Do Smartphones Brainwash Women into Hating Babies?

In this episode, the hosts delve into the complex issues surrounding fertility declines and the possible impacts of smartphone use on marriage and birth rates. They examine fertility statistics, research from the Financial Times, and discuss various arguments, including those posed by Adam Conover. They analyze whether modern technology, especially smartphones, plays a significant role in reducing marriage rates and birth rates. The discussion extends to geographic differences, cultural impacts, and the broader implications of modern lifestyles on fertility. Offering various perspectives, they also touch on the need for new cultural systems to motivate higher fertility rates and the challenges presented by current societal trends.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. I am excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be going over a lot of fertility statistics, a lot of graphs, and we are going to be asking a question that has been posed in a few different ways. We're going to be looking at a number of different articles and research pieces today.

One is the question of, Is fertility collapse primarily due to a breakup in marriage rates downstream of cell phone use Or is and then a second argument I heard actually Very interesting for me. What is it adam ruins everything that guy adam conover. He has like a podcast You know, and he had a competent pro, like progressive pronatalist on who was arguing that it was cell phones that were leading to all of this.

This

Simone Collins: is not something I've heard before. I mean, certainly cell phones have been blamed for the lack of children's literacy, the mental health crisis, but marriage rates?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, she argued it was making kids that wasn't happening to the phone. So we're going to go over these two related arguments.

Okay. Okay,

Simone Collins: sure.

Malcolm Collins: And I'm going to start by reading a piece from [00:01:00] the Financial Times and then going occasionally into other pieces that exciting, but from a marked fall in the number of couples had U.

S. rates of marriage and cohabitation remain constant over the past decade, America's total fertility rate would be higher today than it was then. And here I am putting a graph on screen that is total fertility rate varied widely by marital status. And what it looks at is what your total fertility rate would be.

If you had been having kids this whole time, so some numbers look really high, like the married and spouse present looks like it's been hovering around 4. 5 for the past decade, right? And so the question is, okay, why does that look like it's hovering around 4. 5? Why does separated look like it's hovering around 2.

5? Why does married spouse absent look like it's hovering around 3? Like they seem weirdly high, right? Okay, so here's why. While women are married, they tend to have very high birth rates. Note, the chart above does not show that married women [00:02:00] will have four or five kids. It means that the average birth rate for married women ages 15 to 50 sums up to four or five kids.

You started at 15 there. That seems a little like you're massaging the data. Okay. I don't think many women are getting married at 15, sweetheart. But that's a 35 year span when the average woman will actually only spend 12 and 20 of those years married.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So, okay what is shown here, which I find compelling is that for period married, the number of kids people are having is not declining over time.

So if you can get people married earlier, you are going to have more kids. Yet we've said that before. I do not think that that is the core of the problem, but we'll talk about that in just a second. As you can see above, there's been a decline in married fertility since the peak in 2009. But [00:03:00] married fertility rates today aren't actually much lower than married fertility rates in the mid 2000s.

For divorcees and widowers, age adjusted birth rates are actually higher now than they were before the recession. Never married women, again, have about pre recession levels of fertility, too. By fixing age specific marital status, 2001 to 2008 levels, we can model a counterfactual scenario of what fertility might have been had people gotten married and form families at the same rate as formerly.

And what you see here is that, yes, the fertility rate would have fallen net negative, but not by a ton. You're looking at, like, by negative like 0. 2 here or something like that. Okay. But, we'll get to why I'm not super compelled by this. Essentially, all of the decline in fertility since 2001 can be explained by changes in the marital composition of the population.

Married, single, and divorced women are [00:04:00] all about as likely controlling for the age and marital status to have kids as they were in 2001. But today, a smaller portion of women are married during those peak fertility years. Relationships are not just becoming less common, but increasingly fragile. In egalitarian Finland, it is now more common.

For couples who move in together to split up than to have a child. A sharp reversal in the historic trend and this is from a paper here Partnership Dynamics and Entry into Parenthood Comparison of Finnish Birth Cohorts 1969 to 2000. Any thoughts before I go further?

Simone Collins: No, keep going. I want to hear more.

Malcolm Collins: When pictured as a rise in happily childless dinks, dual income, no kid couples, with plenty of disposable income, the social trends accompanying falling birth rates seem benign. But the rise of singledom and relationship dissolution is a less rosy story, especially considering the drop in relationship formation is steepest among the poorest.

Of course, many people are happily single. The freedom to choose how to spend one's life and with who or without [00:05:00] is to be celebrated. I don't believe that, by the way. People aren't happily single. Everyone hates their life when they're single.

Simone Collins: I don't know. I loved being single, but I didn't. No, you existed.

So there's that. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Quality of your life when you were single versus quality today.

Simone Collins: Much better now. More stressful though.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But the point being is, is you would hate your life when contrasted with today, if you knew this was a possibility. Yeah,

Simone Collins: totally.

Malcolm Collins: But the wider data on loneliness and dating frustration suggests not as all as well.

So we're going to put some graphs on screen here. Here you can see the share of children born outside of wedlock by mother's class. And this is in the United States, 64 percent of your poor. 36 percent of your working class, 13 percent of your middle or upper class. Millennial family passed by class.

Do you have a kid before marriage or do you have marriage before a kid? If you're poor, 61 percent chance you have a kid before marriage. Only 16 percent chance you have a marriage before a kid.

Simone Collins: Wow. Okay. If you're

Malcolm Collins: working class, it's [00:06:00] 44 percent chance you have a kid before marriage. 34 percent chance you have a marriage before a kid.

Kids are forcing marriages in our society. If you're middle or upper class, it's actually only a 19 percent chance you have a kid before marriage. Any 51 percent chance you have a marriage before a kid. Wild, right? And when you, when you look at these disparities, why an almost worldw