The US has seen a 22% decline in the annual birth rate since 2007. A study confuses correlation with causation, and blames the iPhone without real data to support the claim.
Jony Ive once expressed regret for the unforeseen consequences of the iPhone, but he meant for the environment and for people’s attention. Not for the birth rate.
But a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research called “Is the iPhone Birth Control?” allows for no doubt. “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,” claims the paper’s abstract.
When a headline ends in a question mark, somewhere in the article the answer will be no. In this case, it’s in the introduction which quietly says that actually the decline is due to “email, the iPhone, and social media.”
But then it reports that no, listen, right, the US birth rate was pretty much consistent from 1980 to 2007, and of course 2007 was when the iPhone was first launched, wasn’t it? QED.
Or post hoc ergo propter hoc, if you prefer. Just because something happens after something else, it does not mean that one caused the other.
There are, though, other less clickbait correlations that the paper’s writers admit to before attempting to dismiss them all. Specifically, “the timing of the break [from the regular birth rate] aligned squarely with the onset of the recession.”
The writers argue, though, that we are now almost two decades on from that recession, so we should be out of that by now. Two decades on, the rate has not recovered, but to be fair, the US middle- and lower-class economies hasn’t either.
The paper’s writers then exhaustively examine data from around 2005 to 2011. It ends in 2011 because that was when the iPhone ceased to be an AT&T exclusive, and so it’s apparently easier to determine the population that had iPhones and the population that did not.
Correlation is not causation
While the iPhone usage data is all from that narrow range up to 2011, the paper tries to tie it all to much later data regarding other factors. For instance, it cites a National Center for Health Statistics report from 2024 for its data about sex without contraception, although it presents charts that only go up to 2018.
Similarly, various other 2024 reports concerning psychological distress, pornography search interest, and X-rated movie viewing, were used in this research. It doesn’t seem to matter that the report’s own charts show that searches for porn massively increased in 2014 and by 2024 were roughly back to where they were when the iPhone launched.
Detail from a chart in the report that proves the iPhone sparked an increase in searches for pornography, as long as you ignore that the figures drop off again – image credit: National Bureau of Economic Research
Perhaps consequently, after 35 pages of blaming the iPhone for everything, the paper concludes that, well, no, it isn’t really.
“We do not claim that the iPhone is the sole cause of the post-2007 decline,” it says. “But over the 2008-2011 window… our estimates imply that the introduction of the modern smartphone played a sizeable role in the decline in US births.”
So it goes from how the iPhone has destroyed the US birth rate, to actually it hasn’t, and then on to how smartphones in general may be a factor anyway.
There is interesting data in this report, but as the writers themselves said, we’re now nearly two decades after the examination period. And the US Bureau of Labor Statistics currently says that jobs for midwives and related occupations are rising much faster than the average.
By 2011, it was estimated that Apple had sold around 200 million iPhones. By 2021, it had sold 2 billion. If this report’s headline was right, then anyone aged 19 or younger is frankly lucky to have been born at all.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
