John Burn-Murdoch: What's causing the fertility crisis?

🔗Thirty years of saving for retirement shouldn’t depend on one market cycle. Augusta Precious Metals has created a free guide explaining how Gold IRAs work and how physical gold can be held inside certain retirement accounts. Learn more here: http://learngoldira.com/ Or text UNHERD to 35052 to receive the guide. 📰 Subscribe to UnHerd today at: https://bit.ly/4cfaeH0 UnHerd's Freddie Sayers meets John Burn-Murdoch Watch it on the UnHerd website: https://unherd.com/watch-listen/are-smartphones-causing-the-fertility-crisis/ Listen to the podcast: https://plnk.to/unherd?to=page Advertise on UnHerd @ [email protected] UnHerd's Freddie Sayers talks to John Burn-Murdoch, the chief data reporter for the Financial Times, as well as Hernan Moscoso-Boedo and Nathan Hudson from the University of Cincinnati, to investigate a controversial new study suggesting that the global proliferation of smartphones and social media since 2007 has drastically altered young people's behaviour, halved face-to-face socialisation, and accelerated a worldwide collapse in fertility rates that cannot simply be explained by the global financial crisis. Follow UnHerd on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/unherd Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unherd/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unherd/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@unherdtv //TIMECODES// 00:00 - 00:44 - Intro 00:36 - 01:51 - Intro and the smartphone–fertility question 01:51 - 03:00 - Sponsor: Augusta Precious Metals 03:00 - 06:07 - Long-term fertility decline and its drivers 06:07 - 08:39 - 1990s optimism, mood and family choices 08:39 - 10:48 - 2007 step change and falling socialising 10:48 - 13:50 - Defending the smartphone thesis with time‑use data 13:50 - 18:25 - Global patterns and digital media beyond phones 18:25 - 21:30 - Is falling fertility bad and what teens miss 21:30 - 24:41 - Policy ideas, phone limits and bottom‑up change 24:41 - 27:28 - Life beyond screens, youth spaces and porn rules 27:28 - 30:26 - Backlash, dumb phones and decaying social media 30:26 - 30:55 - Outro #UnHerd #Fertility #Smartphones