Always_Ask_Questions,
“We don’t need to presume that the authors were stupid and do not know correlation from causation
I’m not presuming that anyone is stupid. In my own experience with “reading something”, conflating correlation with causation is a pretty common practice, particularly in polemical pieces and news articles, so I felt justified pointing it out.
“so it stands teiku unless you want to google and read about it”
You’re shifting the burden of proof onto me, but I did not make the claim, you did. But I did do a quick Web search and found a news article reporting on a paper by Lena Edlund that posited that cell phone adoption may explain some of the decrease in the murder rate in the late 1990s because it shifted the illegal drug “economy” from mainly street corner dealing to pre-arranged meet-ups at secret locations, which cut down on deadly turf battles. That predates smartphones and has nothing to do with distracted kids though.