When technology takes the blame for economics

A working paper has attracted attention — the NPR headline gives us its flavour — by asking whether the smartphone explains the persistent fall in birth rates since the iPhone arrived in 2007. The question is framed as a behavioural puzzle: are devices colonising the attention and desire that once flowed toward family formation? It is a crisp hypothesis, and I do not dismiss it out of hand. But I would urge the reader to hold it lightly, because correlation between two long-running trends is one of the oldest traps in the analyst's cabinet.

I should be honest about my limits here. The working paper itself is not before me — only the headline — and I will mark what follows as inference rather than recollection. Still, the macroeconomic shape of the problem is legible even from that distance.

Fertility, viewed through an economic lens, is not simply a preference or a pastime displaced by scrolling. It is, among other things, a long-horizon investment decision. Prospective parents are weighing decades of income stability, the cost of housing, the availability of childcare, the expected returns to their own labour market participation, and — most fundamentally — their confidence that the future will be tolerably secure. These are exactly the variables that animate what I have called animal spirits: not irrational whim, but the practical judgement that the future is legible enough to commit to. When that confidence falters, people do not merely spend less; they also, it seems reasonable to infer, form families more cautiously.

The years since 2007 are not only the years of the smartphone. They are also the years of the global financial crisis, of wage stagnation in the median household, of housing costs that have compounded faster than incomes in most rich-world cities, and of a pervasive — and in my view underappreciated — erosion of felt economic security among working-age adults. To isolate the device from this broader landscape of demand-side pressure requires a great deal of careful identification work. Without seeing the paper's methodology, I cannot say whether that work has been done. I note it as the essential question.

I am not arguing that technology is irrelevant. It would be obtuse to deny that platforms, algorithms, and the attention economy reshape behaviour in ways that matter for social life. But even granting that, the policy implications differ enormously depending on whether the dominant cause is a gadget or an economic settlement that has left younger generations with higher uncertainty and lower relative income than their parents held at the same age. One diagnosis calls for parental-guidance nudges; the other calls for housing supply, wage floors, affordable childcare, and public investment that restores confidence in the horizon.

The economist's instinct — and I will own it as mine — is to follow the demand. If people want children but feel they cannot afford them, or cannot afford to stop working long enough to raise them, or cannot find housing large enough to shelter them, then the birth rate is telling us something about aggregate economic conditions, not about the seductions of a four-inch screen. The smartphone may be the most visible feature of the landscape; it is rarely the terrain itself.

The constructive policy implication, then, is not to regulate TikTok in the hope that freed attention will rush toward nurseries. It is to ask what public investments — in housing, in childcare, in wage-supporting full employment — would restore the confidence that makes long-horizon commitments feel rational again. That is a harder conversation, and a more expensive one, than blaming a device. It is also, I suspect, the more honest one.