If your sex life is dead, you can blame Steve Jobs

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Economists find signs of a ‘large and causal relationship between iPhones and fertility' in AT&T exclusivity-era data

If your phone is too compelling, your sex life might not be. American birth rates have been declining for nearly two decades now, and researchers believe they’ve identified a potential new culprit: The iPhone. 

That’s right: A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper examines AT&T mobile broadband coverage from the iPhone’s 2007 launch until the company lost carrier exclusivity in 2011. Comparing birth rates across counties and controlling for confounding factors, the authors concluded that access to the iPhone reduced births, particularly among younger women.

The data, Middlebury College Economics professor and NBER researcher Caitlin Myers and Middlebury graduate Ezekiel Hooper wrote in their paper, suggests that iPhone access caused significant birth rate decreases across age groups. The authors found that women aged 15–19 in counties with access to the iPhone through AT&T saw birth rates fall by as much as 8 percent during the study period, while those aged 20–24 experienced declines of up to 6.6 percent. Older age groups also showed "statistically significant but smaller declines," according to the paper. Myers argues the findings point to more than a simple correlation.

“It’s pretty much undeniable that births fell faster in places with AT&T coverage,” Myers told The Register in an email. “As a scientist, I’m loath to ever say causality is ‘proven’ … but I would say that we’ve identified a compelling natural experiment and that it strongly points to a large and causal relationship between iPhones and fertility.”

Compared to counties with dominant Verizon and Sprint coverage, which only began to receive Android devices in 2009 per the paper, there was no effect on fertility related to the iPhone release. Myers told us that they did see some evidence that those control areas started to show some similar declines when Android phones became widely available, but smaller sample sizes and limited data make those findings a bit less precise.

“Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women,” the paper explained, adding that the release of the iPhone can be attributed to as much as 52 percent of the decline in general US fertility rates over the period. Again, controlling for factors like income, race, education level, and more didn’t eliminate the iDecline in birth rates. 

How the iPhone killed sex

Writing on LinkedIn, Hooper said that people he’s spoken to about the paper were entirely unsurprised. 

“Some counties got a working iPhone; nearby ones didn't,” Hooper noted. “We find that teen and early adult births fell much faster where the iPhone worked. And the counties stuck on Verizon? No effect. Hard to explain that timing with anything but the iPhone.”

The study’s data doesn’t include anything about the reasons the iPhone’s introduction caused a birth rate decline, but Myers and Hooper point to other research - and a bit of common sense - to suggest three possibilities. First there’s the fact that smartphones are a substitute for in-person interactions, meaning people aren’t in physical proximity, and thus less likely to be having sex. Combine that with one of the other factors they identified - instant, easy access to online porn - and people remaining at home instead of going out to socialize are more likely to just take care of business on their own. Third, the iPhone gave people easy access to information about contraception and abortion access, so even those bucking the don’t-leave-the-house trend are less likely to have a kid they don’t want. 

“iPhone is the always-available alternative to in-person time; its social-media apps are engineered to sustain attention; both features displace the peer time that produces sexual encounters,” the pair wrote. 

Then again, iPhone owners still get more action than Android users, at least according to a 16-year-old OkCupid study, so Apple aficionados can at least count themselves lucky in that regard.

“We do not claim that the iPhone is the sole cause of the post-2007 decline,” the duo concludes in their paper. Research looking at more recent effects of connected tech on fertility rates closer to the present has similarly found that, while the iPhone may have been the canary in the coal mine, internet connectivity, social media, and ubiquitous pornography are still having an effect.

The fertility decline that began in 2007 has become a cause for concern around the world, not just with weird billionaires, and Myers and Hooper conclude their paper with a look at government programs in various countries that have been offering economic incentives to encourage their citizens to have kids. Those programs, they say, are targeting the wrong problems, even if the cost of raising a child is too high for many.

“Our estimates imply that the introduction of the modern smartphone played a sizable role in the decline in US births,” the paper concludes. If they’re correct, cash incentives and other economic relief isn’t necessarily going to change things. 

“The policy instruments to which governments have committed the largest sums … do not, on their own, address the behavioral shift our estimates suggest is at work,” the pair wrote.

The solution, like so many other social issues of the modern age, may be better solved by people just putting down their damn phones and ditching FaceTime for some actual face-to-face time. ®