The Future of Digital Life Backlash

Hello and welcome back to Unheard. Are smartphones going to cause the end of humanity? Okay, that may sound like an overly hysterical headline, but that is pretty much the implication of new data that has come out in the past week and has been talked about all across social media. A particular report out of the University of Cincinnati makes the allegation that smartphone us age being widespread around about the 2007 to 2008 period has massively affected the already declining birth rates, such that it could be a major contributing factor to the fertility crisis. This might sound a little bit like a matter for demographers or wonks, but if you think about it, it's hard to think of anything more important. To help us understand it and to talk us through his excellent investigation into it, we're joined today by John Byrne Murdoch, who is the chief data reporter at the Financial Times, and has become something of a celebrity in data circles for his visualizations of these kind of complex data sets. So welcome to Unheard John. Thanks Freddie. Great to be here . So I guess you must have spent quite a lot of time in the past week or 10 days immersed in this fertility data. First of all, tell us about the big trend, because some of the critics of the reporting in the past week were saying that you were focused on the the the effects in the past ten years, but really we should be looking at the past 200 years. I mean big picture what is happening to fertility. It was interesting to hear people saying that. Because I mean what I tried to do at the very opening of the piece was to say, you know, this is something that's been going on forever, for for decades, for centuri es. And what I'm trying to do here is focus on this most recent step where we have something that's a little bit different. What I think is interesting and why it's interesting to talk about this most recent trend. This looks a little different to what we've seen before in terms of the international breadth. So, roughly speaking, throughout the late 1800s and 1900s, we've seen some people say steady, some people say fitful decline in the number of children per woman. That has been fairly gradual and it has happened at slightly different times in different places. So it happened in highest income richest countries first, then filtered through to developing countries. And this most recent decline from about three children per woman to about two, it broadly follows that trend of high income countries first, middle income countries next, lower income countries last. Just to put a chart on the screen for those people who are watching to to illustrate that, we're looking here at total fertility rate in the United States from 1800 to 2020 and you really see that estimates in 1800 is seven children per female. Obviously, a lot of those children will not have made it through to adulthood, but round about every kind of 30 or 40 years it goes down six, five, four, round about 1900, we're down between four and three. There's a slight surge after the Second World War for the baby boomers. It flattens out in the more recent decades, and then there's a falling off again later. But it I mean it's a huge decrease from around about seven children per woman to now two or less. Absolutely. And the key thing you touched on this there, but a really important thing to note there is that a lot of that was due to very high child mortality rates. So there's a there's another statistic which is available for fewer countries, but that includes the US, which is the number of surviving children per per woman. And there instead of talking about seven, even back then you're actually talking about three who survived through to adulthood. So the decline in the number of surviving children has been smaller, but it has been, as you say, a long-term trend. And there's been a lot going on there, a lot driving that, that is fairly well understood. So as I say, improving child mortality is part of that. Big changes to the economy in terms of moving from farming where you needed a lot of kids to work the land to first manufacturing and then services where that sort of need for having more children has changed and and reduced. You've got urbanization along with that, which again probably put downward pressure on number of kids because people had smaller living space. You've got secularization, all sorts of things going on. Women entering the workforce. Yeah, women entering the workforce, women becoming more educated, again a a long and gradual trend. And so so what I didn't intend to do with my piece was to say, oh, birth rates have never moved until the last sort of 15 to 20 years. What I think is interesting is that as you say, you had that stabilization over the latter part of the last century and the start of this century in the US. You see that in a lot of high-income countries, you even see in many middle count incomeries that a steep decline became much more gentle as we got into say the nineties and the two thousands. So I therefore think it is quite interesting and notable that from that 2007, 8, 9, 10 point, slightly different point in different parts of the world, we get this renewed decline across a wide range of cultures, regions, and levels of economic development. Do you have any theories as to why it leveled out or even started increasing again in the nineties and two thousands? Yeah, I mean there's there's competing theories for this. One is that that period from the sort of maybe from we could say from reunification of Germany, the fall of the Soviet Union, through to the eve of the financial crisis, was just, I think, on in some objective senses a relatively positive period . There was this sense that we were entering a period of peace, a period of relative economic stability, or indeed economic growth. So There is the end of history period. Exactly. Exactly. That's one I should and you know the key thing with all of this, both this bit and everything else we're going to talk about, is that these are mainly theories, and it's really hard to prove these things out, especially as you do see slightly different patterns in different places. It's an interesting one. Again, that would be very hard to prove, but it's hard to escape the sense that that mood or existential feeling must play a part in how confident people feel about starting families or having another child. If you feel the world is roughly is in a stable place and you feel confident about what it's gonna look like in the future, it would make sense that you feel confident having a larger family. And it I I don't know how to prove this other than with polling data, but right now it feels like a lot of people will feel anxious that the world is changing. They're not sure what sort of future they'll be bringing children into. Yeah, absolutely. How much of that is about the real material circumstances that people are existing in and how much of it is sh changes in how we talk about these things and the media environment and and that kind of thing? So then what you observe and what the authors of this study observe is something of a step change around 2007. Tell us about that. There's two parts to this. One is that the point where fertility rates has this sort of most recent decline, the point where that starts, is slightly different from country to country. The second though, I think, is that we we can get too hung up on exactly when this is, right? If we think this is about smartphones and social media, that was not something that happened overnight. It took a couple of years for smartphones to become ubiquitous among young adults. It's then taken several years for social media to become the version of social media that it is today. So I'd I would think of this as something from around 2007 through to around as even as late as 2015 in some parts of the world. But what we do see time after time and time again in different places is you have this technological or media change. You then have in time use surveys or other surveys asking how often people meet up and do things with friends and such outside of work or school. You see these really marked declines. So South Korea, the amount of time young adults in their 20s spend socializing face-to-face, halved between 2006 and today. US you see something similar, UK similar, Europe similar. Once again, I've got a chart there. Sorry to interrupt, but it's just quite useful to see it, as you I think you'd agree. So this is a chart which comes from the American time use survey and shows the different cohorts, 15 to 17 year olds, 20 to 29 year olds, etc., throughout the period from 2003 to present day. And number of hours that is estimated these people spent per week socializing outside neither work nor school has halved from twelve hours roughly in 2003 to 2006, 15 to 7 year olds just hanging out with friends, now to less than six hours per week and all of the other generations are also down. So it's in a very short period a a very dramatic change in just the way we interact. Yeah, that's right. And and you also see this in other indicators. So some people in the US, including actually the the authors of the paper we're talking about here, so Matthew Hudson and Hernan Moscow Soboedo, they point to other big society societal-wide trends that coincided with that. So in the US, where suicide rates are tragically relatively high because of the number of guns in circulation, suicide rates rose during this time when people spent less time face to-to face-face. Other people have tracked it to a decline in violent crime. As again, the people at exactly the ages that used to be out maybe having a few drinks and getting into a scuffle were more likely to now be spending time with their screens. So I think it's important to note that there is a lot of at least strongly suggestive evidence that the takeoff of these new new technologies and media platforms has probably played a role in has probably had some kind of impact on society which has changed how often people meet up and had various other second-order, third-order effects. I actually caught up yesterday with the two authors of that paper, Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscos Abuedo from the business school at the University of Cincinnati. I'm just gonna take a pause in our conversation, John, and play some of that because I think it's quite interesting to hear them defend their thesis. We'll come back to you in a moment. A lot of people I think will also associate 2007 as the year next to 2008, which was the global financial crisis. And that a lot of our malaise, a lot of the political unrest, and a lot of people's anxiety about the future really can date from that period. Uh might that not explain why there was a real dip in fertility rates after that There's a multiplicity of factors in every single country is different. So for example, uh Australia suffered from the financial crisis much less than the US or Western Europe. We still see the same thing in in Australia. And also the time used, right? So we when we go and and survey people and look at how they spend their day minute by minute, we see that there's an increase in their time in front of their screens. What are they doing with those screens? I we don't know, but we know that they're spending much more time. In the case of the teens, we see that the unstructured time, so the time that is not spent with the adult supervision completely changed from in-person to uh screen mediated. The structured time, nothing happened. So they still go to school, they still go to sports, they do have their uh structured time constant, but they're unstructured time. That's when they you know they have sex, that that's when they do things that there's the something going on there that builds this character that uh has been changed. So that's basically the the time use and also comparing that to the suicide story, which is coming from a completely different dimension, it's giving us the strength to the argument, if you will. That was Henan Moscoso Bo edo and Nathan Hudson from the University of Cincinnati who were defending their paper that has caused so much controversy. John, I thought the examples they gave against the economic crisis being the main driver were particularly powerful. It slightly dense the critique. I think they've been very careful in this. And I I really like the Australia example for exactly that reason. You know, it it's a it's a country that is extremely similar to Britain and America, for example, in a lot of ways, culturally, linguistically, all like income levels. But yeah, it did essentially escape the gre the global financial crisis. That I think is the cle anest example because it's so similar to these other countries in other ways. But you then have the fact that we see this in the Middle East. We see this in countries that have been growing pretty robustly from a low level all the way through this period in 2007, 8, 9, 10, all the way through. And they still see this downward inflection point at some point between sort of 2010 and 2015. So I I th I I do think it's really important to to note that it feels obvious whenever we talk about things that happened around two thousand eight. Well, you know, the global financial crisis. People are not being stupid here. They're they're going in knowing that that is an obvious counterpoint, preempting it and doing the analysis. So yeah, I certainly think on the global financial crisis, that's a really important piece of counter-evidence. There's also in the Nordic countries, there was a paper a couple of years ago that similarly came in and said, right, well, we obviously assume that the steep declines we're seeing here must be to do with the financial crisis. They looked to that and they found evidence that, you know, maybe that triggered things in 2007 and eight, but it can't explain why they're still falling in 2018, 2022, 2026. So so people are uh are really trying robustly to get at this. It's not just a like, oh we think it's smartphones and here are some lines on a chart. And just on the second point about when these devices and platforms t take off in each country, it's a thorny one to try and get right here. Like in high income countries, it's not too bad because we have decent data on when people and especially young people actually started using these devices like in the UK, Ofcom, the communications regulator, and companies like Ipsos were actually tracking this at the time. Whereas if you want to know when smartphones took off in let's say Morocco or Indonesia, that's trick ier. So what Hudson and Moscow Sorbuedo did is they used the point at which most people had a mobile mobile phone subscription. In my own version of that, that I used in the piece, I used Google sear ches for the Android App Store. Again, we're talking about rough proxies here. We're just trying to trying to find a way of tracking this. But but I think the key thing is that whether you use like 2013, 2014, 2012 for some of these countries, the ballpark does seem to match up with when birth birth rates fall. And the chart that has been so widely circulated is the one that just shows a very broad selection of countries. Australia, United States, UK, Indonesia, Mexico, Senegal, Egypt, Iran. I mean famously, these are not countries that run their societies in the same way. So it'd be hard to think of a more dis par ate group of societies, and yet you're seeing the same shape. So it's a weird, sort of eerie new world, in a way, in which we think all of our societies are so different and at odds, and in fact, these big macro trends are just hitting everyone now in the same way, perhaps in part due to smartphones. Yeah, exactly. And and again, it's this is a theory. It may well be that in five years' time more data comes to light and it turns out that there were other things going on at this point. It's also possible that the internet itself, without smartphones, might have led to some of what we're talking about. You know, if if we broaden this out to digital technology and digital media more broadly, maybe the quality of video games, Netflix, all of these things could be a role. So no one's more to blame than me for putting the word smartphones there in in big writing, but I think we're talking here about broader shifts in the digital media environment and the amount of time people are spending on these things rather than just that sort of six-inch piece of metal, glass, and plastic in our hands. Another thing that got some pushback is whether it's actually a good thing. Obviously, 30 years ago, the thing everyone was worried about was population explosion. People were reading Paul Ehrlich and the like. In fact, for centuries it's been an anxiety that humans are gonna become too numerous, there'sn't gonna be enough food and all the rest of it. And it's only quite recently that the reality has been dawning on people that actually across the world the trend is in the other direction. Even in poorer parts of the world, the future may be one of population decline, not population increase. Their data was also focused on teenagers, and a lot of people were quite pleased to see that teen age pregnancies have come down and I guess a lot of parents would rather have their children, even if they're in the bedroom, looking at their mobile phones, rather than getting pregnant. So I mean, was it is it a good thing or is it a bad thing? Falling teenage pregnancies is I would say unambiguously a good thing. And that's why in in my piece I was broadening this out, the data I was using was for people all the way to through through to thirty or or thirty-four. I don't think anyone or any reasonable person is saying that, oh no, not enough 17-year-olds are having kids. So for me, the this is really about young adults, people wanting to their 20s and thirties, where if you sort of take someone to one side and say, How would you ideally see your life pattern out in sort of twenty years, they'll say partner and two kids and then you ask some variation of how's that going? And you'll get rather a different answer. So for me, that's on the individual level, that's why this is important. It's this evidence, suggestive evidence from surveys that things are not going as people are intending on a deep level. But yeah, falling team pregnancy, viewing You could make the case that the patterns of behaviour you develop in those crucial teenage years are likely to extend. It's not like you're gonna be locked in your room looking at your phone until eighteen and then suddenly bound out as a fully socialized human being age eighteen in one day. This is what Jonathan Haidt talks a lot about, that those early teen years in particular are so formative in the way that we interact with people. So yeah, it might be good to have fewer teen pregnancies, but if those people then just don't know how to form relationships and families later on, we got a serious problem. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. We saw with COVID really the extreme version of what happens when everyone's confined for an extended period of time. And I think the impact of that on young people, the vast majority of people would agree were like clearly negative. And if digital media screens and that kind of thing, uh as in a much steadier, more incremental sense, but if if they're even having a s a tiny version of that impact over the over the past decade or so. That surely is something that we should be concerned about. And yeah, I I think the ideal way you reduce teen pregnancies is through contraception without throwing out I'd say throwing out the baby with the bath water . That's too mixing my metaphors too much. But yeah, without losing all those beneficial interactions, explorations, um, that kind of thing. Okay, so I reckon we've been sufficiently skeptical here. Let's now just allow ourselves to believe the central thesis of this paper, that actually smartphone adoption is massively affecting the fertility rate. It's such a huge conclusion . Uh what do you make of it? I mean what what sort of response should people have to that? Smartphones are now so ubiquitous. Apart from a slightly depressing feeling that we're living in the end times where our species has decided it's preferable to look at a small screen instead of interact with each other. Is there a public policy response? Do you feel it's a more a cultural existential question. Where do we even begin? I'd think that some of the policies that have been talked about or in the case of Australia enacted around restricting use of smart phones or social media for under-16s. They feel to me like something that is worth trying. In terms of the breadth of again, suggestive evidence we have that there may be negative or even net negative impacts of extensive use of some of these devices. So I think first of all, that is just something that is worth trying and seeing how that pans out, at least in the countries that are already doing this. But it is difficult because I do think a lot of this is happening on some kind of deep cultural level. Whether it is a deep cultural level that is being mediated through phones and social media or not, that feels like where most of this is coming from. And that is obviously very, very difficult for governments and policymakers to try and turn around. I do think that the the way this is happening organically, in terms of more and more people, and almost as societies, we're talking about this a lot more now, the potential drawbacks to the levels of usage of these devices and platforms that people are having, drawbacks for some people at least. I think the fact that we're just having this much broader conversation as a society organically is a very good thing. And there's maybe more chance of some of these trends at least moderating. If this is coming from the bottom up, as it were, rather than um something being slapped down from the top. So I think the way this is unfolding organically, I think, is seems fairly healthy to me so far. You can discover more of these kind of conversations with an unheard digital subscription. You get 12 weeks of unlimited digital access to unmissable articles from all of our writers, such as Kathleen Stark, Glenn Lowry, Wolfgang Munshau, Janis Farifakis, and many more for just twelve pounds. As a subscriber, you can also watch exclusive weekly events here at the Unheard Club and read more in-depth subscriber-only investigations and deep dives. Not only that, we'll send you a free limited edition JG Fox Illustrated mug, which features a punk protesting against offensive speech, which I hope you notice is ironically capturing our mission here at Unheard, which is to serve as a home for those still willing to speak their minds. Go to unheard.com slash podcast to claim this offer now. It feels like in terms of public policy or what governments should be thinking about, trying to get people to have more kids is a notoriously, it's a nigh-on-impossible task for a government. You know, we've had various somewhat derisory attempts in Western countries to increase the fertility rate. You know, whether it was David Cameron's I think it was three hundred pounds a year to get married, very few people are going to make that decision based on that incentive. Even Viktor Orban, who made it a central plank of his very long premiership in Hungary to increase the fertility rate, had only very modest success, even though people were literally removed from all income tax if they had three children, it was a wild innovation. It still didn't really work. So it feels like that side is is almost impossible. But stopping kids accessing social media, that seems maybe more p plausible. What else might we try? Another question is if you get kids off their phones, what do we expect them to be doing instead? It struck me as interesting that in the last couple of months in the UK, we've had all of these scenes of massed crowds of teenagers running around the centre of Manchester, centre of Birmingham, bits of South London. And it strikes me that maybe this is the kind of natural results of if you say if if we as a society, regardless of policy, say, right, this thing that you've been spending three, four hours a day on, we want that to come down to zero, and we're in this sort of messy adjustment period where people just say, right, let's just go run around a shopping centre and uh film each other. But I think medium term we do need to come up with a counter proposal, which is right, if if we're not gonna be spending two hours a day on TikTok, what are we gonna provide or at least facilitate in place of that? Now I I'm personally sceptical of this this idea that, you know, more youth clubs solve everything. But I do think some conversation, and this is this is where government and policymakers could be uh could play a role is start having a conversation about what we want or what we would hope that that young people spend that time doing instead. Make it as easy as possible for there to be activities out there where they will meet and mix with.ellow F young people, I definitely don't have any silver bullets, but I do think we need to think about the the other side of that conversation right. Cut screen time, but what comes in its place? We haven't what used the word porn either in this convers ation, but it feels that's relevant. I don't know if you've done any s investigations into the impacts of the online safety act, for example. This is a UK piece of legislation that is in part designed to stop children accessing hardcore pornography, it seems on that side of the ledger to have been quite successful. Reports are that traffic to main porn sites is down as much as 50% in the UK. It's kind of typical that the political right wing is against it for other reasons. They they think it's censorship and that it's uh big brother state and the rest of it. But on that metric, I mean maybe there is an argument to say if you want people to go out there and procre ate, uh better to discourage them staying in their bedroom looking at porn. I've certainly again seen suggestive evidence that or like correlational evidence that heavy porn users, shall we say, are more likely to suffer from sexual dysfunction. That can obviously impact both the chances of getting into a relationship and that relationship proving durable. Again, maybe along with the phone bands, it falls into the category of something that is probably worth trying in terms of how little downside there seems to be. And yeah, I, along with everyone else, would be very interested in seeing the results of that. Final question for you, John, and it's getting a little bit philosophical, I suppose, away from your normal data focus. But do you feel the beginnings of a sort of backlash against this highly technologised world we're living in. You keep reading stories about small endeavors. There are people who are trying to live offline, touching grass, as they call it, or communities that are putting phones away, schools where phones are not going to be evolved, but also just a general, even some of the alt-right online young man behaviour, you know, going to the gym , trying to rediscover your vitality. It feels like there are some green shoots in terms of people wanting to return to being more vital. Do you see any of that? I do, yeah. I mean I mean the one thing I would maybe well push not push back on, but reframe there is I'm not convinced that the ever increasing self-optimization, which I think is also involved in the rise of young people going to the gym and that kind of thing. I'm not convinced that that itself is conducive to more relationships either, because it's often just so um so focused on the self. But yeah, more broadly, I definitely think we're seeing shifts here. You know, I've started to see people with dumb phones, as it were, where you can just call and message but not do much else. People thinking more about their screen time, trying to be more intentional, installing apps to make that a little bit easier. My optimistic take here though is actually that social media platforms are actually degrading in a way that is making this a lot easier. I think it was harder for people to kick those habits say six, seven years ago, when everything was fun and and they were also where you would follow the news and and you had the sports people and the politics people and the news people all in one place. Whereas now that we've got this platform over here with those people, this one over here with these people, there's more and more AI slop, there's engagement bait. I think we may sort of organically end up in this place due to the degradation of quality. That's very interesting. So in other words, the the kind of musk Twitter, which is less useful for getting high quality information at the very least . And for example, Facebook having less news on it, the general slopification of social media feeds might actually be a good thing because it makes it less fun to sit there doom scrolling. I'm optimistic of that, but I think there's even suggestive evidence that it's already happening. Like I've I've written before about how according to some data sets the amount of time people spend on social media peaked about three years ago. So as always, I think it's easier to get people to change their behaviour by that experience actually becoming less pleasant than just by relying on everyone everyone's self-discipline and uh righteousness. John Bermod , thank you so much for your time today. Thanks so much for having me. That was John Byrne Murdoch, Chief Data Reporter from the Financial Times, digging into the latest data around fertility and trying to work out whether the claims made by those two academics in the US might really be true, which is that smartphone use around the world in an almost exactly repeatable fashion is collapsing an already declining birth rate. Really interesting to talk to him. Thanks to you for tuning in . This was Unheard .