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10/10 comment.
More like knee-jerk 1/10 reaction comment. See the sibling comment for why
The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
61–66 of 66 posts
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
>the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency. Why would iPhone _particularly_ do that? I can see greater social media use, greater access to porn, would do those things. But that's common to smartphones in general.
The iPhone was the only smartphone in 2007, and the one that they could track based on AT&T coverage.
It wasn't the only smartphone. And it's not like the internet appeared simultaneous with the iPhone. It was just a different way to get access to the same websites, back when it launched, most of which didn't support the iPhone's screen size anyway. And the only difference was that it made it easier to reach those websites ... outside. On the move. Where you are more likely to meet people.
Their causal explanation here does not ring true in all sorts of ways. Nobody was deciding not to get married and have kids because they were too busy watching porn on an iPhone in 2007, a time when video on smartphones barely worked. Social media predated the iPhone by years. And this practice of controlling for some ad-hoc list of things and then announcing causality is a major cause of spurious false positive claims in academic science. They really should know better than to make strong claims of causality in a case like this. Sociology just isn't capable of explaining things like this no matter how many stats you throw at it.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4816570/
There's much better work out there on this topic that is less heavy on the cute regressions and more heavy on the historical analysis+common sense. It's often a lot more convincing.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#63I'll bite. Maybe it's not the iPhone itself, but social media. I have seen studies about damages that social media can cause in behaviours. This might be one of them. Smartphones are the catalyst to social media consumption as we know. Like people contantly on their phones everywhere instead of interacting with other people, for example.
Social media wasn't the thing it is today during the AT&T exclusive period.
It really did start in the time frame. Facebook opened in 2006. Twitter already existed and grew rapidly in that period. There were messengers. And because everything was slow, I suppose it could even take an hour to doom scroll Slashdot.
Mobile gaming might be another reason.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#64So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
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Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#65So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
I suggest you read the abstract, at least. The fact that only AT&T had the iPhone back then resulted in a natural experiment: It was only available in certain regions. You can thus compare regions where it was available and where it wasn't, while controlling for "richer people" or "people preferring iPhones". As a rule of thumb, if you look at something for 3 minutes and have some obvious questions, the scientists th…
Right but the “certain regions” were affluent metro areas, the control group was rural counties, and the timeframe was the Great Recession.
Even the study authors acknowledge the severe risk of the huge confounding variable.
Re: The iPhone explains 33–52% of fertility decline among women aged 15–44
#66So... Let me get this straight. Because people who had iPhones during the AT&T exclusive period has less kids... They think there is no other possibly explanation besides the iPhone, because they looked at similar groups on different networks and in different areas that didn't yet have coverage for iPhones? It definitely couldn't have been due to richer people having iPhones and having less kids, or people preferring…
Nobody at this level writes a paper like this, asserting a specific causal relationship, without considering exactly the questions you raised. The authors address your concerns. It's possible they did so poorly. But that is the case you would want to make. I'm tired of reading these low-effort takes on HN.
HN sees an awful lot of low-effort "research", which merit only low-effort takes.
This comes from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a well-respected organization. Even if you read only the title, the presence of "nber" in the URL means that it's worth more than just a hot take.
If the link were to substack, or phys.org, or various other content mills, then the HN kneejerk reaction would be warranted. Or rather, what's warranted would be silence, but at least the kneejerk reaction wouldn't necessarily be disproportionate to the quality of the work.