Better video games and streaming services explain over 70% of why people are having fewer kids lately.
arXiv · March 17, 2026 · 2603.14758
The Takeaway
While researchers usually blame housing costs or career demands for falling birth rates, this model shows that 'leisure technology' has made single life so much more entertaining that the relative value of marriage and parenting has plummeted. In Japan, the growth of high-quality digital leisure alone accounted for 73% of the decrease in fertility between 2005 and 2023.
From the abstract
This paper introduces a new factor contributing to the decline in marriage and fertility: the growth of leisure technology. Over recent decades, high-income countries have experienced two notable shifts in household and family dynamics. First, there has been a significant decline in marriage rates and fertility. Second, time has increasingly been allocated to leisure activities. This paper presents a unified model of marriage and fertility, incorporating intra-household bargaining dynamics. The