The long Financial Times article «Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once»has caused quite a stir on the networks, with millions of post views referencing it on X alone. The central thesis of the article is that smartphones and social networks could be one of the factors or the key driver of the global decline of the fertility.
The article argues that the global fall in the birth rate cannot be explained only by economic factors (housing, wages, cost of living or education), because the decline is occurring simultaneously in rich, emerging and poor countries, but has been caused by the profound change in social habits brought about by smartphones.
This is an interesting hypothesis, but in my opinion it is essentially wrong. The fall in the total fertility rate (tasa de fecundidad, in Spanish) started much earlier, as can be seen in the attached graphs.
Higher fertility rates are correlated with high infant mortality. While the total fertility rate takes into account all births, the “effective” fertility rate considers how many children per woman are expected to survive to childbearing age. This effective fertility rate has been estimated primarily by economists Anup Malani and Ari Jacob of the University of Chicago. According to this new effective fertility rate, the global birth rate decline has not been as dramatic as what the total fertility rate curve shows since the 1960s. But in 2023 it was around 2.1 children per woman globally, so it is likely that the world's effective fertility rate will soon be below the replacement rate.
There has to be some factor long before smartphones and more powerful that has caused this drop in fertility rates in many countries over the last sixty years or so. Usually that factor is argued to have been the sexual revolution of the 1960s/70s and, specifically, women's liberation and the mass adoption of the contraceptive pill. But the use of the pill cannot be a cause, but rather a consequence.
The main reason
My thesis is that the main reason why a large percentage of the population has stopped “wanting” to have children and has started to use contraceptives on a widespread basis is secularization and the loss of faith in a creator and protector God and in the transcendent meaning of life. This is in line with major surveys and sociological studies worldwide, as we will see below.
Regardless of the fact that responsible parenthood should guide marriages, a society that increasingly treats children as an economic burden or a burden on the environment has lost confidence in its own future. This is the most worrying feature of our era, also from an economic point of view.
Historically, faith in God and in transcendence gave procreation a meaning that surpassed the individual cost - the child as gift, as mission, as participation in creation, as continuity of something that transcends oneself. Without this framework of deep meaning, the rational cost-benefit calculation will always lose out to comfort, freedom or personal project.
The pill, smartphones, the cost of housing or changing social habits may aggravate the problem at the margins, but they cannot be its root cause. They are irrelevant if the root problem is that fewer and fewer people have a horizon of meaning and purpose that justifies the sacrifice of having children.
It is important to emphasize that the Financial Times article does not categorically state that smartphones are the sole cause or that it is definitively proven, but rather puts it forward as a hypothesis that is increasingly studied and supported by international correlations and changes in the way young people relate to each other.
- Less face-to-face interaction.
- Less pair formation.
- More social isolation.
- More unrealistic expectations about relationships.
- Growing ideological divide between men and women.
Decrease in religious practice
He cites among others the Spanish economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading researcher in the field of the consequences of demographic change, who has long warned that “falling fertility is the great issue of our time,” not only sociologically, but economically.
He also cites different studies such as the one by Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo, according to which regions that received fast mobile internet earlier (≥G4) experienced the drop in births earlier and more intensely.
The article places the onset of the correlation between smartphones and the fertility rate tipping point at approximately 2007-2010, with the mass adoption of smartphones (as measured by mobile app-related searches).
However, as I say, this diagnosis is not consistent with the long statistical series. After the Second World War, fertility (understood as the number of children per woman) was relatively stable at a global level, rising until the 1960s. From the 1960s/70s/80s in many countries it began to fall sharply.
There is ample sociological evidence that precisely since the 1970s/80s - especially in rich countries, Europe, North America, East Asia and part of Latin America - in parallel with that steep fall in the fertility rate, religious practice, religious affiliation, the idea that religion is central to the meaning of life, and faith in God and belief in the deep transcendence of life began to decline. All this long before the widespread use of the internet and of course long before smartphones.
This decline in the transcendent sense is not uniform at the global level (in Africa sub-Saharan Africa are still very religious), but the general trend over the last ~60/50 years in developed and urbanized societies is clearly towards a strong secularization of society (understood not as a separation between Church and State, but as the process by which religion loses influence in general in the different spheres of personal and social life).
Surveys and studies
The most important surveys and sociological studies that support this are:
For example, according to Gallup and Pew, in the US in 1999 70 % of Americans belonged to a church/synagogue/mosque. Today it is less than 50 %. Those claiming “no religious affiliation” went from 5 % in the 1970s/80s to over 30 % today. The proportion who say that “religion is very important in my life,” or who “believe with certainty in God and transcendence” has also fallen.
Pew documents that in many countries, including once strongly Catholic countries such as Spain, Italy, Poland or many Latin American countries, younger generations are radically less religious than older ones.
Globally, there is still a majority of believers, but not among the younger generations. young people. The world has not become “atheistic” overnight, but much more secular and agnostic in many places and segments of society. Especially young people in rich countries or large cities are systematically less believing.
East Asia (Japan, South Korea, urban China) has been particularly secular for years. Sub-Saharan Africa and some South Asian countries remain religious.
Diffuse spirituality
The great sociological transition is that we have gone from “organized religion” to “diffuse spirituality. Many studies detect something important: the sense of ”transcendence“ does not always disappear, but what has been diluted is traditional and institutional religion. That is to say: less faith, fewer churches, less dogma, less regular practice, and in general less commitment.
But these studies show that many people still hold beliefs in “something beyond the material,” in astrology, energy or individual spirituality. Belief in transcendence still exists, but it is much more ambiguous and without a clear basis.
Pew 2025 indicates just that: many non-religious people still believe in “something spiritual beyond what we can see and touch,” but in a very weak way that does not lead them to have a well-founded hope. And it certainly doesn't lead them to have more children.
Smartphones arrived in a society that had already lost the transcendent sense and accelerated the symptoms (isolation, pornography, constant comparison). But to diagnose the cause in technology is to confuse the accelerator with the engine.
The great demographic challenge of our era, “the great question of our time,” cannot be solved with more subsidies or fewer screens. It requires recovering a compelling horizon of meaning that makes having children worthwhile. History shows that societies that forget the reason for this sacrifice end up disappearing, culturally and literally.
The widespread use of contraceptives, smartphones, social networks, the fall of face-to-face relationships, the belief in apocalyptic anthropogenic climate change and that the world is overpopulated are only consequences of the process of secularization and loss of hope and faith in a creator and protector God (for Christians, the loss of faith in a father God who loves us madly).
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