Fertility

The Smartphone Theory of Birth Rate Decline Doesn't Hold Up

Fertility rates started falling centuries before the iPhone was introduced.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 5.18.2026 12:02 PM

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Just when you think smartphone panic can't get any more dumb, it always does. Case in point: People are insisting that phones are why people worldwide are having fewer kids.

There's one very simple, very obvious flaw with this theory: Fertility rates have been falling for hundreds of years.

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History Time!

In the U.S., the total fertility rate—that is, the average number of kids a woman in a given time period will have in her lifetime—has been falling since the U.S. founding. (Cue panic: Is democracy to blame for declining birth rates???)

In 1800, the fertility rate for white American women was 7.04. By 1850 it had dropped to 5.42, and by 1900 it was 3.56. For black women, the fertility rate in the 1850s (the earliest period for which we have data) was 7.9; by 1900 it was 5.61.

By 1930, the U.S. fertility rate had fallen below 3 for both white (2.45) and black (2.98) women, and the decline continued into the 1940s.

Fertility trend lines have not always been a linear decrease. By 1960, fertility rates had ticked up again, reaching 3.53 for white women and 4.52 for black women.

Then they once again tumbled, reaching just 1.74 in 1976.

The fertility rate continued to hover below 2 until 1989, after which it bounced back and forth between just under and just over 2 for a couple decades. It fell to 1.97 again in the 1995–1997 period, then saw small but sustained increases from 2002 (fertility rate 2.02) through 2007 (2.11).

Then it started falling again, going back down to 2 by 2009. It has mostly declined modestly but consistently since then, reaching 1.89 in 2011, 1.76 in 2017, 1.66 in 2021, and 1.62 in 2024.

It's this post-2007 fall that has the technology alarmists going off. Don't you know the iPhone was introduced in 2007?

Moral Panic Alert

In a new piece for the Financial Times, John Burn-Murdoch—author of a criminally misleading and data-torturing article about conscientiousness last year—suggests that "the most recent [birth rate] plunge appears connected with our use of technology." He notes that in the past 15 years, birth rates have been falling "across different cultures and levels of economic development." And what unites all these disparate countries? The use of smartphones, of course.

It sounds so obvious! That is, until you consider the other things that have united many countries over the last few decades.

A giant decline in child mortality. (People have fewer kids when they're less worried that several will die.) Rising housing costs. A big financial crisis. Rising material wealth nonetheless. Rising expectations about the levels of comfort and adult supervision that kids must have. A global pandemic. Globalized media and culture. Increased access to contraception and abortion.

And, of course, better economic options for women and less stigma around remaining unmarried, making it........

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