NYT | M Murphy
Low fertility rates are a lagging indicator, the latest outcome of a string of social shifts that have already embedded themselves in our lives. Stopping at “it’s the phones!” can leave the many underlying issues — economic precarity, atrophied social skills, increasing isolation and anxiety — unaddressed. Worried parties would be better served by focusing on factors further up the chain: the in-person interactions that lead to relationships, which then might lead to sex and only then, potentially, to births. A nuanced exploration of that mechanism might reveal other, deeper problems — and possibly more solutions.