Also should note that this is a working paper and not peer reviewed. Working papers are circulated to invite comments and discussion. Until some experts confirm their methodology I wouldn't take any of this for granted.
Seriously though, I'm gay so if I want I can literally go to a sex club and have sex, but scrolling is 100 times better than sex with a random person.
IMO the problem isn't that we choose scrolling over sex, but that having a smartphone makes independence easier, which removes opportunities and motivation to meet people. People talk to each other mainly when they need to solve practical problems. Remove practical problems and you remove social interaction.
I remember clearly that when my ex fixed my bike I had a strong impulse of being attracted to him. But realistically, when my bike is broken, I'd rather take it to a bike shop than ask someone for help and then do favors in exchange.
This study uses iPhone usage and birthrates at the county level.
The rural/urban distinction for counties has a strong correlation with wideband cellular data coverage, and that effect was even stronger in the early days of the iPhone when cellular data coverage was both weaker and more expensive.
Apple has better data. They know who has an iPhone, and they almost certainly know if they have kids. That info is probably available via ad brokers.
Here's an anecdote that today's kids are too young to have experienced, but their parents also weren't around for it. I was in middle school when the iPhone became popular. It was pretty sudden, so the social effect was obvious. Their parents probably bought them iPhones because they were addicted too, but it's different when you're in school. Since then have been hoping for a day when this gets undone.
In my experience it didn’t seem that impactful at the time. The social effect of early Facebook was pretty minor, not that much different to the MSN chats that came before it. I think it’s social media content discovery algorithms specifically that caused the sea change. If we exclude modern social media life really wouldn’t be that different to how it was before smart phones. Obviously I understand smart phones are what enabled this…
Kids stopped socializing. School bus was suddenly very orderly, cause everyone was playing with their iPhones. And it wasn't only an initial shock that went away, but kept settled in as iPhones got better over time.
Sometimes I hear today that kids without phones get ostracized because social circles have moved online. That wasn't a thing yet, I guess because it was an awkward period for messaging. AIM group chats were kinda popular before, but iPhones didn't support that well, and group texts either didn't exist (pre-MMS) or were really bad. Facebook was popular but wasn't really used for messaging.
Wondering if it's just the iphone and the fact that we have it always in our pockets or the amount of "radiations" we are exposed it constantly at home at the office tbh
I don't know if it's "birth control" but it will definitely let you know that "Plan B" is not considered "pregnancy-termination" it is still legal in all States.
i'm confused what this is in reference to, but yes, levonorgestrel emergency contraceptives can't be called pregnancy termination by even the most extreme definition because it works by delaying ovulation, does not impact implantation and does nothing during/post ovulation/ and 'conception'
Study claims iPhone contributed to a significant decrease in the birth rate after its release in 2007, when AT&T was the only carrier for the phone, allowing researchers to “isolate an iPhone-specific channel” and compare birth rates in areas with a high AT&T customer base to competitors' areas:
“The diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52 percent of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44.”
Authors go on to muse that “as modern smartphones diffused, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity fell sharply alongside rising consumption of pornography, a possible substitute for partnered sex.”
Nothing to do, of course, with AT&T’s customer base at the time being urban, well-educated, and white, or that U.S. birth rate in the youngest groups had already been falling before 2007 with the trend continuing during study period.
The authors do address this issue, by reweighting their treatment and control counties on observable covariates. But I agree with you that this isn’t the causally watertight research design that economists usually strive for.
It might be worthwhile using local lightning strikes as an instrument for 3G coverage. Others have done this, but not for fertility afaik. But the lightning strike data costs about $1000.
I wouldn't have expected the era that brought Walkman phones, Cybershot phones, the T610/T650, the P910 and many others (Xperia!) to be called "crap", compared to....dunno, the Sony CMD-Z5...?
This is a pretty mind blowing result. Moreover, this was before the really addictive apps were available, like TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts. So it probably has gotten even worse since then.
In this modern world where highly effective birth control is cheap and straightforward, we really need to stop equating fertility rates with levels of sexual activity. You can have plenty of sex and not have a child; you can have very little sex and have a substantial number of children.
It's fascinating to me how personal choice never seems to enter into these discussions, even in relatively highly educated, first-world democracies. I actively chose to not have kids -- it was not an accidental by-product of iphones or any other proposed environmental factor.
Unless you have surgically implemented birth control (such as vasectomy), the pregnancy chance logically increases with higher rate of sexual activity with multiple partners.
Mistakes happen. Birth control is not 100% effective.. condoms break, women forget to take the pill, etc.
Of course it goes without saying you have a much higher chance of pregnancy if you're not using any form of birth control.
The most absolutely infuriating thing about fertility rate discussions is the conclusion everyone draws of "obviously people aren't having enough sex".
I was sexually active for over 15 years before having exactly 1 child when I decided to.
The limiting factor in the number of children I have has at no point been the frequency of intercourse itself.
There's a subgenre of dystopian sci-fi where the premise is that reality in general is destined to be eclipsed by matrix-like hyper-realities, and that people will vastly prefer those and cede reality to whoever's left.
I guess the way this could work itself out is that if you prefer a hyper-reality, your genes do not pass on, and someone else's do, and within some number of generations we bounce back in response to evolutionary pressure.
I learned a fun fact in a recent interview of David Reich (by Dwarkesh):
> Every mutation that can occur does occur. There are eight billion people in the world. There are maybe 30 new mutations every generation, so that’s 240 billion new point mutations every generation. There are only three billion DNA bases in the genome, so every mutation that can occur does occur about 100 times every generation. We’re not mutation-limited anymore.
Interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that The Matrix would become more ubiquitous, but it seems there are plenty of mechanisms from avoiding that. People read novels 200 years ago, and i imagine that was a bit of blue pilling.
However, medical care isn't evenly distributed, neither is education, and there's tons of cultural differences as well. The mutations happen, but if the next Einstein or Ramanujan dies in a war-torn ghetto, did the mutation really happen?
yeah but that's no fun. Verve-102 and PCKS9 is a fascinating story in that area, of what we know and what we can do, but we need more money funding medical research in order to maker progress.
That might only be part of the issue. There has been some "experiments" where people are asked if they'd prefer to give up their phone for some period of time, or go without sex in that same period. Women were more likely to prefer their phones over sex and other studies show that women generally spend more time on their phones than men does.
at this point the number of young men wanting a family is higher than women. meanwhile there are more straight women having sex / in a relationship than men, how that is possible when the population ratio is almost 50/50 i leave as a exorcise for the reader...
I don’t want to be flippantly dismissive but surely there was a certain other event in 2008 that caused many families to reconsider the financial wisdom of starting a family.
Even if you control for age and wealth, the people who used iPhones in 2008, i.e. tech hipsters, are obviously different in tangible ways from the people who didn't use iPhones in 2008. It's not possible to prove causality from that.
Are the tech hipsters disproportionately in the areas already covered by AT&T? It seems plausible, if Apple and AT&T were targeting similar demographics that Apple would choose AT&T as its first partner. But it's on the edge of weird correlations where the burden of proof starts to fall on the person disputing that the study is unbiased, rather than on the researchers to rule out every possible correlation.
Alternatively, maybe you are arguing that even if iPhones caused a decline in birth rate among tech hipsters, that doesn't transfer to the population at large. This is both less believable and less valuable as a criticism of the study: even if the result only holds in one demographic group it's still an interesting finding.
Aren't iPhones the first sexy enough phone for more than tech hipsters? I still remember BlackBerry (aka CrackBerries), which was what business types used. And then iPhone came along, and pinch-to-zoom was such a sexier UX.
Sheesh, when the addictive scrolling was scrolling through your emails and BB Messenger messages...
Or, the kind of people who bought iPhones in 2008 were a different subset of the population than those who didn’t and as such they have different opinions and preferences when it comes to family and kids?
With that said, I can also see that infinite entertainment and infinite information makes you deprioritize having children.
But it’s far from proof, this study. It’s more like “I found some numbers that support my already existing opinion, so let’s run with that”.
Maybe some people realized that they could wait a few years and still have kids later, and others didn't think about having kids purely though the lens of evolutionary biology.
nitpick about what you said: you don't wanna postpone that plan too much. At 40 you won't have the energy to keep up with the needs of the kid. You will hate your life and you'll make a ton of mistakes. I had them young, and my career and financial situation weren't affected at all.
Before political correctness hit this area, doctors' observations led to classifying any first pregnancy past 25yo as geriatric. Healthcare progresses in some areas, some (like DS) are rigid to socially defined trends.
Okay? My parents had me at 35 in the 90s, and I'm sure you've met plenty of people who had similarly aged parents. It's not like there's one perfect age for everyone to have kids, and my point is that if some people realize at 25 that waiting five years puts them in a better position to raise kids, what's the problem with that?
Biologically there is an age range for all. Various complication risks raise pretty much continuously from about 20, for both the mother and the child. Say Down Syndrome is 5x more likely at 35 than at 20.
Last century geriatric pregnancy was one term used for over 35s. It is no longer used, and 25 seems like it is social media bullshit. Apparently the term was created ~1960 for international usage because medical complications after that age were far more risky in the 50s.
What makes an iPhone better than Durex is that you can take it out of your pocket and everyone will envy you. In that sense, I think it's an envy-inducing contraceptive tool.
It is "birth control" but in sort of opposite way. People are now much better informed, thanks to internet and devices like iphone. They do not have to relly on state education (that wants more babies) and popular shows like Friends.
State founded school is not going to tell you it costs $1200000 to raise baby, or you have 50% chance it will be taken away.
It will also push stats made in lab controlled conditions, and gloss over unreliability of such medications in real life (like if you would skip a pill for a few days).
Failure rate of birth control in normal life is around 10% per year (if you drink, forget to take pill at very exact time, use antibiotics). So there would be about chance 50% to get unwanted baby over years. Well informed person will not make such mistake.
Edit: about the cost
I said the "cost is", not that they are "spending it". There is lost opportunity, lost salary, lost investments, inflation...
It is not 18, more like 24 years.
Let's do some some math, take $600 rent over 18 years = $129,600. With 5% annual rent increase $202k. If you would reinvest that rental income with 5% yearly return $304k!!!
Stay at home mum for 5 years, at $60k = $300k. If you invest that into retirement account when baby would go to school, for 12 years at 5% yearly return it is $538k
retire? Retiring only on Social Security is pretty tough, and $1.2M would provide like $4K/month income which on top of Social Security may allow for modest lifestyle in some low COL area.
Wrt. the original post i'd agree with GP - better information/education is probably the most powerful birth control.
If you don't have children to inherit your fortune to, you can retire with full exhaustion of capital - that will yield way more than 4k$/month. Plus, if you don't have children there is not much holding you in the US - you can look at 2nd world countries. I.e. That money buys you a good retirement lifestyle in Mexiko, Brazil, Argentina etc. Or Vietnam, Thailand etc. if you are more into asia.
> If you don't have children to inherit your fortune to, you can retire with full exhaustion of capital - that will yield way more than 4k$/month.
As a lone elderly person you're likely to be scammed and lose a lot of that capital near the end, without close people that like and support you. Elders are incredibly vulnerable to financial scams, specially those enabled by technologic means they are not familiar with.
Actually raising a child costs more than $1.2M - just $20K/year invested in S&P500 over the last 20 years would have grown to more than $1.2M. Or those $20K/year could be spend on the child. And $20K/year is pretty low.
> Actually raising a child costs more than $1.2M - just $20K/year invested in S&P500 over the last 20 years would have grown to more than $1.2M.
The future markets of a shrinking world, with consumer and worker cohorts dwindling year after year, will be very different from the last 20. This is paradoxal reasoning. Your're counting on going childless, while the market remains the same, other people keep having children to grow the market. But if everybody else does the same it doesn't work. The mean investment probably will give negative returns, in a fast shrinking world.
alternatively, the things can go very opposite to what you're saying as robots/AI will make many jobs more productive requiring less people thus driving the economy even more profitable than the last 20 years. The society wouldn't need those very expensive children for the jobs where robots would do.
I’d check that math - that’s 67k/yr, not 20k/yr. 1.2mill/18 years.
I’m a parent and yeah it’s expensive but not multiple mortgages expensive unless you’re choosing certain expenses like very costly private schools. I also don’t compare parenthood with investing in the S&P 500 as they are radically different undertakings, but that’s a different discussion entirely.
>I’d check that math - that’s 67k/yr, not 20k/yr. 1.2mill/18 years.
It is meaningless calculating cost by simple division when the endeavor takes 2 decades. Money today are different from money 20 years ago. S&P500 is pretty reasonable and well accepted device to calculate opportunity cost over such long timeframes.
I didn’t set these numbers, the other dude did then you backed it up even going so far as to lecture me about how 20k isn’t enough to raise a kid. I completely agree that this is meaningless, but I’m also not going to let 1.2mill suddenly equal 20k/yr raising a kid!
>going so far as to lecture me about how 20k isn’t enough to raise a kid.
i expressed my opinion. You may have different one. Expressing an opinion different than yours isn't "lecturing".
>I’m also not going to let 1.2mill suddenly equal 20k/yr raising a kid!
using S&P500 as the opportunity cost evaluator the 20k/yr results in even more than $1.2M. I don't see what you're arguing about. Do you have a better opportunity cost evaluator than S&P500?
You need to resubmit this with a better headline:
People prefer scrolling to sex enough that using the iPhone explains up to half of the U.S. birth decline since 2011.
Also should note that this is a working paper and not peer reviewed. Working papers are circulated to invite comments and discussion. Until some experts confirm their methodology I wouldn't take any of this for granted.
Seriously though, I'm gay so if I want I can literally go to a sex club and have sex, but scrolling is 100 times better than sex with a random person.
IMO the problem isn't that we choose scrolling over sex, but that having a smartphone makes independence easier, which removes opportunities and motivation to meet people. People talk to each other mainly when they need to solve practical problems. Remove practical problems and you remove social interaction.
I remember clearly that when my ex fixed my bike I had a strong impulse of being attracted to him. But realistically, when my bike is broken, I'd rather take it to a bike shop than ask someone for help and then do favors in exchange.
This study uses iPhone usage and birthrates at the county level. The rural/urban distinction for counties has a strong correlation with wideband cellular data coverage, and that effect was even stronger in the early days of the iPhone when cellular data coverage was both weaker and more expensive.
Apple has better data. They know who has an iPhone, and they almost certainly know if they have kids. That info is probably available via ad brokers.
Surely the electromagnetic radiation from iPhone must be disorienting the storks.
Here's an anecdote that today's kids are too young to have experienced, but their parents also weren't around for it. I was in middle school when the iPhone became popular. It was pretty sudden, so the social effect was obvious. Their parents probably bought them iPhones because they were addicted too, but it's different when you're in school. Since then have been hoping for a day when this gets undone.
In my experience it didn’t seem that impactful at the time. The social effect of early Facebook was pretty minor, not that much different to the MSN chats that came before it. I think it’s social media content discovery algorithms specifically that caused the sea change. If we exclude modern social media life really wouldn’t be that different to how it was before smart phones. Obviously I understand smart phones are what enabled this…
> It was pretty sudden, so the social effect was obvious.
What was this social effect like, according to your memory?
Kids stopped socializing. School bus was suddenly very orderly, cause everyone was playing with their iPhones. And it wasn't only an initial shock that went away, but kept settled in as iPhones got better over time.
Sometimes I hear today that kids without phones get ostracized because social circles have moved online. That wasn't a thing yet, I guess because it was an awkward period for messaging. AIM group chats were kinda popular before, but iPhones didn't support that well, and group texts either didn't exist (pre-MMS) or were really bad. Facebook was popular but wasn't really used for messaging.
I think the social effect on adults might have been similar, although more gradual, since I didn't really notice it at the time.
Wondering if it's just the iphone and the fact that we have it always in our pockets or the amount of "radiations" we are exposed it constantly at home at the office tbh
I don't know if it's "birth control" but it will definitely let you know that "Plan B" is not considered "pregnancy-termination" it is still legal in all States.
i'm confused what this is in reference to, but yes, levonorgestrel emergency contraceptives can't be called pregnancy termination by even the most extreme definition because it works by delaying ovulation, does not impact implantation and does nothing during/post ovulation/ and 'conception'
TL;DR:
Study claims iPhone contributed to a significant decrease in the birth rate after its release in 2007, when AT&T was the only carrier for the phone, allowing researchers to “isolate an iPhone-specific channel” and compare birth rates in areas with a high AT&T customer base to competitors' areas:
“The diffusion of the iPhone explains 33-52 percent of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15-44.”
Authors go on to muse that “as modern smartphones diffused, time spent with friends in person and sexual activity fell sharply alongside rising consumption of pornography, a possible substitute for partnered sex.”
Nothing to do, of course, with AT&T’s customer base at the time being urban, well-educated, and white, or that U.S. birth rate in the youngest groups had already been falling before 2007 with the trend continuing during study period.
The authors do address this issue, by reweighting their treatment and control counties on observable covariates. But I agree with you that this isn’t the causally watertight research design that economists usually strive for.
It might be worthwhile using local lightning strikes as an instrument for 3G coverage. Others have done this, but not for fertility afaik. But the lightning strike data costs about $1000.
The funny thing is that there was a study or an article suggesting Apple users got more sex than non Apple users.
Android an even more effective birth control then?
Hard to say. In 2007-2011, during the time of that study, I was using Nokia Symbian phones.
Hahaha yes. Those times there still were original Sony to be had and not that Sony-Ericsson crap.
I wouldn't have expected the era that brought Walkman phones, Cybershot phones, the T610/T650, the P910 and many others (Xperia!) to be called "crap", compared to....dunno, the Sony CMD-Z5...?
(me walking down memory-lane...)
You probably did not use LG or non-Symbian Nokia crap. S-E were really good.
Yeah, I used the E51 and E63
LG not, but non-Symbian Nokia was rock solid. Like 8110 which is still iconic, or 5110 which you could kill a dozer with.
As was Sony cmd Z1.
And I think I still have a first-ever color screen phone by mitsubishi somehere.
This is a pretty mind blowing result. Moreover, this was before the really addictive apps were available, like TikTok, Reels and YouTube Shorts. So it probably has gotten even worse since then.
I think the cause is mobile phones giving more people exposure to social networks
https://blog.est.im/2026/stdin-09
ppl are now having better options than raising a baby.
> ppl are now having better options than raising a baby.
It gets me beffudled people actually think addiction to the virtual crack of social media is a better option.
this comes to show that sex is just entertainment and it is being crowded out from all sides
In this modern world where highly effective birth control is cheap and straightforward, we really need to stop equating fertility rates with levels of sexual activity. You can have plenty of sex and not have a child; you can have very little sex and have a substantial number of children.
It's fascinating to me how personal choice never seems to enter into these discussions, even in relatively highly educated, first-world democracies. I actively chose to not have kids -- it was not an accidental by-product of iphones or any other proposed environmental factor.
Unless you have surgically implemented birth control (such as vasectomy), the pregnancy chance logically increases with higher rate of sexual activity with multiple partners.
Mistakes happen. Birth control is not 100% effective.. condoms break, women forget to take the pill, etc.
Of course it goes without saying you have a much higher chance of pregnancy if you're not using any form of birth control.
Thank you I was about to post this.
The most absolutely infuriating thing about fertility rate discussions is the conclusion everyone draws of "obviously people aren't having enough sex".
I was sexually active for over 15 years before having exactly 1 child when I decided to.
The limiting factor in the number of children I have has at no point been the frequency of intercourse itself.
There's a subgenre of dystopian sci-fi where the premise is that reality in general is destined to be eclipsed by matrix-like hyper-realities, and that people will vastly prefer those and cede reality to whoever's left.
I guess the way this could work itself out is that if you prefer a hyper-reality, your genes do not pass on, and someone else's do, and within some number of generations we bounce back in response to evolutionary pressure.
I learned a fun fact in a recent interview of David Reich (by Dwarkesh):
> Every mutation that can occur does occur. There are eight billion people in the world. There are maybe 30 new mutations every generation, so that’s 240 billion new point mutations every generation. There are only three billion DNA bases in the genome, so every mutation that can occur does occur about 100 times every generation. We’re not mutation-limited anymore.
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/david-reich-2
Interesting. It hadn't occurred to me that The Matrix would become more ubiquitous, but it seems there are plenty of mechanisms from avoiding that. People read novels 200 years ago, and i imagine that was a bit of blue pilling.
However, medical care isn't evenly distributed, neither is education, and there's tons of cultural differences as well. The mutations happen, but if the next Einstein or Ramanujan dies in a war-torn ghetto, did the mutation really happen?
A point mutation is very unlikely to produce “the next Einstein”, it’ll just produce someone with one slightly different protein in their gut.
yeah but that's no fun. Verve-102 and PCKS9 is a fascinating story in that area, of what we know and what we can do, but we need more money funding medical research in order to maker progress.
Everything is entertainment in the modern world.
On the other hand, as William James wrote, one of definite characteristics of a religious experience is seriousness. "All is not vanity."
[dead]
Porn became easier to access. Men became less horny.
The men part doesn't really matter because birth rates are determined more by women's behaviors than anything else. And the paper does focus on women.
You're right, he should have said people became less horny
That might only be part of the issue. There has been some "experiments" where people are asked if they'd prefer to give up their phone for some period of time, or go without sex in that same period. Women were more likely to prefer their phones over sex and other studies show that women generally spend more time on their phones than men does.
never
at this point the number of young men wanting a family is higher than women. meanwhile there are more straight women having sex / in a relationship than men, how that is possible when the population ratio is almost 50/50 i leave as a exorcise for the reader...
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48444543
I don’t want to be flippantly dismissive but surely there was a certain other event in 2008 that caused many families to reconsider the financial wisdom of starting a family.
They compared AT&T users with an iPhone (the only place you could get an iPhone) to users with other carriers.
Since people using other carriers also experienced 2008, it's not that.
Even if you control for age and wealth, the people who used iPhones in 2008, i.e. tech hipsters, are obviously different in tangible ways from the people who didn't use iPhones in 2008. It's not possible to prove causality from that.
Are the tech hipsters disproportionately in the areas already covered by AT&T? It seems plausible, if Apple and AT&T were targeting similar demographics that Apple would choose AT&T as its first partner. But it's on the edge of weird correlations where the burden of proof starts to fall on the person disputing that the study is unbiased, rather than on the researchers to rule out every possible correlation.
Alternatively, maybe you are arguing that even if iPhones caused a decline in birth rate among tech hipsters, that doesn't transfer to the population at large. This is both less believable and less valuable as a criticism of the study: even if the result only holds in one demographic group it's still an interesting finding.
Aren't iPhones the first sexy enough phone for more than tech hipsters? I still remember BlackBerry (aka CrackBerries), which was what business types used. And then iPhone came along, and pinch-to-zoom was such a sexier UX.
Sheesh, when the addictive scrolling was scrolling through your emails and BB Messenger messages...
Or, the kind of people who bought iPhones in 2008 were a different subset of the population than those who didn’t and as such they have different opinions and preferences when it comes to family and kids?
With that said, I can also see that infinite entertainment and infinite information makes you deprioritize having children.
But it’s far from proof, this study. It’s more like “I found some numbers that support my already existing opinion, so let’s run with that”.
Ah but maybe having an iPhone causes you to be more exposed to financial crashes.
Or maybe the type of person that buys iPhones also spends too much on other items causing them to be over leveraged when a financial crash does occur.
No financial chicanery is good enough a reason to end your line.
Maybe some people realized that they could wait a few years and still have kids later, and others didn't think about having kids purely though the lens of evolutionary biology.
nitpick about what you said: you don't wanna postpone that plan too much. At 40 you won't have the energy to keep up with the needs of the kid. You will hate your life and you'll make a ton of mistakes. I had them young, and my career and financial situation weren't affected at all.
Before political correctness hit this area, doctors' observations led to classifying any first pregnancy past 25yo as geriatric. Healthcare progresses in some areas, some (like DS) are rigid to socially defined trends.
Okay? My parents had me at 35 in the 90s, and I'm sure you've met plenty of people who had similarly aged parents. It's not like there's one perfect age for everyone to have kids, and my point is that if some people realize at 25 that waiting five years puts them in a better position to raise kids, what's the problem with that?
Biologically there is an age range for all. Various complication risks raise pretty much continuously from about 20, for both the mother and the child. Say Down Syndrome is 5x more likely at 35 than at 20.
Last century geriatric pregnancy was one term used for over 35s. It is no longer used, and 25 seems like it is social media bullshit. Apparently the term was created ~1960 for international usage because medical complications after that age were far more risky in the 50s.
Now ~20% of all pregnancies in the US are 35+.
Soviet doctors definitely used the term "старая первородящая" (old firstborn), google at your peril.
404
[flagged]
hypergamy
What makes an iPhone better than Durex is that you can take it out of your pocket and everyone will envy you. In that sense, I think it's an envy-inducing contraceptive tool.
correlation vs causation https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
Alternately (and appropriately related to smart phones and biology): https://xkcd.com/925/
Can you at least pretend to have read the article in question?
positive correlation between iphone users being more virgin than others
Is porn birth control ? Yes it is. But why is porn free and ubiquitous ?
Surely there's an enormous amount of money behind it, but where's the ROI ?
I'd say that smart phones are a bigger problem than porn.
If you are in the category that would sit and watch porn in the public, then you already wouldn't need birth control.
It is "birth control" but in sort of opposite way. People are now much better informed, thanks to internet and devices like iphone. They do not have to relly on state education (that wants more babies) and popular shows like Friends.
State founded school is not going to tell you it costs $1200000 to raise baby, or you have 50% chance it will be taken away.
It will also push stats made in lab controlled conditions, and gloss over unreliability of such medications in real life (like if you would skip a pill for a few days).
Failure rate of birth control in normal life is around 10% per year (if you drink, forget to take pill at very exact time, use antibiotics). So there would be about chance 50% to get unwanted baby over years. Well informed person will not make such mistake.
Edit: about the cost
I said the "cost is", not that they are "spending it". There is lost opportunity, lost salary, lost investments, inflation...
It is not 18, more like 24 years.
Let's do some some math, take $600 rent over 18 years = $129,600. With 5% annual rent increase $202k. If you would reinvest that rental income with 5% yearly return $304k!!!
Stay at home mum for 5 years, at $60k = $300k. If you invest that into retirement account when baby would go to school, for 12 years at 5% yearly return it is $538k
> State founded school is not going to tell you it costs $1200000 to raise baby
Completely wrong. Not even plausible. You think every family is spending $67K per year, per baby, until they're 18? What?
>it costs $1200000 to raise baby
What exactly are you planning to do with all that money anyway? Consume things?
Nothing? Because I do not have that money!
retire? Retiring only on Social Security is pretty tough, and $1.2M would provide like $4K/month income which on top of Social Security may allow for modest lifestyle in some low COL area.
Wrt. the original post i'd agree with GP - better information/education is probably the most powerful birth control.
If you don't have children to inherit your fortune to, you can retire with full exhaustion of capital - that will yield way more than 4k$/month. Plus, if you don't have children there is not much holding you in the US - you can look at 2nd world countries. I.e. That money buys you a good retirement lifestyle in Mexiko, Brazil, Argentina etc. Or Vietnam, Thailand etc. if you are more into asia.
> If you don't have children to inherit your fortune to, you can retire with full exhaustion of capital - that will yield way more than 4k$/month.
As a lone elderly person you're likely to be scammed and lose a lot of that capital near the end, without close people that like and support you. Elders are incredibly vulnerable to financial scams, specially those enabled by technologic means they are not familiar with.
So consume things
Is paying for healthcare and rent and basic food still "consume things"?
The right question is "to what age".
Get all McKinsey and calculate a TCO of a baby from conception to end-of-uni. $1.2M is low-end even for eastern EU, it's more like twice that.
0-to-23. $100K/year. This what a baby costs.
Yeah, but you didn't consider the resale value.
Or the potential for end of life care.
And apparently grandkids are neat, but it's hard to have those without having kids. Not sure how to value that one.
If I had $300k going through my bank account every year I really think I would have noticed by now.
You’re just making up numbers
Actually raising a child costs more than $1.2M - just $20K/year invested in S&P500 over the last 20 years would have grown to more than $1.2M. Or those $20K/year could be spend on the child. And $20K/year is pretty low.
> Actually raising a child costs more than $1.2M - just $20K/year invested in S&P500 over the last 20 years would have grown to more than $1.2M.
The future markets of a shrinking world, with consumer and worker cohorts dwindling year after year, will be very different from the last 20. This is paradoxal reasoning. Your're counting on going childless, while the market remains the same, other people keep having children to grow the market. But if everybody else does the same it doesn't work. The mean investment probably will give negative returns, in a fast shrinking world.
alternatively, the things can go very opposite to what you're saying as robots/AI will make many jobs more productive requiring less people thus driving the economy even more profitable than the last 20 years. The society wouldn't need those very expensive children for the jobs where robots would do.
I’d check that math - that’s 67k/yr, not 20k/yr. 1.2mill/18 years.
I’m a parent and yeah it’s expensive but not multiple mortgages expensive unless you’re choosing certain expenses like very costly private schools. I also don’t compare parenthood with investing in the S&P 500 as they are radically different undertakings, but that’s a different discussion entirely.
>I’d check that math - that’s 67k/yr, not 20k/yr. 1.2mill/18 years.
It is meaningless calculating cost by simple division when the endeavor takes 2 decades. Money today are different from money 20 years ago. S&P500 is pretty reasonable and well accepted device to calculate opportunity cost over such long timeframes.
I didn’t set these numbers, the other dude did then you backed it up even going so far as to lecture me about how 20k isn’t enough to raise a kid. I completely agree that this is meaningless, but I’m also not going to let 1.2mill suddenly equal 20k/yr raising a kid!
>going so far as to lecture me about how 20k isn’t enough to raise a kid.
i expressed my opinion. You may have different one. Expressing an opinion different than yours isn't "lecturing".
>I’m also not going to let 1.2mill suddenly equal 20k/yr raising a kid!
using S&P500 as the opportunity cost evaluator the 20k/yr results in even more than $1.2M. I don't see what you're arguing about. Do you have a better opportunity cost evaluator than S&P500?
I don’t even know what you’re trying to say anymore mate. Have a good weekend.
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Well, lets buy a house, car.. wife should stay at home for couple of years, education, health care...
>wife should stay at home for couple of years
That’s awfully presumptuous and gendered.
>buy a car
Assuming you don’t already have one and live somewhere where a car is needed. Plenty of parents with no cars or who had 1 and continue to live with 1.
>buy a house
Plenty of people do that with or without kids and plenty of parents rent.
>education
Plenty of people go to public school.
>healthcare
Valid but also people’s situations vary wildly here.