- How smartphones are implicated in the decline of fertility;
- How the latest Star Wars film waters down its franchise, as happens with much popular culture;
- Crime in LA in the lowest in decades, but voters are still very concerned about crime;
- How Pete Hegseth doesn’t understand diversity.
This is Sunday’s post, finished today Monday, since family events took priority yesterday, given the holiday.
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Now smartphones are a cause of declining birthrates?
Washington Post, opinion by Megan McArdle, today: A suspicious decline in birth rates points to a new culprit, subtitled “The infinite scroll could contribute to lower fertility rates and smaller graduating classes.”
The drop in U.S. birth rates is well known, as are the problems that demographic change will cause: closing schools, slower economic growth, climbing budget pressures and a politics that is increasingly locked into zero-sum intergenerational battles — something evident as established homeowners vote to exclude new housing that young people need.
What’s less understood is that this isn’t just America’s future. It’s everyone’s.
Sometime between 2008 and 2015, birth rates worldwide hit an inflection point. They had been decreasing in most countries for a while as societies got richer, women got more educated and infant mortality fell. But during that period the decline sped up, and some places that had comparatively high birth rates — such as Latin America — are now declining faster than in the U.S. Mexico’s birth rate dropped below America’s in 2023.
Is it that all nations, even ‘third world’ nations, are too distracted by smart phones to socialize? No, there’s a bit more.
The devices could be causing birth rates to decline in several ways — accelerating the spread of Western norms about female empowerment, pitting the sexes against each other as feminists on social media take on the manosphere, or simply substituting for the social activity that leads to babies. Burn-Murdoch’s data suggests that less socialization, especially, is a big part of the problem: Young people are spending less time together, which means fewer opportunities to find romantic partners.
Solutions? Outright banning things seldom works and can backfire. Social pressures can be more effective. Adjust the social contract.
Communities could collectively decide to give kids dumb phones rather than smartphones, to discourage people from taking them out in adult social settings, and to generally treat the infinite scroll as something like smoking — if you’re an adult you have a right to do it, but it’s bad for you and kind of déclassé.
If that seems fanciful, just remember that social sanction can be much more effective than the law at deterring destructive behavior. Few people shoplift, cheat on their taxes, vandalize public property, run through red lights or shout at strangers even when they could probably get away with it. That’s because they’d be ashamed to violate the social contract — and even more ashamed to have the neighbors find out.
I’ll add that people follow such social conventions not because they’re religious and explicitly follow some list of rules. They do so because humanity has evolved a moral sense precisely because without it we would not have built larger social groups and our modern culture and civilization, a moral sense that applies in many situations not explicitly spelled out in religious rules. Virtually all people “know” what’s right or wrong, what’s acceptable socially or not. It’s only the persnickety ones, or the dim ones, who think such rules don’t exist unless they’re put down in writing.
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This strikes me as another example of a familiar trend. (I have no interest in Star Wars per se.)
Washington Post, opinion by Will Leitch, 21 May 2026: The new Star Wars movie is a terrible way to treat an American myth, subtitled “Lucasfilm got scared of its own fans — and Star Wars has never recovered.”
Star Wars once represented the infinity of our imaginations, but now it represents their limitations: What so many of us lost ourselves in growing up has become one more watered-down thing to fight about. We have done the impossible: We have dragged Star Wars down to earth. What a waste.
It’s precisely the point that the movie did big box office this past weekend. Despite critical disdain.
I’ve noted this same trend about other properties, from Frankenstein (the original book is quite different from the many ’30s Hollywood movies that turned the monster into a *monster*, not to mention the humorous riffs in later decades) to Star Trek (with its many later series diverging from the idealism of the original) to any number of movies dumbing down famous works of written science fiction (off hand, from I, ROBOT to STARSHIP TROOPERS).
It’s a kind of regression to the mean.
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Once again, people don’t do rates, they do anecdotes, and a certain portion of the population is always alarmed about crime. Any crime. Even if the only reported crime was a single liquor store break-in during the past month, conservatives would vote for the tough-on-crime candidate.
Los Angeles Times, today: L.A. is safer than it’s been in decades, but crime is an issue dominating the mayor’s race
Key points:
- Despite crime rates falling to near-historic lows in recent years, challengers to Mayor Karen Bass have made public safety a central issue in the June 2 primary.
- Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt has attacked Bass over homelessness and public drug use.
- City Councilmember Nithya Raman has criticized police pay raises, saying the mayor’s LAPD spending is coming at the expense of other city services.
Then:
Homicides in Los Angeles are down to levels not seen since the 1960s. Neighborhoods once awash in gang violence now sometimes go weeks, even months, without a shooting. And the follow-home robberies and street takeovers that captured the public’s attention in recent years have largely subsided.
By many measures, the city is safer than it has been in generations — and yet voters following L.A.’s hotly contested mayoral race might think the opposite.
The challengers to Mayor Karen Bass have zeroed in on homelessness and public drug use to argue she hasn’t delivered on public safety, while also criticizing how the Police Department has operated and been funded during her tenure.
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JMG, today: Pentagon: “Diversity Is Our Strength Is The Dumbest Phrase In Military History, We’re One Nation Under God”
“The single dumbest phrase in military history was peddled in our Army only a few short years ago. You’ve all heard it — maybe in your first two years at West Point — ‘Our diversity is our strength.’ Diversity is NOT our strength. UNITY is our strength. …
I think he thinks diversity is about having people in the Army who aren’t white men. He doesn’t understand what diversity actually means, or why it’s important.
