Staff Reports
The headlines are blunt: new working papers now say the smartphone era helped push birth rates down, especially among teens and young adults. Ben Shapiro, Editor Emeritus of The Daily Wire and host of The Ben Shapiro Show, has been pointing to this research — and he’s not whispering about it. If true, the story is simple and savage: we handed young people tiny computers and watched courtship, childbearing, and a lot of old-fashioned social life drain away into glowing screens.
What the new research actually finds about smartphones and birth rates
There are two working papers driving this story. One, from economists Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper at the NBER, uses the early iPhone rollout as a natural experiment and finds that areas with earlier iPhone access saw big drops in births. The numbers are striking: iPhone diffusion may explain roughly 33–52% of the decline in U.S. fertility for women aged 15–44 in the studied period, with births falling about 4.5–8.0% for ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% for ages 20–24. The other paper, from Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso Boedo at the University of Cincinnati, documents a “collapse” in teen fertility across countries after smartphones and 4G spread. Their work points to a tipping point: once teens moved social life online, unstructured in‑person contact fell sharply, and so did unintended teen pregnancies. The proposed mechanisms are plain — less face‑to‑face time, more instant access to sexual content and contraceptive info, and digital coordination that replaces the accidental meetings that used to lead to real-world relationships.
Why this matters — and yes, it touches a masculinity crisis
Conservatives should pay attention because the stakes are cultural and demographic. Falling birth rates mean fewer families, fewer workers, and fewer young men and women learning adult roles in the old-fashioned way — by showing up, courting, marrying, and having kids. We can quibble with methodology or wave our hands about long-run trends, but when rigorous economists point to a tech shock that explains a third or more of a fertility decline, it deserves a hard look. Call it a crisis of masculinity if you like — or call it the market reward for swapping front-porch courting for doomscrolling and swipe culture. Either way, the result is fewer babies and frayed social ties.
Caveats, critics, and the policy question no one wants to dodge
The papers are working papers, not final verdicts. Scholars warn against treating a single innovation as the sole cause of a multi-decade trend. Economic pressure, changing gender roles, housing costs, education, and contraception policy all matter. Peer review, replication, and further study will test these results. Still, even a large partial effect from smartphones would force policymakers to rethink family policy, parental guidance, school and civic programs, and tech regulation. If technology reshaped mating markets, we can either keep admiring the convenience of constant connection or figure out how to rebuild spaces where people actually meet.
So what do we do? We start by calling this problem what it is: a social choice dressed up as progress. Conservatives should advocate for pro‑family policies, parental responsibility, and cultural incentives that bring young people back into real communities — not just into virtual ones. We should also press for more research, demand accountability from platforms that design to addict, and stop pretending that every new gadget is automatically neutral. The numbers in these papers are a warning. If we want kids and stable families, it’s time to stop treating smartphones as a harmless enhancement to life and start treating them like the social experiment that they are.
