As governments around the world struggle with ways to reverse plunging birth rates, new U.S. studies suggest they have ignored a key culprit – the smartphone.
“Is the iPhone Birth Control?” asked a paper published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research, delving into why U.S. fertility rates have fallen by 22 percent since 2007.
For a while, experts linked the decline to the recession that struck in 2008 when the global financial system nearly imploded, driving millions of people into hardship. But when the economy picked up, a rebound in births never came.
Myriad other reasons have been posited, such as increased use of contraception, more female education, and growing housing or childcare costs. However, no clear cause has been established.
We tried prohibition for alcohol. Didn’t work.
We’ve had more luck using social pressure and laws short of outright prohibition for tobacco. This might work for phones, too. But, we can’t even get most elementary schools to ban phones in the classroom.
Ultimately, addiction hurts the addicted, and not everyone becomes addicted, so blaming the supply is pointless.
Education and natural social pressure almost killed tobacco entirely
(until big tobacco invested millions upon millions to push the “vaping” trend). <- Edit: possibly misinformation. thank you to both commenters for their replies. I will research to revise my understanding.Prohibition… of alcohol caused riots and created an underground market that enriched the Kennedys. of drugs led to mass imprisonment and made the drug crises a part of daily life. (Granted, that was largely the intent of the War on Drugs, but I digress).
No, there was not a natural progression. In the US there were major campaigns ran that started around 1999. The first efforts started in Mississippi, and I knew someone in college that worked on the campaign. It was seen as a money grab internally, they didn’t care at all about anyone’s health.
But then look at other countries. Smoking is just as popular as ever in China and many SE Asian countries today. Because they did not get the same propaganda machine.
Also, big tobacco hates vaping. Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds have pushed back hard against it because it has hurt their duopoly powers
On the vape thing, I always find it funny when people conflate big tobacco and vaping industry. They’re completely separate aside from Big T initially desperately trying to get it banned and now trying to get it on it.