John Byrne Murdoch

I did this analysis where we say, right, if young adults still owned homes at the same rate as they did in the 1990s, what impact would that have on their birth rates?

And in all likelihood, people would be having more children.

However, people who own their home today are having fewer kids than those who owned their home 30 years ago.

And the same for renters.

So housing is part of this.

It's definitely not all of this.

Yeah, so this is another one where I should just say, you know, everything we're talking about here, there are theories, there are arguments.

Some evidence seems stronger than others, but none of this is completely watertight.

But the reason that a bunch of the researchers I spoke to are starting to point the finger more at technology and devices is

is that this is a simple question of time use.

If the age groups that would typically be the ones settling down and having kids are spending significant amounts of time on their phones, that is time, a lot of which might previously have been spent hanging out face to face with their peers.

And we have hard evidence on this, that the amount of time young people spend socializing in person has fallen very steeply from the late 2000s in high-income countries through to the present day.

The deep, strong relationships that lead to things like marriage, perhaps children, are the result of a lot of time hanging out with people to get there.

You hang out with a lot of people to find the right person, and then you hang out with that person long enough to settle down.

And if we are simply hanging out a lot less, by some measures half as much as we used to, then that process is going to take a lot longer if it happens at all.

Yeah, it's worth mentioning that these theories are not actually new.

People have been talking about this and finding evidence of this for a long time.

So in the 2000s, there was some really interesting research done looking at the impact of televisions.

And several different researchers using different methods found that the number of televisions per person in a country was a stronger predictor of its birth rate than simple measures like economic development or female education.

You then had additional studies that showed that even within couples, those that had televisions or more televisions