Wednesday, June 3rd 2026 - 07:54 UTC
The birth rate was stable in countries like the U.S., the U.K. and Australia in the early 2000s, but in 2007, it started dropping in all those countries.
By Gwynne Dyer - Smart phones seem to be directly linked to a worldwide crash in the birth rate. 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,” according to 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 doom-scrolling, 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, realized 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.
