Last weekend the Financial Times published a report on the decline over the past two decades in global birth rates. The report, which breaks down statistically the likely causes of this decline, makes for bracing reading. In more than two-thirds of the world’s 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the standard so-called “replacement rate” of 2.1. This is not just a reality in the wealthy countries of the West: birth rates over the past 15 years have been in free fall across countries at all levels of economic development, and many developing countries now have lower fertility rates than wealthy ones. Ageing populations drag down standards of living, shrinking workforces, reducing economic productivity and creating structural fiscal tensions. One important aspect of the data is that there is a large and widening gap between the number of children people would like to have and the number they have. People still, on average across global regions, report an ideal of 2-2½ children. “Birth rates,” writes the report’s author John Burn-Murdoch, “are often collapsing despite, not because of, people’s desires.”The reasons for this are, as with any trend across multiple regions and over long periods, multifarious and difficult to parse. Some of them are in themselves good things: reduction in child mortality, wider availability of contraception and birth control, the liberation of women from restrictive traditional gender roles and so forth. Others – lack of affordable housing, for instance – are unambiguously bad, and particularly dire in our own country. But economic factors are, as with all others, inconclusive. The demographic slide is occurring both in countries that were hit hard by the global financial crisis and those that were basically untouched, in countries with booming economies and in those with much more restricted growth.The most attention-grabbing aspect of the article, though, and the most bracing, is its strong suggestion that one of the big factors in this global population decline is the smartphone. It cites an early-stage recent paper, published by the University of Cincinnati, that looked at birth rates through the roll-out of 4G wireless networks in the US and the UK. “The number of births fell first and fastest in the areas that received high-speed mobile connectivity earliest,” writes Burn-Murdoch. The paper’s authors, he continues, “argue that smartphones have transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising and leading to the collapse in their fertility.” The same trend, according to the FT’s own research, is visible in other countries. France, Poland, Mexico, Morocco, Indonesia, Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal: all saw precipitous falls in births beginning around the time of the mass adoption of high-speed internet connected smartphones. [ 'Doing phone' is a resplendently stupid phrase. It's perfect for what we've becomeOpens in new window ]I’m not a demographer or a statistician, and I’m not really qualified to judge the rigour or the worth of the report, or the various studies it draws on. I’ve seen a fair amount of debate about both its methods and its conclusions; it’s all too easy to frame this discussion, too, in ways that feed into right-wing narratives about the need for women – especially white European and American women – to have more babies. It’s not clear, either, how much of this birth-rate decline is due to a reduction in teen pregnancies, but I’m willing to guess that’s a not insignificant factor. (It’s also not that long since the presiding apocalyptic anxiety was climate change, and that one way we were being told we could avoid or mitigate it was to have fewer children, as though the solution to that vast and urgent crisis could ever be individual life choices, rather than systemic change.)We should of course be wary of confirmation bias, and of confusing correlation with causation. (People love nothing more to point out in response to any kind of study or statistics-based report that correlation is not causation; it’s just one of those things that makes everyone feel smart to say and to agree with, and you’ll find no argument here against this eminently sound principle.) But something about the idea that we’re failing to reproduce ourselves and our societies at least in part because of our attachment to these devices – and the ways in which that attachment is causing us to become detached from one another – feels somehow, well, right. And if I don’t feel qualified to judge the truth of the “it’s the phones” theory from a statistical or sociological perspective, I do know a poetic truth when I see one.I am reminded here of Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 masterpiece Children of Men, whose speculative diagnosis of our collective malaise comes to seem more accurate with every year that passes since its release. The film is set in England in 2027, against the backdrop of a mysterious catastrophe that has caused humanity en masse to become infertile. The UK is run by a right-wing authoritarian government; we see ordinary Londoners trudging to work past “illegals” – refugees from the countless disasters of an increasingly unstable world – being rounded up and put in cages, to be sent to internment camps. [ Is mine the first generation thicker than our parents?Opens in new window ]The film depicts a world in which, amid slow societal dissolution and quasi-fascist authoritarianism, people continue to live more or less ordinary lives. In the film’s opening scene we learn, from a news bulletin on a cafe TV, about the death of an Argentinian teenager known as “Baby Diego”, who at 18 years old is the world’s oldest person.It’s not an apocalyptic movie in the mode of The Day After Tomorrow or Armageddon, or even The Road. The world it shows us is only an exaggerated version of the one we already live in, with its normalisation of perpetual crisis, its hardening borders and hardening hearts. The mass sterility, which is never explained in the film, captures the exhaustion of our own time, a sense of the foreclosure of new political and cultural possibilities. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, whose work was an influence on Cuarón in writing Children of Men, referred to the film as “a diagnosis of the ideological despair of late capitalism.” As difficult as it seems to be to say anything certain about the complex causes and effects of global birth-rate decline, there’s a sense in which we’re not learning anything from the statistical correlation with smartphone usage that we didn’t already know. What we know is that something is badly wrong with the world that has been built around and for these devices; that the hyper-capitalism that is channelled through them is an anti-human force, and that its products are loneliness, alienation and ideological despair. We don’t need birth-rate statistics to tell us that.