A new study claims smartphones are the main driver of the collapsing U.S. birth rate, which has fallen by one-quarter since 2007. So did the iPhone eat the kids, or is there another reason Americans aren’t having kids anymore?
To answer that, let’s look at the study in question. It basically argues that technology has had a physically isolating effect on young people, so they don’t hang out anymore and get the chance to form relationships.
It’s a pat hypothesis, but it doesn’t align with the fact that the fertility collapse is almost entirely among Democrats, who are down to 1.4 kids per mother, while conservatives are having the same number of kids they did in the 1980s, 40 years ago. Since conservatives also use iPhones, there goes the hypothesis.
Where did the study go wrong? First, it used the natural experiment of the original iPhone rollout, which went city-by-city. The researchers correlated fertility with iPhone penetration, and voilà. The problem, of course, is that the iPhone didn’t roll out randomly, but started with cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
In other words, they weren’t measuring smartphones and fertility. They were measuring blue cities and fertility.
This is disappointing if you were thinking about throwing away the iPhone to get that baseball team. But it’s interesting — and encouraging — to suggest that the decline in fertility is not fate but culture. Specifically, it’s the culture of women.
A recent Pew survey found that a majority of young liberal women think limiting children is good for careers, while nearly 70% of conservative women think you can have a good career even with kids. This matters because over the past 20 years, young women have swung hard to the Left, rising from 28% to 40% self-identified liberals, and, according to Gallup, now line up with liberals over conservatives on 87% of issues.
Another survey found the most important life goals of young women who voted for Kamala Harris were career and spending money on luxuries — having children was almost dead last. Conversely, the most important goals of men who voted for President Donald Trump were getting married and having children.
The longitudinal IFS survey asks women by birth cohort how many kids they’re having, and in recent trends, conservative women are unchanged: 2.1 per woman. But Democrats are dropping one-fifth of a kid per decade: 1.7 for mothers born in 1987, 1.5 by 1997, and likely 1.3 by the time today’s 19-year-olds have their turn.
Interestingly, conservative women want even more kids — between 2.5 and 3 — suggesting economic conditions such as housing costs and wages may be their limiting factor. Just as interesting, the survey data indicate that better economic conditions wouldn’t improve fertility among Democrat women, who don’t want more kids, and would likely just fund more girls’ trips to France.
And it’s not just kids: liberals and conservatives also have radically different priorities in marriage. In short, conservatives — and especially conservative women — see marriage as a good thing and something towards which they aspire, while liberal women see it as a mixed bag that slows their careers.
Considering marriage makes having kids much easier, that means not only do liberal women not want kids, but they also don’t want the pathway — marriage — that takes the economic edge off having kids. In short, it’s not smartphones that ate the kids. It’s smartphones that found the ones eating the kids: liberals.
Now, without a doubt, the iPhone and social media have had an isolating effect. Gen Z is having fewer relationships and a lot less sex than Gen X. But the fact that conservatives are apparently immune to the baby-munching effect of new technologies suggests the problem is liberal ideology — namely, the feminist reframing of marriage and children as prison rather than fulfillment.
Reinforce that mentality through 12 to 16 years of left-wing schooling, and it apparently leaves a mark. Ultimately, it’s culture and not economics or smartphones that are dictating the terms here. Policy levers are limited, at best.
You can protect free speech so conservatives can share the joys of family. You can implement school choice so parents can free their kids from a liberal education. But the Left has so completely captured the cultural institutions — especially media — that it’s the mother of rear-guard battles. It’ll take a cultural overhaul to reverse the decline in fertility.
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Peter St. Onge, Ph.D., is senior economist and E.J. Antoni, Ph.D., is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.
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