One big reason for fewer babies: phones?

All across the world, people are having fewer children. The birth rate is declining quickly in countries ranging from the United States to Finland to Mexico and Turkey.

Fertility data used to be a fairly esoteric concern. Not anymore. Vice President JD Vance talks about it regularly, Elon Musk calls it civilization’s greatest threat. There’s even a convention for “pronatalists,” Natalcon, taking place later this month in Texas. While worry about the falling birth rate has become a right-wing shibboleth, some Democrats are also leaning into “pro-family” rhetoric.

Why birth rates are declining is hotly debated. Some point to the increase in women’s education and income, others to the cost of childcare and housing. King’s College London social scientist Alice Evans has another theory.

“What has happened everywhere, all at once, is that we see a rise of singles,” Evans told Today, Explained co-host Noel King, “and it precisely correlates with the decline in fertility.”

King talked to Evans for a recent episode of Today, Explained. Click the link below to hear the whole thing The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity.

Give me your name. Tell me what you do and your area of expertise.

My name is Alice Evans and I’m a senior lecturer of international development at King’s College London, and my research focuses on gender…[and the birth rate]. My research has taken me from Mexican villages to the Atlas Mountains to Uzbek towns, through Korean universities. And by talking, learning from young men, older men, and women across the world, I’ve started to think: Why is fertility collapsing? What’s going on? And my interviews have really helped me understand this massive global problem. 

So birth rates are going down all across the world. What are the leading theories as to why this is happening?

There’s the right wing, the left wing, and then there’s the Alice Evans take.

Okay!

I think the conservative right in the US will blame childless cat ladies, right? So they’ll say that, yes, women are over-educated, they’re living with their cats and they’re very, very selfish.

Correct. 

But here’s the thing: That theory has two major omissions, because the collapse in fertility is happening at vastly different political economies. I mean, in Tunisia and Turkey, female labor force participation is very low, around 30 percent, and yet their fertility is only 1.5 (children per woman) — so even in places where women aren’t even getting jobs, they’re not having kids. India is an extremely patriarchal casteist society, but in Tamil Nadu, in the south, it’s got exactly the same fertility rate as England and Wales. That’s 1.4. 

So it’s not just about these over-educated women pursuing their careers. Also, there’s also a class-based variation. The US right tends to blame these overeducated women — in Sweden and in Finland, the rate of childlessness is actually among the most disadvantaged people. They’re least likely to have children.

I wonder if JD Vance knows any of this.

He should call me up!

All right, so that’s on the right, and then we heard earlier the theory on the left. There’s one theory that you often hear is that it’s just become too expensive. Women would like to have more children, but they can’t afford to. There’s not enough support. People aren’t making enough money, etc.

Absolutely. So many people across the world experience economic difficulties, and so these could be like very high house prices in New York, making it much more expensive to have an apartment with an extra room. Or the very expensive cost of childcare. You know, when I was in San Francisco, people would say, [childcare] might be $30,000! Super, super expensive, and that’s prohibitively difficult for many families. 

Now those difficulties are real, and governments should take those economic concerns seriously. And I’m all here supporting more affordable housing, greater access to safer, accessible childcare. However, I don’t think that explanation is a full story, because it won’t explain why it’s happening everywhere, all at once, even at very, very different levels of income. 

So that brings us to the Alice Evans theory.

Yes, exactly. So what has happened everywhere, all at once, is that we see a rise of singles… Now, previously, from the 1960s onward American couples had fewer children, but now what’s happening is they’re not even forming those couples. So in America, for example, over half of 18- to 34-year-olds are neither in a steady relationship nor living with a partner. Furthermore, most single Americans don’t feel much pressure to find a partner. Half say they’re not even looking. 

Are we sure that sexy singles are to blame? Because for many years, people have had kids without being married or without living with someone, without being in relationships. 

Oh, that’s a great point, but that’s actually going down too now. In America, it’s always been the least educated who are less likely to marry and that’s where there’s been the steepest decline in fertility.

All right, so I’m assuming you looked into why more people are staying single and also saying, “I want to be single.” What’s going on?

So here’s the thing, I think, historically, people would have married for one of three reasons. Very crudely: love, money, or respect.

Hmm.

In conservative societies where singledom is totally stigmatized, then you have to marry for respectability. In India where it’s so important, lots of aunties and uncles might be pestering people, you know, when are you getting married? When are you getting married? For my grandparents, it was just the done thing to get married. 

But now, as society liberalizes, you know, Miley Cyrus championing flowers, “I can buy myself flowers,” there’s more permissibility. So that’s one thing. 

There’s also economic convergence. As women earn their own incomes, they can increasingly be more independent. So compatibility increasingly depends on love, whether people really enjoy each other’s company. But of course, there are lots of frictions. People might be manipulative, deceitful, unfaithful, and if there are lots of frictions, they may call it quits. So that might be one aspect of it, economic convergence between men and women’s earnings, and cultural liberalization, making singledom more permissible. 

On top of that, I think the big change that we see across the world, all at very different levels of income, is the massive improvement in hyper-engaging online entertainment: TikTok, video games, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Bridgerton, Netflix. You can browse Blackpink’s livestream, or go on PornHub — anything you like! All these technological advances enable instant access to the world’s most charismatic, charming content. Or maybe you prefer to do sports bets and gambling. And so why venture out when everything is at your fingertips, from Netflix to Zoom meetings? And so we see tracing the data over time that there is growing isolation, young people are spending much more time alone. In recent surveys, 65 percent of young American men say “no one knows me well.”

Awww.

And 28 percent of Gen Z didn’t socialize with anyone they didn’t live with in the past week. So we just see this global trend, and it is absolutely global. So for example, last year, I was in Mexico and lots of different Mexican little towns, and mothers would say the biggest problem here is that our teenage sons are spending all their time in their bedroom. And I’ll hear the same stories in little Indian villages, in Bangladeshi villages, all these people being hooked on hyper-engaging media.

Are there any countries that buck the trend?

Well, yes, actually. I was in Uzbekistan for a month last year, and there, there’s been an increase in fertility.  When I’m in Uzbekistan, people will typically ask me four questions, and the answer should always be yes. Do you like Uzbekistan? Do you like Uzbek food? Are you married? Do you have children?

Hah!  
And that tells you a lot about people’s priorities: a strong and a national pride, and also this strong onus that women should be married and have children. So that’s one option. 

You [can also] just pump up the status of marriage and fertility. In Georgia, their Orthodox Patriarch similarly bumped up the status of children and fertility [by promising to personally baptize any baby born to parents who already have at least two children]. In Hungary, they tried to give people cheaper mortgages if they promised they’d be married and have children. 

But what I’m saying about the Alice Evans theory of the collapsing fertility is that these pronatal incentives of saying $2,000, $5,000 to have an extra child, they’re simply too small if the prior constraint is that most people are increasingly single. Most governments are putting the cart before the horse, by focusing on couples, rather than realizing this prior constraint. If I’m right, that the problem is technology, this hyper-engaging media, distracting us, and driving this digital solitude, which ultimately prevents people from forming couples, then we need to think:  Well, we have various options. Could we regulate technology in some way? Could we introduce further restrictions? Or what can we do in schools to ensure that we’re fostering social skills? 

Because just as we see declining maths and English reading skills across the OECD, simultaneously, my interviews suggest that if people aren’t spending time socializing, then they’re not necessarily developing the capacity to bond and charm and woo. You know, if you’re not mixing and mingling, then you get a little bit anxious if you go out into a crowd of unknown strangers.

This is such a good point. And so the question becomes: What do we do that doesn’t simultaneously make us feel like we are losing personal civil liberties? The government could take my phone and send me to speed dating, but that would feel like a real invasion. And, you know, personal freedoms, people feel pretty strongly about those, so in terms of how we should change the conversation around what went wrong here, what is going wrong here, and what we should do about it — what’s your best idea?

So my message for the world, based on my globally comparative research, is: let’s focus on the core problem, and that’s the rise of singles. Now, how can we address that? First and foremost, we need to understand and tackle the problem. Let’s have a range of pilot initiatives to build community groups, to build local clubs and societies, to support communities so that people can mix and mingle and fall in love. I’m a great advocate for romantic love, for sharing our life stories, for empathizing and understanding with each other, that’s quintessentially what makes us human. So if we put that problem front and center and start working on that tricky conundrum, then maybe we can, you know, address loneliness and boost up fertility.