{"text":[[{"start":6.95,"text":"From the 1980s to the early 2000s, birth rates in high and middle-income countries were stable, or at least stabilising. But over the last 10 to 15 years, across a wide range of regions, cultures, and level of economic development, they've gone into steep decline. In more than two-thirds of the world's 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman is now below the replacement rate of 2.1. In 66 countries, the average is closer to 1 than to 2. And in some, the most common number of children born to each woman is now 0. "}],[{"start":43.25,"text":"In 2023, Mexico's birthrate fell below that of the US for the first time, followed quickly by Brazil, Tunisia, Iran, and Sri Lanka. Lower and middle-income countries are now getting old before they get rich. The pace and breadth of decline are defying expectations. The UN projected there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50% overestimate. The real figure was 230,000. "}],[{"start":73.35,"text":"To be clear, falling fertility across the 19th and 20th centuries is no mystery. The consensus is that this earlier phase was driven primarily by falling infant mortality, the shift to a manufacturing and then service economy, urbanisation, and the rise of female education. What I want to focus on here is the much more recent decline, the sudden and roughly synchronised drop across very different societies after a period of relative stability. "}],[{"start":101.69999999999999,"text":"Another important part of the story here is that, in many cases, birth rates are falling despite, not because of, people's desires. On average, young men and women still report wanting around two children, even in South Korea, where most women now have zero. But those headline numbers mask a lot of variation below the surface. In several countries, a rising share of young people, especially young women, now say they don't plan to have any children. Evidently, young people's goals and preferences around relationships and children are in flux and increasingly in tension. What could explain such striking recent shifts? "}],[{"start":138.5,"text":"Historically, demographers have looked primarily at economics. But increasingly, those theories don't fit the evidence. Researchers are now starting to point to a new culprit - smartphones and the marked changes to our digital media environment. I've spent the last few weeks diving into the latest evidence, from detailed population records to Google searches, and here's what I found. "}],[{"start":160.95,"text":"First up, it's worth asking why low and falling birth rates get so much attention. The answer is that the numbers and trends we're seeing today will be enormously consequential in the decades to come. The clearest demonstration is in how low birth rates shrink the workforce. Fewer children today means fewer workers tomorrow. "}],[{"start":179.39999999999998,"text":"Take Japan, the poster child for economic stagnation. Few appreciate that Japan's workers are actually just as productive today as ever. On a per worker basis, it's still one of the very richest countries in the world. But low birth rates have meant Japan's workers account for a shrinking share of its increasingly elderly population. So there's less being produced to be shared around, suppressing GDP per capita and living standards. "}],[{"start":205.14999999999998,"text":"Ageing populations also mean ballooning spending on pensions and elder care, which tends to mean either rising taxes, cuts in spending on investment in infrastructure, or both, helping to create a sense of decline that often fuels populist politics. The Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernandez-Villaverde calls fertility decline the question of our time, with most other problems flowing downstream of it. You don't have to agree with everything Elon Musk says to acknowledge that low birth rates are already worsening many of the world's social and economic problems. "}],[{"start":238.49999999999997,"text":"One underappreciated difference between the recent decline and earlier phases of the demographic transition is that in the earlier period, the fertility rate fell primarily because couples had fewer children. Today, the main reason is there are fewer couples. Demographer Stephen Shaw has shown that in most high-income countries, the number of children mothers give birth to is stable or even rising. What's fallen steeply over the past 15 years is the share of women who have any children at all. "}],[{"start":266.25,"text":"In the US, mothers today have an average of 2.6 children, up from 2.4 30 years ago. But over that same period, the share of women who have any kids has fallen from 85% to 63%, and the share who are single has climbed. Had US rates of marriage and cohabitation simply held steady over the past decade, America's fertility rate today would be higher than it was 10 years ago, not lower. The stereotypes here tend to focus on the so-called girl boss, putting career before children, or well-off, dual-income, no kids couples choosing to remain child-free. "}],[{"start":300.3,"text":"But the data tell a different story. Across a wide range of countries, the decline in coupling and births is much steeper among those with the least education and lowest incomes. Among university graduates the share forming couples and having children is actually quite stable, and in some places, even rising. In this sense, family formation has become K-shaped. "}],[{"start":322.65000000000003,"text":"Nor have the shifts some progressives called for borne fruit. Since the 1980s, rich countries have tripled real-term spending on child benefits, subsidised childcare, and parental leave, while men have also increasingly stepped up, the share of childcare done by fathers climbing steadily. But birth rates have just kept falling. "}],[{"start":343.6,"text":"In several rich countries, the US and UK among them, a big barrier to forming families in recent decades has been housing. Up to half of those countries' fertility declined since the 1990s can be explained by falling home ownership and a rise in young adults still living with their parents. Without a long-term home, other long-term commitments get harder. But housing cannot account for the most recent steep decline, nor for how global it is. "}],[{"start":370.55,"text":"In the Nordic countries, fertility has fallen despite economic stability and a rising share of young adults living independently. Couples who move in together are in several countries now more likely to split up than to have a child, a sharp reversal of the historical norm. "}],[{"start":388.5,"text":"Other economic factors are also insufficient. The recent slide has hit countries battered by the global financial crisis and the ones that were unscathed. It shows up in slow-growing western Europe and the rapidly growing Middle East and Southeast Asia. Young people's economic precariousness, the later and longer climb up the career ladder after an extended period of education, the changing balance between young men and women in education and pay, these are all real factors, but slow, gradual shifts. They don't fit a sudden drop across most of the world. "}],[{"start":421.95,"text":"Dissatisfied with these economic explanations, researchers have begun pointing at a new culprit, the digital devices and platforms that play an outsized role in young people's lives across the world. A fascinating study from the University of Cincinnati used the staggered rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and UK to show that births fell first and fastest in areas that got high-speed mobile connectivity earliest. The researchers theorised that smartphones transformed how young people spend time with one another, sharply reducing in-person socialising, and that that has driven, at least part of the collapse in their fertility. "}],[{"start":459.65,"text":"A similar trend shows up in country after country. US, British, and Australian birth rates for teens and young adults were broadly flat through the early 2000s, but began a marked decline from around 2007 or 08. That same slide begins in Mexico and Indonesia around 2012, while in Egypt, Iran, and Senegal, steady declines became steep around 2015. Every one of these inflexion points coincides roughly with the mass adoption of smartphones in that country. Line up those disparate-looking declines by the local arrival of the smartphone, and they collapse into a single, unified trend. "}],[{"start":498.15,"text":"So how exactly might smartphones lower birth rates? Research has proposed several mechanisms. The most direct is that phones have eaten into the time young people spend with each other in person. In South Korea, young adult face-to-face socialising has halved in just 20 years. As demographer Lyman Stone puts it: 'To meet a person you're going to marry and perhaps have children with requires filtering through a lot of people. If you socialise much less, it takes you much longer to find a match, if you find one at all.' "}],[{"start":527.5,"text":"The standards by which people judge potential partners shift, too. If you spend lots of time socialising with your peers in the real world, your standards for a potential partner are anchored in the real world. If you spend your time on Instagram, your standards are anchored to an artificial sense of what's normal. "}],[{"start":544.55,"text":"Then, there's culture. Social media doesn't just consume time. It spreads ideas. Ideals around individualism, women's independence, what a relationship should look like, these now move faster and further than ever before. In this sense, social media may be accelerating cultural shifts that were already happening, but more slowly. "}],[{"start":566.5999999999999,"text":"Stanford University's Alice Evans thinks what she calls cultural leapfrogging could be a key part of why the recent declines in coupling and birth rates are truly global. Instagram and TikTok let young women and countries with quite conservative gender norms bypass the often patriarchal authorities and adopt progressive and egalitarian ideals from the West that their male counterparts are not ready for. "}],[{"start":592.3499999999999,"text":"Then there's the fact that young men and women on social media often inhabit different worlds, served different content by the algorithm, which can include negative stereotypes of one another. My own work has shown that the growing ideological divide between young men and women is a smartphone era phenomenon. Women have moved sharply leftward. Men have not. And we've seen the emergence of a digital manosphere, and some say femisphere. "}],[{"start":617.8499999999999,"text":"At the same time, coupling and births have cratered. Add in the reduced face-to-face contact, and you have real friction at the point where relationships used to form. Layer on top the way social media can intensify people's worries, making decades-long processes feel like sudden waves, and creating a persistent sense of insecurity, and you can see how a single technology could pull on so many threads at once. "}],[{"start":643.1499999999999,"text":"I should, though, add a note of caution. Most of this remains theory. Researchers in different parts of the world have found qualitative evidence for many of the mechanisms I describe here, and some quantitative evidence is coming in. But for now, these are plausible explanations more than proven causal pathways. "}],[{"start":662.5499999999998,"text":"That said, the broader idea - that new media technologies can reshape relationships and fertility - is not new. In 2001, researchers found a stronger link between falling birth rates and television ownership than with income or education. A later study found that watching soap operas portraying small families led women to have fewer children. Another found that owning a TV led couples to have less sex. Considering smartphone usage is much heavier and more solitary than television viewing, the effects could plausibly be much larger. "}],[{"start":695.1499999999999,"text":"So if the most recent widespread decline in births is due in part to the changing digital media environment and all of its downstream effects, what can be done about it? Governments need to resist unrealistic solutions. There's no uninventing the smartphone. As Lyman Stone puts it: 'If someone has bad eyes, we don't fix their genes. We give them glasses.' And there's good evidence that giving young couples secure and suitable housing increases their likelihood of starting a family. "}],[{"start":722.6499999999999,"text":"Baby bonuses, financial incentives from governments for having children can help if they're generous enough. But government resources are limited. And, perhaps more importantly, incentives aimed at happy couples may be beside the point when more and more people simply lack partners. "}],[{"start":738.1999999999998,"text":"The harder truth, as far as I'm concerned, is that even if smartphones vanish tomorrow, much of what they've accelerated would remain. The ideals they've helped spread around individualism, what women want from a relationship, what young men and women now think of each other have, in many places, become the new defaults. Reversing them, if even possible, will be slow and partial. "}],[{"start":760.1999999999998,"text":"Ultimately, falling birth rates appear to be part of a wider picture of young adults' singledom, isolation, and declining well-being. Bringing together this fractured and frustrated generation may just be the challenge of our times. "}],[{"start":781.1999999999998,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781398019_8570.mp3"}