidence for it is more impressive because it is data-based. That’s what we have social scientists for, and John Burn-Murdoch, a columnist with the Financial Times, realised that you could quantify the data if you talk to enough of them. So he did, and learned that the big drop in the birth rate happened precisely when people got smart phones.

What evidence is there of a connection?

Not every country adopted smart phones at the same time. 2007 was the year they were rolled out across the richer countries of the West, and by three years later, 34 per cent of British people and 27 per cent of American people had one. (Now it’s 95 per........

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