Spending on software accounts for around 2 percent of GDP…In other words, having access to infinite amounts of the tasks that software performs today would only raise GDP by around 2 percent.
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.
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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.