John Burn-Murdoch

Are smartphones causing the fertility crisis?


May 21, 2026
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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 behavior, halved face-to-face socialization, and accelerated a worldwide collapse in fertility rates that cannot simply be explained by the global financial crisis.


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