Something very odd happened after the introduction of the iPhone, the world's first smartphone. We stopped having so many babies.

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Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs held high the first iPhone at the Macworld convention in San Francisco on January 9, 2007 - and the birth rate went down. Not immediately, of course - but in country after country, including Australia, as smart phones took off, baby production fell.

The iPhone came to Australia in 2008. From 1975 until then, the average number of children born to each Australian woman was just under two births per mother. After the year of the iPhone, the rate started to slide so it's now around 1.5 babies per woman.

But any statistician will tell you that just because two things coincide doesn't mean one causes the other. Credit card spending goes up before Christmas but credit cards don't cause Christmas. So falling birth rates after the introduction of smartphones doesn't necessarily mean a causal connection. It may or it may not. We need more evidence.

And there is extra evidence. Firstly, the same thing happened in different countries of different levels of prosperity. The fall followed the different dates of the iPhone's availability. Birth rates fell after its introduction in Mexico and Indonesia around 2012, and in Iran, Egypt and Senegal around 2015.

On top of that, clever social scientists had the brilliant idea of comparing fertility in areas of the United States which had the iPhone with those which didn't. AT&T initially had the monopoly so the researchers studied birth rates in parts which had AT&T coverage between June, 2007 and February, 2011 and those which didn't.

They concluded "that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44".

Broadly, it seems that smart phones have inhibited the formation of relationships between men and women. (You may now say: "I told you........

© The Examiner