Great piece in the NYT this week... And here's one hell of a way to open an article:

In case you needed another reason to distance yourself from your smartphone: It may lead to the eventual extinction of the human species.

The plummeting birthrate is an arresting metric, and often seems like a stand-in for society’s ills

Author goes through the conclusions of some recent papers investigating the v hip and current phenomenon

The problem isn’t the papers themselves — both note that the smartphone should be considered as accelerants of a pre-existing decline, rather than the sole cause. Instead, it’s in the eager interpretation of those results, which often lends the impression that a mystery — the elusive single source of declining birthrates — has been solved.

Still iffy about the causality; how exactly is it that the flicker of a screen, and its addictive properties, delays and stops the most meaningful decision of a person and a couple's life — kids. What's the mechanism of action impacting the dependent variable? To speak econ. One of the papers mentioned uses a clever IV (quasi-natural experiment in which carriers the early iPhone launch ran on).

Here's a neat phrase and sum:

guess I just doubt that the worldwide fertility crisis is because a lack of "unintended teen conceptions."

"the fertility crisis appears to be a crisis of connection""the fertility crisis appears to be a crisis of connection"

That's more like it. The connectivity accidentally caused a rift in all of ours everyday connection, so now we can't function as well; can't find meaning; can't connect with new partners; and when we do, always able to escape to the glorious comforts of the screens.

ugh