Drink to smartphones lowering birth rates for World Population Day and National Mojito Day

Happy World Population Day and National Mojito Day! Like last year, I'm combining the two today. I begin the holiday observances with the Financial Times explaining Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once.

Smartphones and a marked change to our digital media environment are part of the reason for the demographic shift changing our world, including how low birth rates are shrinking the workforce. Chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch presents his lastest findings on this challenge faced by most nations[.]

There's a lot to chew on here. I've been writing a lot about government policy and economics, but I don't think I've mentioned non-medical technologies in the context of falling birth and fertility rates before. That's certainly a "scifi is now" topic. I also haven't discussed lack of independent housing as a factor in demography, although I've certainly blogged about housing and real estate during the past 15+ years. I think I'll be adding those perspectives to my writing in the future.

By the way, I consider "Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernandez-Villaverde call[ing] fertility decline the question of our time, with most other problems flowing downstream of it" to be the result of a perspective I criticized in Meditations on sustainability, part 1.

[E]conomy is dependent on society, which is in turn dependent on the environment. Without an environment, there is no society. Without a society, there is no economy. Those relationships put sustainability into perspective. They also show that the emphasis on economy above all is exactly backwards. No wonder we're in trouble.

That written, I'm not surprised the Financial Times would feature it. As I quoted from Yes, Prime Minister, "The Financial Times is read by people who own the country," in this case the U.K., so they would think it salient. As one of the commenters pointed out, "This video is for rich people. Everyone who's is struggling knows why we don't have kids." From my ecological perspective, resource use, if not outright depletion, and waste production, as exemplified by fossil fuels and climate change are the primary problems and everything flows downhill from them. As a biologist, I think limited resources primarily define carrying capacity, the maximum sustainable size of a population, and we should be examining those, especially their connections to the issues the economists identify.

DW News confronted the effect of technology on society directly when it asked Are smartphones killing birth rates worldwide?

The world is having fewer children and the pace of decline is happening much faster than expected. The reasons are complex and varied, from a lack of affordable housing to a lack of suitable partners. But could smartphones and modern tech be part of the problem? DW speaks to AI researcher Connor Leahy about how digital life may be reshaping relationships.

I was wondering if someone would bring up dating apps, the obvious technological solution to people finding partners, and Connor Leahy pointed out that their incentive is to keep people on the app, not find a permanent partner. Now I'm wondering if government matchmaking services are in our future. I suspect that would not be an unadulterated good and other causes would have to be addressed for them to be effective.

For what it's worth, the commenters to the video were hostile to the question, but I think that's because DW News didn't present the data supporting the inference, not that it helped the Financial Times video that much. Their commenters weren't as mean, but they were certainly skeptical. I'm not one of them; I think the researchers are onto something, at least as a contributing factor for the last 20 years.

I return to the U.S. for the third video, PBS NewsHour examining The potential impacts of the U.S. birth rate decline.

The U.S. fertility rate is at an all-time low, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Researchers say this is part of a larger downward trend. Since 2007, the number of Americans having babies has dropped 23%, well below the replacement level, meaning not enough are being born to replace those who die. William Brangham discussed more with Brian Mann of NPR.

PBS NewsHour broadcast this segment and then uploaded it one month before the study on smartphones and birthrates came out, so it didn't include its findings. In that light, the decline in teen pregnancy might be less a result of good policy and more the effects of smartphones. That doesn't make it any less of an accomplishment, just an accidental one.

Reading this would be enough to make me drink if my diabetes hadn't made me lose interest in drinking, so it's time to celebrate with Michigan Public saying .

Inspired by Tracy Samilton's recent trip to Cuba, Tammy Coxen whipped up this stellar mojito - which we might claim is one of the tastiest in Michigan. Samilton explored the Michigan-Cuba connection during her time in Havana, so Coxen used white rum from the Ann Arbor Distilling Company to bring some Michigan flavor to this drink perfect for warmer weather. Cheers!

That's a wrap for today's double celebration. Stay tuned for the Sunday entertainment feature. I have an awards show my readers can vote in for free, as long as they are interested in horror and horror-adjacent science fiction movies and television.