Study Links Smartphones With Declining Fertility Rates (ktla.com) 155
Two recent studies argue that smartphones may have contributed to falling birthrates by reducing in-person social interaction, sexual frequency, and other conditions tied to unintended pregnancies. "One of the studies published in May is called 'The Collapse of Teen Fertility in the Digital Era' and the other, published just Monday, is titled 'Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T's 2007-2011 Carrier Monopoly,'" reports KTLA. "Both were chronicled in a New York Times piece by political writer Sabrina Tavernise on Monday." Slashdot reader sabbede submitted the story. From the report: The one from May, authored by two University of Cincinnati professors, posits that teen fertility "collapsed globally" starting around 2007 -- the same year the first iPhone was released. "Smart phones changed how teens spend time with each other ... this change in turn drove the collapse in teen fertility," the study's abstract reads. "Once enough teens are on the phone, being on the phone is where the peer network is; in-person time falls sharply, and with it the unstructured contact in which most unintended teen conceptions occur." The study claimed that countries "across the income and policy spectrum" were affected by the teen fertility drop, and that researchers used data from multiple countries, including the U.S., England and Wales, to rule out "country-specific contraceptive access and welfare reform stories." "This model predicts that the shift towards the phone-mediated equilibrium affects multiple aspects of teen behavior," the abstract continues, concluding that "the same instrument that produces a collapse in teen fertility produces a surge in teen suicides."
The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null.
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." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."
The study published on Monday looks more closely at the United States, explaining that nationwide general fertility rates have fallen 22% since 2007. "[This is] a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors," the National Bureau of Economic Researchers study states. "We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone." As mentioned before, the first iPhone was rolled out in 2007, and this study makes use of that timeframe as "a natural experiment" by using data from 2007 through 2011, when iPhones were only sold on AT&T. "From June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T's mobile broadband coverage," the study says. "Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5-8.0% at ages 15-19 and 3.2-6.6% at ages 20-24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint's pre-2011 coverage footprint are null.
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." "Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44," researchers continued. "National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use and reducing sexual frequency."
Ban smartphones in school... (Score:5, Funny)
Bring back unwanted teen pregnancies!
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No doubt!
I read the conclusions of the study as a good outcome! Well, for teens anyway. For older adults, it might be more of a problem. On the other hand, people all my life have been wringing their hands about Earth's overpopulation. So maybe no real down sides.
Re:Ban smartphones in school... (Score:4, Interesting)
I take it you missed the part of the article that mentioned that the iPhone also directly links to the rise in teen suicides.
Re:Ban smartphones in school... (Score:5, Interesting)
Every technology has a dark side, to be sure. Reducing teen pregnancy is not one of them.
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Do real people ACTUALLY think that way?!?!?
I mean, once I'm dead and in the ground, I don't give a flying fuck what the 'future' holds for earth....I won't be here and I won't know anything about it.
That's why I'm all for having as much fun and enjoyable life experiences while I'm above ground and processing oxygen.
Those in the future? I dont give a fuck....why should it?
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They're probably too busy counting and spending all their disposable income.
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Are they happy or do they secretly cry at night that they are genetically dead and irrelevant to the future?
Do you?
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Small wonder, if you are a teen in a sub-Saharan society and you see on your $50 Chinese Android phone how the teens in developed countries live with their iPhone 17 Max Pro Giganticum with fake photos of a Mercedes S on Facebook, small wonder they might light the charcoal grill in a small unventilated room.
Re: Ban smartphones in school... (Score:5, Insightful)
Our economic system does not cope with population decline. So something has to give, and I don't think given how we treat women or screw over the younger generation that they're going to start raising extra children.
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While I agree with much of your comment, it doesn't mean that teen childbirth is a net good.
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This is the biggest challenge that developed nations are facing. Either we retool our economies to cope with population decline, or we accept higher levels of immigration, or we do something drastic to increase the birth rate.
Increasing the birth rate without forcing women to have children can only really be done by making parenthood much more attractive. That means a greatly reduced cost of living, and lots of support for parents (financial, government/subsidized services).
The elephant in the room is clima
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To be sure, we are worried that the world population/US population's rate of acceleration in growth is reducing. The population isn't reducing, it continues to increase. World population in 1800 was 1 billion and in 1900 was 1.6 billion. Today, after 126 years, the world population stands at 8.5 billion. That's ~5x increase. Are we very worried that we won't touch 85 billion (another 5x increase) in the next 126 years?
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World population is levelling off around 11-12bn, which is sustainable with modern farming methods. The main reason it continues to grow is increased lifespan, so there are more generations alive at once.
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World population is levelling off around 11-12bn, which is sustainable with modern farming methods.
That would only be true if modern farming methods were sustainable. They require the use of fertilizer derived from oil, and use of that synthetic fertilizer destroys soil diversity which is necessary for crop production and in fact just for those crops to be nutritious. Even if the population didn't increase we'd already be cruising towards disaster. Factory farming is outdoor hydroponics in a dirt medium.
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"This is the biggest challenge that developed nations are facing."
Hardly, this is the SOLUTION to AI and robots "taking our jobs."
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Our economic system does not cope with population decline.
Probably not just our economic system, our civilization as a whole, though AI may change that. A highly technological civilization depends on having a large population because it depends on a vast amount of knowledge, which requires a tremendous amount of specialization. Some of this is the obvious sort, such as the scientists and engineers who are focused on increasingly-narrow areas of expertise, but a lot of it is not at all obvious, especially in industry, where everything we make requires a huge amou
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Once AI takes all the jobs (and automates the ones you might think can't be automated), what does AI need humans for?
What highly technical work? Programming the AIs?
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Our economic system does not cope with population decline.
Change the economic system. The way of infinite growth is not the only possible way.
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I wondered whether you had had some kind of bad personal experiences or were just repeating biased sources of information. Could be both, but a quick Google search partially answered the question: 10 out of 11 Scholarships are EXCLUSIVELY for Women. [reddit.com]: Reddit r/MensRights, four years ago.
Later in that same discussion: "Title is misleading. The majority of scholarships are open to everyone. Of the few that are restricted by gender, 10 out of 11 are exclusively for women. ... The reality is that only a few per
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more like 5 to 4
And more women attend college then men, so it's probably about even. And, I would note, women admitted to college tend to have a higher average GPA then men admitted to college.
I'm not a fan of the gender wars, but I do like facts!
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In my friend circle, they mostly play computer games, and occasionally do some recreational drugs or drinking. And they are in their 40s. What a life!
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And then, you lose your country....the culture is lost, what makes your country YOUR country....disappears.
And if that's the fate.....I'd rather have it die slowly of population decline than see it evaporate and become unrecognizable in my lifetime .
Re: Ban smartphones in school... (Score:2)
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Do they really acculturate, though?
The ones I see here in MN just come here for free stuff and jobs they can barely do, and barely speak any English. They don't acculturate to our culture; they expect us to bend over backward to appease their culture. They have an advocate who pencil-whips them through immigration, 'helps' them with filling out the paperwork for every benefit possible (food stamps for their two kids, and the neighbor's three kids (and, the neighbor does the same, the husband gets a job an
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Indeed is USED to work this way....and if so, sure, cool.
The trouble is...it no longer works th
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Why is slashdot posting these garbage articles? (Score:5, Insightful)
Better Betteridge [Re:Why is slashdot posting ...] (Score:4, Interesting)
I read that and immediately thought, "Betteridge's Law of Headlines confirmed again."
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I think you're right as far adults go -- adults are having fewer children because children are unaffordable.
Teens, OTOH, were almost never making a conscious decision to try to conceive children anyway -- if they got pregnant, that was an unintended side effect of having recreational sex. So if the teenage fertility rate is falling, the most likely explanation is that teens are either having less sex, or they are using contraception more effectively (or both). It's quite plausible that teens are simply sp
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Ok but what about the recent conservative plan to force unwanted teen pregnancies to full term? Why did that backfire, and how exactly is it related to the 2007 launch of the iPhone?
Headlines (Score:4, Interesting)
Every couple I know whom don't have kids just don't want to have kids. It's not phones or money or socioeconomic factors or social media. They just don't want kids.
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They just don't want kids.
The issue is never that simple. I tell people all the time I "just don't want to have kids". The reality is that there's a whole lot of reasons behind the fact I "just don't want to have kids", and two of those factors are most definitely the lifestyle change that comes with having the expense of a kid, and the lifestyle change that comes with 2 full time employed people needing to suddenly look after kids too. Now these are not the only issues, but to discount them is disingenuous.
People who frame this as
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Women do not want children in more numbers than ever because they are not marrying, because they follow each other on instagram and other mass hysteria sites where they promote hedonistic living to each other
GP comment explains the why, you're explaining the what, we already know what the what is. And some of us know what the why is, but not you. Therefore you're stupid and your comment is stupid.
So women as a voting block created the environment of high taxation and subsidization
Just absolute clown shit.
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Every couple I know whom don't have kids just don't want to have kids. It's not phones or money or socioeconomic factors or social media. They just don't want kids.
Yes, that has probably always been true that some people simply don't want kids. Today it is easy to not have kids as birth control in various forms is common. In my parents day (before the pill) the majority of marriages seemed to be due to pregnancy and married people often screwed up and ended up with kids. Sex is fun and even being careful, pregnancy can result with being careful successfully in the past being a lot harder then today.
Used to be a lot more lack of entertainment as well, nothing else to d
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Many civilized countries that don't have these problems anywhere near the extent of the U.S. have also seen birth rates as bad or worse than the U.S.: Italy, Norway the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, etc. And all of their governments have provided significant financial incentives to have children and they've all failed mi
Re:Why is slashdot posting these garbage articles? (Score:4, Informative)
Read through the rest of the article -- the researchers directly tackled each of the possible other explanations that you suggested and ruled them out. Your instincts are good for hypothesis testing, but the data in the article says those were tested.
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Why is slashdot posting these garbage articles
Because people vote for that.
And publishing such an article allows readers, like you, to argue for or against it and to put the article's accuracy and relevance into perspective.
The Real Reason (Score:2)
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When birth rates are up in the high single digits, the reduction is due to education, women's rights, and improved healthcare. When it gets down to around 2, it starts to become the cost of living instead.
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Yes. Less in-person interaction does not mean no interaction at all. You don't have to be all over your partner(s) all the time to result in a childbirth. The man just has to save on some rubber use a couple of times, that's all. The real reason is lack of intent. Not iPhone or Spotify or PlayStation.
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It certainly HELPS!!!
Geez, then I was a teen (way before cell phones and internet).....my girlfriend and I were fucking constantly, basically any time opportunity presented itself.
This was the "norm" for most of my peers in my HS years....
So if not cell phones and social media....what's the explanation for such a drastic change?
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Fair point. But I wonder what would happen if the editors applied a stricter filter to the stories published here. I'm afraid we would lose the variety and depth of the opinions of fellow slashdotters like you, who take their time to offer insights that are not evident to a layperson. And given that we all have different backgrounds, even if I'm an expert in a certain subject, I can be completely ignorant about others...
So I tend to view the occasional garbage article not as a bug, but as a feature... Cheer
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But that is a weak causal story compared with the much more direct variables everyone is living through: housing costs, wage stagnation, student debt, childcare costs, healthcare costs, delayed household formation, and wealth being increasingly captured by the top of the economy
That analysis is utterly wrong. Far, far worse than the smartphone theory.
It is, in fact, the almost exact opposite of the truth. The truth is that wealth is what causes fertility decline. Wealth and female education, actually, which come hand-in-hand. This story is strikingly visible everywhere around the globe. As a population becomes wealthier and its women become better-educated, fertility falls. Without exception, and the effect is so powerful it overrides culture, religion, everything.
This i
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Teen fertility (Score:4, Insightful)
Any article that mentions the decline of teen fertility as a problem is a propaganda piece. Its authors are awful human beings and deserve to rot in hell for all eternity.
In 2026, teens should not ever be getting pregnant. We don't live in that world any longer. Whoever that bothers needs to rethink their life choices.
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Re: Teen fertility (Score:2)
Thankfully very few people are Mormon
Re:Teen fertility (Score:4, Insightful)
The researchers started off thinking this was a medical problem. If it was a toxin or virus, that would be a concern. I don't think their intention was to say that teen pregnancies were something to champion, only that it was concerning that it was happening and we didn't know why.
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Throughout most of history, females that are fertile have been experiencing pregnancy as soon as they are able. If that wasn't the case, we would not be here as deaths from everything other than old age has been incredibly common.
Now that deaths from old age appear to outnumber all other deaths, there is no need for females to become pregnant as soon as they are able. That is why we enacted laws protecting young females. We do not need their participation anymore.
To me, it is gross and barbaric to treat fem
Im sure this discussion (Score:2)
Good, I guess! (Score:2, Insightful)
If humans have to rely on unintenional/accidental/forcible conception to maintain sustainable birth rates then it's probably a good thing that the birth rates are tanking.
That said, blaming smartphonnes on this is obviously bupkis, considering Japan fell down the sub-2 hole in late 1970s; very much before even cellphones.
I personally like to believe (and this is very much a matter of faith, as nature itself couldn't care less how many generations of slightly above average lemmings drown themselves million t
Conflicting issues (Score:3)
A) We don't want teens getting pregnant as a general rule.
B) We don't want adults to be socially inept.
Smartphones are not an amusing solution to A when they develop into a problem with B. Beyond that, the kids aren't as happy as they used to be either.
So teen fertility rates are perhaps a useful proxy for socialization at the moment, but we need to work to divorce the two things so that "happy, social teens" aren't "at risk of pregnancy teens".
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Lower rates of teen pregnancy could also be caused by better education about contraceptives, and easier availability of contraceptives.
It's true. (Score:3)
The iPhone launch is also partly responsible for microplastics in everyone's balls. It's a double whammy.
I've got AT&T service (Score:4, Informative)
No bars? May as well jump the wife again.
Re: I've got AT&T service (Score:3)
That only works if she has no bars too.
Young people aren't partying and drinking alcohol (Score:4, Interesting)
They also aren't going to bars. They are also using fewer recreational drugs than previous generations. They are also hooking up and having sex far less frequently. They are measurably less intelligent than previous generations. Fewer of them enjoy reading, and the ones who do, read less than previous generations, and at a lower grade level. Fewer of them are able to write an entire paragraph in English at grade level.
It just keeps going and going.
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Phones are worse for you than binge drinking, reefer, and promiscuity combined. Imagine that!
Re: Young people aren't partying and drinking alco (Score:2)
I'm afraid I don't follow. Could you rephrase that as a four hundred millisecond video, vertical format, poorly lit, and shaky?
Re: Young people aren't partying and drinking alco (Score:2)
Maybe kids should participating in more risky behavior. And spending your birthday money on in game loot boxes is not the risky behavior I'm talking about.
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Weed is cheaper than alcohol and you don't feel like shit afterwards.
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They read a lot, it's just that the content they read comes from their peers rather than authors with an editorial team to ensure proper grammar and spelling.
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They are also hooking up and having sex far less frequently. They are measurably less intelligent than previous generations.
That seems pretty smart to me.
Nonsense (Score:2)
It's a correlation not causation. The real cause is high taxes. When you tax people too much, they cannot afford to raise as many children to the standards they expect.
This basically peels your civilization back, tearing off the most intelligent first, and leaves an idiocracy of angry morons.
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Depends on the country...
Many european countries have welfare and taxation systems that reward having children but punish higher earners.
This creates a situation where the higher earners can't afford to have kids as it would mean time off work, childcare costs etc. Meanwhile those on welfare have every incentive to have more kids.
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Uh huh... username checks out.
"High taxes" aren't the cause; we could end all taxes and it would not improve things (and in fact would make things worse). It's the decline in buying power that decades of wage stagnation have brought about. You can't have prices on goods and services keep increasing at the same time that wages stay flat and expect nothing to change. People are finding it harder and harder to make a living without the added expense of having children.
Yes, your average person is getting over
the papers do not rule out all the possibilities (Score:2)
When I first read this post, I thought the same as you: garbage framing.
You've nicely posited some alternative explanations -- NONE OF WHICH are addressed in the first paper linked (Is the iPhone Birth Control? Causal Evidence from AT&T’s 2007–2011 Carrier Monopoly), contrary to one reply below yours.
Correlation, as we know, is not causation. Until proven otherwise, those research efforts are just blind to many other possible causes.
Violent crime too (Score:2)
There's also evidence that violent crime has reduced during this timeframe. The hypothesis is that it's due to people not being so bored, or finding alternative things to do. I don't have a citation, but crime has dropped a lot since the smartphones have become available broadly.
Re: Violent crime too (Score:2)
People who were once excluded from much of society because they were too poor to participate can now afford to connect online. In-person society is on the decline, it won't go to zero but real life is not going to be the dominate culture for humans in the very near future.
Re:Violent crime too (Score:5, Insightful)
Violent crime peaked in the early 90s and has been steadily declining (with a slight bump during the pandemic). With low crime and advances in modern medicine this is the safest time to be alive.
Forget it (Score:3)
Correlation is not... Oh forget it.
Oh good (Score:4, Informative)
I guess we've moved on from moral panic over Tinder and "hookup culture."
Birth rates have been falling globally for fifty years and in many western countries for more like 250 years.
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This is a good place to mention my very first post on social media. It was here on Slashdot. The thread was about a rise in shrunken and mutated genitals on amphibians. Everyone was positing causes like plastic or meds in the water supply. My comment, titled "What this really means" was "Us old guys have bigger dicks than all you young wiseasses. Now get off my lawn, pansies!
We've been talking about this for a long time, well before cellphones.
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UID checks out.
Data (Score:3)
A quick search says that in 2011 only 35% of American adults owned a smartphone of any kind. Only the wealthiest teens would've had them, and those are the least likely teens to experience unwanted pregnancies in the first place.
Did teen fertility decline first among the wealthy and then later and to a lesser extent among the poor? That could be evidence. But if you're doing a study purely of iPhones, especially from 2007-2011, you're not getting the data to compare different socioeconomic classes.
Correlation does not imply causation (Score:2)
They will blame it on anything (Score:5, Insightful)
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Shall we ask where inflation came from?
We had well over a decade, nearly two with near-zero interest rates (which was partly government jiggering the numbers but it was low) that seemingly exploded a handful a years ago.
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You're not getting it. This is about price inflation, not monetary inflation. Monetary inflation is only one cause of price inflation, which outstrips monetary inflation significantly. There are lots of other causes, like consolidation reducing competition.
Teen pregnancies drop cause of smart phones.good (Score:2)
I am SHOCKED! (Score:2)
While reading the comments, I saw that lots of commenters DID actually RTFA!
Never seen before!
The answer is simple (Score:2)
Poorly researched hysteria (Score:2)
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There is no consistent hypothesis as to why at this point.
It is expensive to raise a child to succeed in this modern world. Put that together with better healthcare (you don't need six kids to ensure the survival of one or two) and it's better to invest resources in just a couple of kids.
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Wut? (Score:2)
What smartphones do is allow people to access social media, a big cause of problems. But then again, so do desktops and laptops.
Another social media caused issue is the rise of generalized misandry, and the target of that misandry "checking out"That's the part that is often not spoken of as much, as to dare to mention that not all problems are caused by men will be attacked.
W
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The usual answer is "No, no, you are lonely."
You should marry my ugly sister, Bertha. Or rather Katherina. (See how far back this plot scheme goes?)
Let's not forget the attacks on the so called "pick me!" women, who are castigated for treating men well.
Small town thinking. It's nearly impossible to locate such women in a big city. Much less constrain them to the village women's pecking order. And then threaten ostracization for failing to stay in their place.
The Zombie Apocalypse arrived years ago (Score:2)
You are utterly unable to put the damn mobile down and look at other people around you. You're one of those complaining on the London tube that about people who, you know, sit and look around, without only staring at their mobile...
Population growth is a burden not a benefit. (Score:2)
The less of it the better because quantity of life works against quality of life, see third world fecundity if in doubt.
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Is this slashdot or a garbage tabloid?
Isn't that basically applying the Identity Principle? /s
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The assumption (incorrect) is that frequency of conception has a fixed relationship to the frequenvy of engaging in sexual conduct. It's this second number that we need to get a better handle on. And thanks to cell phones, conducting a survey should be simple. Just ask for the number and substantiating proof in the form of video clips.
I'm certain that such a study would in no way be found to be contreversial.
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Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner!
Though the consolation prize does go to smart phones (particularly 'apps' like tictoc,FB,IG..etc), for encouraging 'virality' of all the 'outrage culture' that allowed all the above to take root in the first place.
2nd consolation prize to goes specifically to dating apps like Tinder,Bumble..etc. that encourage female hypergamy and ONS Chad culture.