The irreversible smart phones and world’s dropping birth rates
Key takeaways
- 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.
- Not every country adopted smart phones at the same time.
Why this matters: an international story with cross-border implications worth tracking.
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.