Sign up for the Planet Money newsletter. The world is confusing.Economics can help.Economist Caitlin Myers has a striking explanation for why women are having fewer babies: It's the smartphones.Myers and other researchers have been searching for what's behind the sharp drop in fertility over the last two decades.
Birth rates in the U.S.have fallen by 22% since 2007.At first, economists assumed that the Great Recession was to blame but that births would soon rebound, as they'd done after previous downturns.But then the economy recovered — and birth rates just kept falling.If the recession wasn't responsible for the baby bust, what was?"Whatever it is, it must be big, and it needs to coincide with about 2007 because that's when we see all the births go down," says Myers, a professor of economics at Middlebury College in Vermont.That happens to be the year that Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone, declaring, "Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything."Maybe even birth rates.In a provocative new working paper titled "Is the iPhone Birth Control?" Myers argues that the spread of smartphones could explain between a third and a half of the decline in birth rates during that period.To test that theory, she makes clever use of an accident of history that creates a kind of natural experiment.
When iPhones first came out, they worked only with AT&T."In some areas of the country, AT&T had broadband coverage and you could get an iPhone, and in other areas, including where I live in Vermont, that coverage was much more limited," Myers recalls."And what you can see in this simplest of comparisons, births start to fall in the places where you can get one, and they're not falling nearly as much in the places where you can't."One might argue the results are skewed because smartphones spread faster in urban areas or wealthier communities.
But the results hold up even when Myers controlled for variables like population de...