Smart Phones are to Blame Again!

[mike carey]

This is both a tech story and a sociology one, so I settled on the Lounge rather than the Tech Forum.

I've been paying attention to the work of John Burn-Murdoch for a while, at least since the pandemic that I can remember. He's the chief data reporter for the Financial Times and cross publishes his content on other platforms as well.

In this fascinating piece on YouTube he correlates the recent sharp decline in birth rates with the widespread arrival of smart phones in a range of countries. The case he presents is persuasive, although as he notes, not proof of cause rather than correlation. It runs for about 12 minutes.

 

[Lotus-eater]

Color me skeptical. Tyler Cowen's critique:

"Here is the background to the debate.  Here is more from Noah.  Here is a thread from researcher Caitlin Myers.  And here is some basic information:

In 2008, 1.9% is the share of the mobile-subscribing population with an iPhone wireless subscription.  As a percent of all adults that is 1.6%.

In 2009, it is 4.3%.  3.6% of all adults.

In 2010, 6.8%.  5.5% of all adults.

Plus conception to birth takes nine months (give or take!), noting that actual family planning may make this lag far longer.  In 2008 fertility rates already were falling pretty sharply.  The whole “maybe the iPhone messes up your dating processes” factor also requires some time to operate, especially since iPhones as a network of many many users, and whatever negative effects on socializing you think that might have, was still to lie in the future.  And what you could access on the iPhone then was far more limited than today.

So when the authors talk about diffusion explaining 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among American women 15–44, I still do not get how that is supposed to operate.

The explanations I am hearing seem to be parasitic on world intuitions from 2026, not the time period under consideration."

[mike carey]

Burn-Murdoch's video didn't claim anything beyond correlation.

[+ PhileasFogg]

For me, I blame the vasectomy I had 30+ yrs ago.   Highly confident of both correlation AND causation 

Edited Monday at 10:26 AM by PhileasFogg

[+ Jamie21]

Plus, I’m doing my best to turn the straight guys gay. I’m having quite a lot of success.

[+ Vegas_Millennial]

11 hours ago, Lotus-eater said:

In 2008, 1.9% is the share of the mobile-subscribing population with an iPhone wireless subscription.  As a percent of all adults that is 1.6%.

In 2009, it is 4.3%.  3.6% of all adults.

In 2010, 6.8%.  5.5% of all adults.

These statistics are for the share of mobile phones that are "iPhone".  It's not including Android smartphones or the very popular (back then) BlackBerry. 

Nearly 20 years later, I still don't have an "iPhone".

[Lotus-eater]

24 minutes ago, Vegas_Millennial said:

These statistics are for the share of mobile phones that are "iPhone".  It's not including Android smartphones or the very popular (back then) BlackBerry. 

Nearly 20 years later, I still don't have an "iPhone".

BlackBerry was introduced a decade earlier and was not a smartphone; if BlackBerry played a significant role, the trend should have started soon after 2000. Android lagged the iPhone and did not become a major player until 2010. 

Also, while young women are more susceptible to social contagions (e.g., witches, anorexia, ROGD, etc.), I don't think that western ideas of feminism (8:55) had such a large impact simultaneously across many different cultures; ideas are not adopted and universally practiced that quickly.

Edited Monday at 08:36 PM by Lotus-eater

[+ SirBillybob]

The key chart is misleading. It cannot be used as evidence that a smartphone inflection point accounts for an already pre-existing fertility decline trajectory that occurred for many of the countries depicted. By flattening one-decade pre-inflection fertility decline trends to about 0%, when some of those actually approach the same level of decline as depicted post-smartphone, as opposed to running temporal longitudinal trend lines through the steadily dropping fertility metrics that unequivocally cannot be attributed to smartphone prevalence, that history is falsely nullified. (See Mexico for illustration)

That is likely an artefact of the attempt to adjust for national variation year by year in a single standard for estimating inflection influence. However, that distorts the graph, visually artificially elevating the true potential impact of smartphone availability, as well its scope of abruptness. At most, such device access can be considered as potentially accelerating fertility changes that had been, and continue to be, attributable to a host of other variables unrelated to the “tech shock” inherent in hand-held computers. 

The verbal presentation compensated by suggesting that the smartphone analysis can only speak to whether fertility fell faster than what might have been otherwise expected. Fertility transition had been substantially well on its way. For example, Mexico’s fertility decline rate is almost symmetrical around (pre / post) the proposed inflection explanation point posed by widespread smartphone uptake.  

Edited Tuesday at 03:07 AM by SirBillybob