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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 ma
Published on 10 months, 3 weeks ago