Commentary: Should we blame smartphones for declining birth rates?

Mr Hudson and Mr Moscoso Boedo explain the phone-to-fallowness connection this way: “Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur.”

Most would – and should – consider a drop in teen births to be a positive development. But, as the researchers ominously note, “the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides.”

A CRISIS OF CONNECTION

Looked at more closely, the fertility crisis appears to be a crisis of connection. And smartphones compound it via a substitution effect, encouraging the move from a real-world context to a phone-mediated one.

Texting and video calls – simulacra of in-person conversation – reduce the need to meet in real life. On-screen entertainments – gambling, gaming, apps exquisitely engineered to hook users via intermittent reinforcement – distract from the slower, more effortful pleasures of connecting with other humans. Pornography can lower the desire for in-person sexual activity. And social media supercharges it all, with endless streams of anxiety-inducing and gender-polarising content.

An increase in fertility rates could be positive for any number of reasons, from economic dynamism to individual fulfilment. But equally or more important might be an increase in civic health, or a decrease in isolation.

All of the above are less likely to result from hand-wringing about iPhones as contraception than from asking more nuanced questions: What parts of human life have we, intentionally or not, allowed technology to displace? And how can those things be restored?

The answer might still be to throw our phones into the sea – but not just to juice fertility.

Christine Emba is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.