Did the iPhone cause a baby bust?

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The Baby Bust in the United States began in 2008, the year of the financial crisis and the year the Great Recession began. Births and the birthrate have fallen nearly every year since the 2007 peak.

It’s easy, then, to blame the recession, and most commentators do, believing that the Baby Bust is mostly an economic phenomenon. But it’s not mostly economic. It is mostly cultural. And so if we zoom in a bit, we can pinpoint a more precise date when we stopped having babies.

The second quarter of 2008 was the first quarter with a year-over-year drop in births. The four months starting in May 2008 were the first four-month stretch where the year-over-year general fertility rate fell every month.

May 2008 was before the stock market crashed. It was, however, nine months after the first iPhone launched.

To some ears, it sounds absurd that smartphones could deter people from having kids. But the iPhone was never just a device. It was a cultural revolution. And when we see a cultural phenomenon as dramatic as the last 18-years’ collapse in marriage and family formation, we should wonder what changed the culture.

Maybe the culture was upended by a device that altered how people spend all their time, how singles date, how fast first-world norms spread across the planet, and frankly, how we understand ourselves.

The evidence

While the timing of the iPhone lineup, that could just be a coincidence. What’s more, something as massive as our reduction in marriage and family formation, obviously, will have many causes.

So economist Caitlin K. Myers and data analyst Ezekiel Hooper tried a more detailed analysis. They took advantage of the fact that the iPhone didn’t launch in equal quantities everywhere at once. For about four years, only AT&T subscribers could use iPhones, and AT&T coverage is not equally distributed.

The researchers say they compared “counties with near-universal AT&T coverage to counties with little or none over 2003, 2011.”

What they found: The dropoff in baby-making was far greater in the counties with more AT&T coverage. The difference was large enough and the pattern clear enough that the authors concluded that the iPhone was a major cause of the Baby Bust.

“Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33, 52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15, 44,” the researchers concluded.

“The diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women.”

This is a single study, so it’s certainly not proof. There are a million reasons to doubt the conclusion, and a million other likely culprits in the Baby Bust: The Great Recession started in 2008, and birthrates have generally been falling for hundreds of years. The study’s methodology is not watertight.

The study has, though, shown correlation: Where the iPhone became available, birth rates were lower than expected.

The mechanisms

So how exactly could this work? How could a cellphone keep a woman from getting pregnant?

The study points to a few plausible mechanisms by which smartphones could drive down baby-making, but anyone familiar with a smartphone could imagine a dozen other possibilities.

The dating apps are an obvious potential culprit.

Before smartphones, almost every couple met in person. Now, most young adults use dating apps. These apps were supposed to reduce the friction in meeting a good match, but since their widespread adoption, marriage rates have gone down, and men and women have come to trust one another less. Now the data suggest that even dating is down.

Why would apps made to facilitate dates result in fewer dates? It’s not totally clear, but one could guess.

Maybe meeting people in person, through friends or shared activities, is more conducive to helping people find a good match.

Also, the dating apps drove home the idea that one ought to flirt only with someone who has explicitly consented to being flirted with.

Further, dating apps have become the place to seek a partner, fostering the idea that it is inappropriate to ask someone out in person or to pursue a romantic relationship with the girl on the softball team.

More darkly, the smartphone put all the pornography in the world in the pocket of young men, and that had bad effects. More people watched porn, and more people searched for porn after the iPhone was launched than before.

“The iPhone made on-demand pornography always-available and private,” the authors wrote. “If the device displaces partnered sex by providing a substitute, the substitution should show up in series like these.”

More porn makes healthy dating and marriage harder.

Also, smartphones simply waste people’s time, leaving less time for socializing and dating, which leads to less dating, which in turn leads to less marriage. The time-wasting and less hanging out show up in the study as a good outcome: The largest drop in birth rates was among teenage girls. Instagram might be ruining high school, but it’s doing it in a way that at least results in fewer pregnant girls!

However, Gen Z’s and Millennials’ emaciated social life appears to extend into their 20s.

Stanford University psychologist Jamil Zaki puts it in the terms of ease: Smartphones make it easier to take care of necessities, and thus make it easier to just stay home.

“We can one-click order meals and nearly any product, practice yoga on YouTube, and even pray through an app,” Zaki said in a 2025 interview. “Communal activities don’t have to be done in community, so we stay home. Going out has become like working out: We feel better after doing it, but it takes energy to get started.”

Declining sociality leads to all sorts of social pathologies.

Members of Gen Z are less trusting of others than any of the previous generations, and they have become less and less trusting every year. This could be another mechanism by which smart depresses baby-making. The internet and social media seem especially crafted to reduce human connection and foster distrust.

Marriage and parenthood require high trust. Joining your life with another person, which is what both marriage and parenthood require, makes you extremely vulnerable. As a result, less trusting people will be less likely to have kids.

Also, raising children requires social support, and so it requires a tight-knit community, which is inseparable from trust.

Other studies seem to confirm these connections.

One recent study out of China found that folks who use the Internet more are less trusting of others. The causality likely goes both ways here, but if you spend time online, you can imagine how it could erode your faith in humanity. A smart phone plugs us into this alienation-machine 24 hours a day. Instead of speaking to your neighbors at the bus stop, you’re mainlining bad news and conspiracy theories.

In turn, more trusting people have more babies and get married more. For instance, as women get more educated, their birthrates fall, but they fall less in cultures with higher social trust.

The deeper cause

Smartphones are tools, and it’s easy to think that a tool cannot harm us, a tool is simply what we make of it.

But our tools often shape us, and change the nature of society. The cotton gin was just a tool, but it created a demand for cheap labor, specifically slavery, thus changing history.

The smartphone has changed not merely how we carry out our daily tasks, it has changed how we understand ourselves. Social media, in particular, seems to have driven home a harmful anthropology.

Social media algorithms are designed not to make us happy, but to make us addicted. The easy and the enraging are the most addictive. Feasting our eyes and minds and souls on the easy and enraging will make us torpid and angry. It will fuel social distrust and convince us that people are bad. That doesn’t dispose a person to marrying another person, or to creating more people.

WAKING UP TO THE BABY BUST

Social media also cultivates an overly individualistic view of the human person, at the expense of family and community.

Instagram, for instance, is made for you to cultivate your personal image or brand. It cultivates self-absorption. It teaches us that life is about improving and advancing yourself, rather than about serving and loving others, which is exactly what parenting requires.