The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock: the diffusion of the smartphone. The U.S. rollout of the iPhone, the first modern smartphone, provides a natural experiment: from June 2007 through February 2011, the device was sold only on AT&T, allowing us to identify its effect from variation in AT&T’s mobile broadband coverage. Entropy-balanced Poisson and synthetic difference-in-differences event studies imply that access to the iPhone reduced births by 4.5–8.0% at ages 15–19 and 3.2–6.6% at ages 20–24, with statistically significant but smaller declines among older cohorts. Placebo analyses applied to Verizon and Sprint’s pre-2011 coverage footprint are null. Taken together, these cohort effects imply that the diffusion of the iPhone deepened the decline in births among women under 30 while suppressing the rise in births among older women. Overall, the diffusion of the iPhone explains 33–52% of the decline in the general fertility rate among women aged 15–44. National-survey evidence on time use and sexual behavior is consistent with the iPhone reducing in-person interactions, increasing pornography use, and reducing sexual frequency.
That is from Caitlin K. Myers & Ezekiel Hooper.
That is from Caitlin K. Myers & Ezekiel Hooper.
the perspectives
The U.S. general fertility rate has fallen by 22% since 2007, a sustained decline not readily explained by economic conditions, contraceptive use, housing or childcare costs, or other commonly cited factors. We assess the potential role of a different shock:…
Whether or not this study is true or even plausible, everyone is going to point to it and keep citing it and the studies and opeds that cite it will be cited by other studies and opeds and so on and so forth. It's a dishonest enterprise. But really, we could just say, "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage—and to get there you have to get off your damn phone." Why don't we just say that? It would be far more intellectually honest and compelling, and insofar as we would disagree amongst ourselves, we could then argue on what we really hold dear morally rather than pretending to argue over numbers.
Social science is good for many things, but we should stop citing it for these sorts of questions, even when it confirms our biases.
General purpose technologies require whole new business models in order to exploit their full potential.
it’s a nontrivial task to think of business models that could be fully automated
even with an AI that can’t yet do everything
.
That’s going to be hard! If I had any good ideas for how to do that, I’d go become a billionaire myself.
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Bringing warriors from the provinces to the Imperial Capitol to fight in front of the emperor is very Roman
*UFC x White House
You make the most money when you are right and contrarian
The technology industry continues to see accelerating change because it continues to reinvent itself and broaden its reach. The retail sector could have invented e-commerce, but it didn't, and Amazon wanted to be part of the technology industry rather than a retail business. The automotive industry could have built electric cars, but it took an outsider to the industry to create Tesla. Yet, some have fought against technology ever since the printing press to no avail. Some aspects of technology require review, monitoring, and regulatory oversight, but those who fight against technology continue to find themselves on the wrong side of history.
And just as FAANG is now outdated, Magnificent 7 may soon be outdated too. Should we include SpaceX, TSMC, and Broadcom, which are currently worth more than Tesla and Meta? Or is MANGOS (Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, SpaceX) the new group to watch? We will see. The only constant in life is change, and that’s part of what makes investing hard.
-Alfred Lin (sequoia)
I suspect that if Elon were to die tomorrow, there is a non-trivial chance his "net worth" would fall by at least 50%. Obviously, he is one of the greatest innovators of the modern era. I could write a lot of very nice words about his impact on humanity, but the whole trillionaire buzz and leader-inspired valuations smell like shit to me.